10 ms·

Real quick thing about the water in California: it's important because it is used to make food, which is exported from the state's central plains to the rest of

Real quick thing about the water in California: it's important because it is used to make food, which is exported from the state's central plains to the rest of the country. Your mental model should not include the direct water use of humans.. this is and always has been about the economics of food production. So if people leave California, it will be because they can't get jobs in agriculture.. people would be coming from Fresno, not San Francisco. Also the increase in food prices brought about by the collapse of that titanic industry will be borne by everybody in the country, and is therefore the problem of everybody in North America who likes pistachios and such.

sampo 5y ago
> people would be coming from Fresno, not San Francisco Yeah. Bay Area is privileged to have the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct to bring them water from a reservoir in the Yosemite national park, independent of the local weather conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hetchhetchyprojmap.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hetchhetchyprojmap.jpg
scrumbledober 5y ago
it's not just pistachios and almonds, it's a full 1/3 of the country's vegetables and 2/3 of the country's fruits and nuts. California's water problems are everyone's water problems.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  In the most extreme scenario, can the US create new agricultural fields in other states, cutting down forests if needed ? The weather will change but surely the US will still have arable land enough to feed its citizens (even if they have to forget some kind of crops (pistachio, etc.) aside) ?
  - lazide 5y ago
    Yup. Or even just build a canal from the Pacific Northwest - which gets so much water they can’t use almost any of it, even damming everything they can - down south. California has always gone through droughts, and the issue isn’t an actual lack of water (from a support of the population, or even support of agriculture in general). It’s the economics of it, what is cost effective where, and prioritization of what makes sense and what doesn’t- which is hard, and there are a lot of incumbents with iffy models (cities, counties, and farmers) that don’t want to adjust or be honest about any of this.
    - newaccount2021 5y ago
      You can't use words like "always" - large-scale habitation of California isn't even a century old.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - lazide 5y ago
        Going through a drought doesn’t require habitation? And if a drought exists or not says nothing about demand on the water that arrives, just how much water arrives. Tree ring records in north America go back approx 12k years. Here is a study analyzing back to 101 b.c. In California specifically [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00193528 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00193528] The Spanish also started to colonize California (and keep records) in 1770ish, well before the prior wet spell started in 1850 (and ended in the 60’s ish)
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    As climate bands move, which areas become suitable change as well. I don't think it's obvious yet exactly where, if anywhere, makes sense since the place you move it to might be untenable ten years later at this rate. Of course such moves would heavily entrench large agricultural companies who have the resources to build speculative farms. I'm personally expecting that farmers will adapt to local conditions and grow crops that use less water and don't mind the heat, or else find a way to reduce water losses from evaporation. If fruits and vegetables that are no longer tenable to grow in California become more expensive, and they probably will, there will be more incentive to both find a way to grow them more carefully in California as well as more reward to exploring growing them elsewhere.
    - Fricken 5y ago
      Well, th skies have looked progressively more like Bladerunner 2049 up here in Alberta for 4 summers running. We had some crops fail due to heat earlier in the season, and more are failing due to dryness now. So don't look at us.
      - dv_dt 5y ago
        I think too many people have a mental model that we can just shift a little north and it will all be ok, but that’s too simple a model. The temperature extremes from regular seasons are likely going to widen, making crop yields drop in a much wider band than just where the average temperatures rise and precipitation drops to drought levels.
  - thethethethe 5y ago
    Sure, but nothing will fully replace the productivity of the California central valley, which has some of the most fertile soil in the world. The Willamette valley up in Oregon is incredibly fertile as well, though it is currently too cold to grow lettuce and strawberries year round. That will change in the coming years but the Willamette valley is about the third the size. Additionally, the Pacific northwest is drought prone just like California, it's just not quite as bad yet. When I was there earlier this summer the reservoirs we're quite low
    - cronix 5y ago
      They're even lower now. A few months ago, the federal gov't cut off a lot of farmers in S. Oregon from water that they use for crops. To save fish. > Amid historic, climate change-driven drought, the federal government in May shut down the water supply from the Upper Klamath Basin on the California-Oregon border to protect native fish species on the verge of extinction. As a result, Hill and other farmers like her in the region have been cut off from water they have used for decades. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/10/us/klamath-oregon-drought-water-war/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/10/us/klamath-oregon-drought-wat... People go to bed with water and wake up to dry wells. Since the farmers can't use the traditional water source in the area, they are digging their wells deeper and deeper in order to water their crops. Something a lot of regular people can't afford to do, so as the farmers drop the water table searching and searching for that continually drying up water, others are going without. https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/29/southern-oregon-wells-dry-up-drought/ https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/29/southern-oregon-wells... Bad things seem to be coming.
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      I wonder if there are any water loss effiencies that can be applied to crops. Farmers of certain crops in California basically erect and take down temporary structures of all sorts either for pest or temperature controls to optimize yields already.
    - riversflow 5y ago
      >currently too cold to grow lettuce and strawberries year round. I don't have links, as I found out about by asking what happened in the San Yanez and Santa Maria valleys to someone who works in Ag finance (they are starkly barren compared to what they were just a few years ago and I was very curious), but California berry production has been almost completely off-shored to Argentina. As they explained, berries are a low margin crop to begin with that absolutely requires hand picking, and California's minimum wage laws along with cheaper refrigerate freight have driven the local farmers out of business. He seemed to think that California Ag was completely on its way out, and that we can expect to be importing almost all of our fresh vegetables and fruits from South America.
  - sampo 5y ago
    > can the US create new agricultural fields in other states Even California could. California could have much more irrigated agricultural land, if they completed Stage II of the original 1957 California Water Plan. I guess before 1970s, there was not much political controversy in building reservoirs and harnessing rivers and directing the water flow though agriculture. Then in the 1970s and after, some people started to see intrinsic value in rivers in their natural state, and opposing further water projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project#Controversy_and_modern_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project#Proposed_and_unbuilt_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project...
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Think BIGRRRRR! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Table crops require ample irrigation and mild temperatures. The parts of the US which have the most rain also tend to see more severe winters. The parts of the US which have more sunshine and warmth ... tend to be dry. It's possible that table-crop cultivation --- lettuce, fruits, vegetables, etc., could move to the southeastern US. That's closer to larger population centres as well, which might reduce shipping times and costs, and improve produce quality in Eastern and Central grocery stores. Traditionally, the South is known for cotton, peanuts, stone fruits (peaches), oranges (Florida), and tobacco. The magic California offered was hot, dry, sunny summers, with the only thing required to make the fields bountiful being a reliable supply of water. The state's mountain dams fed a slowly-released pulse of meltwater from snowpacks delivered this. There is the added bonus that although the Central Valley is famously hot, it has low humidity, making farm-labour conditions far more tenable, helps as well. Mississippi in August is not a dry heat. That's now severely imperiled.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    If things get that bad, building a nuclear power plant and devoting its power to desalination would probably be more economical and environmentally friendly than cutting down forest for feilds. Hell if it gets that bad building a pipeline to pump water south from the mouth of the Columbia river would be on the table.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      How will you cool the reactor without water?
      - smegger001 5y ago
        Remember the whole "power devoted to desalination" thing? all you need is the starting freshwater and then it can process its own from sea water.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Big ask considering the state of water availability currently.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    It would require forethought because it takes time to grow food. It could get bad in the meantime.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I'm guessing that is based on dollar amounts rather than calories? In other words, CA may appear to have a larger share than the reality if they focus on more expensive crops like avocados, pistachios, and almonds.
lhorie 5y ago
It's not even just California either. The Ogallala aquifer that underlies the Midwest corn belt is also running low. That's 90% of national corn production and affects basically everything that uses corn starch or HFCS. Unsustainable agriculture will get ugly.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Hm. Pistachios, cashews, almonds, various nuts also land on the shelves of German Aldi and Lidl in convenient 200g bags.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Back in the 1980s in Europe, almonds and pistachios came from Turkey (and possibly Bulgaria) and cashews from Angola. I don't know if this is still the case.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Some still do, I guess. I just described what I saw on the packaging of Aldi's and Lidl's own brands. I think some of that applies to fruit juices also, but there they only sometimes declare from where the ingredients come.
david38 5y ago
Much of what we grow in arid land is exported. Let’s stop growing wet crops in arid land just to send to China to feed pigs.

sampo 5y ago

> people would be coming from Fresno, not San Francisco Yeah. Bay Area is privileged to have the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct to bring them water from a reservoir in the Yosemite national park, independent of the local weather conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hetchhetchyprojmap.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hetchhetchyprojmap.jpg

scrumbledober 5y ago

it's not just pistachios and almonds, it's a full 1/3 of the country's vegetables and 2/3 of the country's fruits and nuts. California's water problems are everyone's water problems.

johnchristopher 5y ago
In the most extreme scenario, can the US create new agricultural fields in other states, cutting down forests if needed ? The weather will change but surely the US will still have arable land enough to feed its citizens (even if they have to forget some kind of crops (pistachio, etc.) aside) ?
- lazide 5y ago
  Yup. Or even just build a canal from the Pacific Northwest - which gets so much water they can’t use almost any of it, even damming everything they can - down south. California has always gone through droughts, and the issue isn’t an actual lack of water (from a support of the population, or even support of agriculture in general). It’s the economics of it, what is cost effective where, and prioritization of what makes sense and what doesn’t- which is hard, and there are a lot of incumbents with iffy models (cities, counties, and farmers) that don’t want to adjust or be honest about any of this.
  - newaccount2021 5y ago
    You can't use words like "always" - large-scale habitation of California isn't even a century old.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lazide 5y ago
      Going through a drought doesn’t require habitation? And if a drought exists or not says nothing about demand on the water that arrives, just how much water arrives. Tree ring records in north America go back approx 12k years. Here is a study analyzing back to 101 b.c. In California specifically [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00193528 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00193528] The Spanish also started to colonize California (and keep records) in 1770ish, well before the prior wet spell started in 1850 (and ended in the 60’s ish)
- neltnerb 5y ago
  As climate bands move, which areas become suitable change as well. I don't think it's obvious yet exactly where, if anywhere, makes sense since the place you move it to might be untenable ten years later at this rate. Of course such moves would heavily entrench large agricultural companies who have the resources to build speculative farms. I'm personally expecting that farmers will adapt to local conditions and grow crops that use less water and don't mind the heat, or else find a way to reduce water losses from evaporation. If fruits and vegetables that are no longer tenable to grow in California become more expensive, and they probably will, there will be more incentive to both find a way to grow them more carefully in California as well as more reward to exploring growing them elsewhere.
  - Fricken 5y ago
    Well, th skies have looked progressively more like Bladerunner 2049 up here in Alberta for 4 summers running. We had some crops fail due to heat earlier in the season, and more are failing due to dryness now. So don't look at us.
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      I think too many people have a mental model that we can just shift a little north and it will all be ok, but that’s too simple a model. The temperature extremes from regular seasons are likely going to widen, making crop yields drop in a much wider band than just where the average temperatures rise and precipitation drops to drought levels.
- thethethethe 5y ago
  Sure, but nothing will fully replace the productivity of the California central valley, which has some of the most fertile soil in the world. The Willamette valley up in Oregon is incredibly fertile as well, though it is currently too cold to grow lettuce and strawberries year round. That will change in the coming years but the Willamette valley is about the third the size. Additionally, the Pacific northwest is drought prone just like California, it's just not quite as bad yet. When I was there earlier this summer the reservoirs we're quite low
  - cronix 5y ago
    They're even lower now. A few months ago, the federal gov't cut off a lot of farmers in S. Oregon from water that they use for crops. To save fish. > Amid historic, climate change-driven drought, the federal government in May shut down the water supply from the Upper Klamath Basin on the California-Oregon border to protect native fish species on the verge of extinction. As a result, Hill and other farmers like her in the region have been cut off from water they have used for decades. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/10/us/klamath-oregon-drought-water-war/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/10/us/klamath-oregon-drought-wat... People go to bed with water and wake up to dry wells. Since the farmers can't use the traditional water source in the area, they are digging their wells deeper and deeper in order to water their crops. Something a lot of regular people can't afford to do, so as the farmers drop the water table searching and searching for that continually drying up water, others are going without. https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/29/southern-oregon-wells-dry-up-drought/ https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/29/southern-oregon-wells... Bad things seem to be coming.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    I wonder if there are any water loss effiencies that can be applied to crops. Farmers of certain crops in California basically erect and take down temporary structures of all sorts either for pest or temperature controls to optimize yields already.
  - riversflow 5y ago
    >currently too cold to grow lettuce and strawberries year round. I don't have links, as I found out about by asking what happened in the San Yanez and Santa Maria valleys to someone who works in Ag finance (they are starkly barren compared to what they were just a few years ago and I was very curious), but California berry production has been almost completely off-shored to Argentina. As they explained, berries are a low margin crop to begin with that absolutely requires hand picking, and California's minimum wage laws along with cheaper refrigerate freight have driven the local farmers out of business. He seemed to think that California Ag was completely on its way out, and that we can expect to be importing almost all of our fresh vegetables and fruits from South America.
- sampo 5y ago
  > can the US create new agricultural fields in other states Even California could. California could have much more irrigated agricultural land, if they completed Stage II of the original 1957 California Water Plan. I guess before 1970s, there was not much political controversy in building reservoirs and harnessing rivers and directing the water flow though agriculture. Then in the 1970s and after, some people started to see intrinsic value in rivers in their natural state, and opposing further water projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project#Controversy_and_modern_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project#Proposed_and_unbuilt_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project...
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Think BIGRRRRR! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Table crops require ample irrigation and mild temperatures. The parts of the US which have the most rain also tend to see more severe winters. The parts of the US which have more sunshine and warmth ... tend to be dry. It's possible that table-crop cultivation --- lettuce, fruits, vegetables, etc., could move to the southeastern US. That's closer to larger population centres as well, which might reduce shipping times and costs, and improve produce quality in Eastern and Central grocery stores. Traditionally, the South is known for cotton, peanuts, stone fruits (peaches), oranges (Florida), and tobacco. The magic California offered was hot, dry, sunny summers, with the only thing required to make the fields bountiful being a reliable supply of water. The state's mountain dams fed a slowly-released pulse of meltwater from snowpacks delivered this. There is the added bonus that although the Central Valley is famously hot, it has low humidity, making farm-labour conditions far more tenable, helps as well. Mississippi in August is not a dry heat. That's now severely imperiled.
- smegger001 5y ago
  If things get that bad, building a nuclear power plant and devoting its power to desalination would probably be more economical and environmentally friendly than cutting down forest for feilds. Hell if it gets that bad building a pipeline to pump water south from the mouth of the Columbia river would be on the table.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    How will you cool the reactor without water?
    - smegger001 5y ago
      Remember the whole "power devoted to desalination" thing? all you need is the starting freshwater and then it can process its own from sea water.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Big ask considering the state of water availability currently.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  It would require forethought because it takes time to grow food. It could get bad in the meantime.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jjeaff 5y ago
I'm guessing that is based on dollar amounts rather than calories? In other words, CA may appear to have a larger share than the reality if they focus on more expensive crops like avocados, pistachios, and almonds.

lhorie 5y ago

It's not even just California either. The Ogallala aquifer that underlies the Midwest corn belt is also running low. That's 90% of national corn production and affects basically everything that uses corn starch or HFCS. Unsustainable agriculture will get ugly.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

Hm. Pistachios, cashews, almonds, various nuts also land on the shelves of German Aldi and Lidl in convenient 200g bags.

tuatoru 5y ago
Back in the 1980s in Europe, almonds and pistachios came from Turkey (and possibly Bulgaria) and cashews from Angola. I don't know if this is still the case.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Some still do, I guess. I just described what I saw on the packaging of Aldi's and Lidl's own brands. I think some of that applies to fruit juices also, but there they only sometimes declare from where the ingredients come.

david38 5y ago

Much of what we grow in arid land is exported. Let’s stop growing wet crops in arid land just to send to China to feed pigs.