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A staggering amount of California's water is used for alfalfa, which gets shipped to China to feed cows. In essence, we are allowing certain farmers to sell CA'

• innagadadavida 4y ago
  Agriculture consumes a lot of water in this drought stricken state. The worst part is that many of these farms pump water from the ground thereby collapsing underground aquifers. This is an irreversible change and has caused the Central Valley to sink by several feet over the last few decades. There is zero political will to solve this. Instead we waste time and energy on pointless green initiatives, desalination and harassing homeowners to stop watering lawns. Keep in mind the labor used to grow these plants is imported as well. California is a very wealthy state and giving up some of these agricultural businesses to other states and maybe even to our poorer southern neighbors will be an overall good thing with minimal loss in tax revenues. These lands should be used to grow trees instead.
  • Jistern 4y ago
    California will never, ever, ever run short of water... unless the Pacific Ocean dries up. Cheap electricity will result in cheap desalination. The sky is not falling.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      running short of water does not mean you have nothing to drink, it means famine. madagascar has terrible famine right now, becauae there is no rain. In Syria, all crops that are not irigated have died. current irrigation water is free. You cant use water from desalination, because it takes many tons of water to grow one kilo of food, and tens of tons of water to grow a kilo of beef. that would drive up prices more than 10x, which menas famine. you people just don't understand the shitstirm that's coming one the crops fail on two important crop producing nations simultaneously
      • formerkrogemp 4y ago
        Multiple nations are having water issues. Not just in myopic California. South Africa, the Mekong delta including Thailand and Vietnam, the PO river, parts of the US southeast are dealing with depleted aquifers and drought conditions, the Nile river supporting Egypt and Jordan, Lake Chad of Africa, etc. The water issue is global, as will be the impact on food prices. I expect significant refugees/migrants and authoritarianism.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • Jistern 4y ago
        Have you ever actually bothered to make a cursory study of the history of food production over the last, say, 100 years in the USA? Since FDR came into office in 1933 the US federal government has actively been dealing with a serious food problem: tremendous agricultural surpluses. Virtually every wealthy country, even Japan, has the same problem: too many farmers and too much food. "We are running out! The sky is falling!" Hey, if that's what you want to yell and scream, that's your prerogative. But, as the adage goes, "Facts are stubborn things." In terms of crop value, California is the largest agricultural producer in the USA. I'm almost certain if California were to produce zero food whatsoever, the USA could still easily produce massive agricultural surpluses. Go read Frances Moore Lappé’s infamous "Diet for a Small Planet" which was a very famous bestselling book in 1971. It has been almost 100% debunked as inane wishful thinking. She claimed meat production had a negative environmental impact, was wasteful, and contributed to global food scarcity. Sure, just like factories can pump rivers full of pollution, if not properly regulated, cattle producers will tend to do the same thing. The answer is good laws and proper enforcement: not requiring people to eat tofu as a main course for dinner. Frances Moore Lappé was an unhinged "tree hugger." Don't be like her. Use your head: study the history, and look at the technology. While you are at it, imagine wind turbines spinning in the empty wastelands of the American West, pumping water from Canada to California. Kansas and Nebraska were part of what was known as the "Great American Desert." But then some engineers figured out how to pump water from what is now the "dying" Ogallala aquifer. We aren't living in caves, my man, trying to fight off lions and bears with spears. Doomers. Sheesh. You guys disgust me. Go spread your falsehoods elsewhere.
    • innagadadavida 4y ago
      You are right but running out of water is not the issue I’m talking about. This will not help fix the underwater aquifer collapse problem. Also, I am not aware of anyone using sea water in a large scale for agriculture.
• kirubakaran 4y ago
  On top of that, that water is heavily subsidized by CA tax payers!
• mcdonje 4y ago
  The alfalfa is also used for cows grown in CA for CA residents. That's also a bad thing. Cow farms should be significantly limited in arid climates. There are ecologically better alternatives.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    There are way too many cows, man, and all because of marketing and greed.
    • readthenotes1 4y ago
      Greed only plays a supporting role here. Gluttony is the cardinal sin more to blame.
      • omarfarooq 4y ago
        Gluttony is greed.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          Yet, techically, different. Each gets a sin of its own.
        • readthenotes1 4y ago
          There's an old list of sins: Pride Greed Lust Anger Gluttony Envy Sloth Whether or not you believe the religion whose followers came up with this list, it does provide a handy way to categorize human behavior.
  • krasin 4y ago
    >The alfalfa is also used for cows grown in CA for CA residents. That's also a bad thing. Cow farms should be significantly limited in arid climates Technically, from what I understand, it's enough to limit alfaalfa in arid climates. The location of cow farms does not matter much after that, in terms of water usage. What's also good is that enforcing alfaalfa regional restrictions is super easy - a satellite photo would be enough to spot a field, and there's not enough margin to have any organized crime to fight back.
• sitkack 4y ago
  Don't worry, CA can't do it forever as that water is coming out of a giant underground sea that is collapsing, it will never fill up again. https://energyskeptic.com/2021/aquifer-decline-in-california/ https://energyskeptic.com/2021/aquifer-decline-in-california... https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/central-valley-aquifer https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/c... https://revealnews.org/article/9-sobering-facts-about-californias-groundwater-problem/ https://revealnews.org/article/9-sobering-facts-about-califo...
  • stainforth 4y ago
    The profits that went to a few human owners of that agribusiness should be clawed back
    • madboston 4y ago
      But everyone will die with happy thoughts of making those few rich.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world. There's no answer except functioning government and the general eradication of solipsistic liberal/libertarian fantasies, and that's never going to happen.
      • rexpop 4y ago
        > That won't put the water back. No, but it will partially compensate for impacted communities' subsequent economic precarity.
      • sumy23 4y ago
        > That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world. Punishing the perpetrators won’t put the water back in the same way punishing a murderer won’t bring the victim back. We don’t punish to make right. We punish to deter.
• amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  The water is owned by the farmers, not by California. Probably the state should eminent domain it, but I have no idea what it would cost to do so.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Treating water allocation as if it were property, which it manifestly is not, leads to what would charitably be described as neurotic behavior. We have no need to continue that. Outlawing alfalfa growth in California from allocated water would not conflict with anybody's "rights". They can grow something else there that uses less water. Or (and this is something being done, in the Sacramento River delta) flood the land and collect carbon credits for sinking swamp vegetation. Much of the farmland in the Sacramento River delta is well below river and, indeed, sea level, some over 20 feet below, behind dikes (called there "levees") which threaten to collapse in the next big earthquake, pulling in a toxic load of salt water from the bay. (This has happened more than once; the dikes are not in better shape today.) Flooding fields gradually is hoped to lead to a sustainable future for the river. Erstwhile farmers could also float solar panels and collect more revenue. Raise freshwater fish and shrimp, besides. California agriculture north of Bakersfield does not use up quite so much water as allocation seems to indicate; the water evaporates and is blown to the Sierra Nevada mountains where much of it precipitates, and ends up in rivers again.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > The water is owned by the farmers, not by California if there is no rain, they have no property. the idea that you can own something beyong laws of physics is amazing. it's like owning thoughts and ideas
  • amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    I can't tell if the downvotes mean that I'm wrong about this, and the state could theoretically reallocate that water, or that I'm right but people think it should work differently. Are there any experts on how this works in California that could weigh in here?
    • 4y ago
• HWR_14 4y ago
  The farmers spray that water all over their fields as opposed to using targeted irrigation, so most of the water is wasted instead of even being viable to be exported.
• ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  this is not business, thus is vandalism. Its the same as if i go and rip apart public street furniture and sell them as metal scrap for profit.
  • kristopolous 4y ago
    Pillaging, exploitation, and destruction of the commons leading to ecological and societal degradation and eventual collapse has been documented as what capitalism does since there was a thing called capitalism There's still plenty of boosters who will use fallacious arguments defending it that were just as tired hundreds of years ago. Some people let their aspirations of greed blind them from what's clearly happening
    • strogonoff 4y ago
      Replacing capitalism with X will not eliminate the underlying socio-psychological factors that push humans to secure themselves at the expense of other humans and the environment. All capitalism does is give participants a high degree of agency that reveals these factors (and that’s also why regulation is needed—the market doesn’t work well when malicious actors exploit information asymmetry). In long term, we should understand and alleviate the origin of that chronic desire to win while others lose—however, replacing capitalism with X, depending on the degree of autocracy in X, may just obscure them instead, which seems counter to that goal.
      • kristopolous 4y ago
        Disagree. It richly rewards and strongly encourages behaviors we consider asocial and destructive. Let's take Natchez, Mississippi. In 1850, half of America's millionaires lived there. It was the wealthiest city in the country because we richly rewarded and encouraged human enslavement. The brightest minds had very lucrative careers in slave economics and slave labor studies and there was lots of focus on optimizing human enslavement for maximum profit. It was the silicon valley of the 19th century and you'd have a bright and successful career if you pursued working in the slavery industry. Slave technology, slave accounting, slave management - you don't even need to directly interact, you can just make the tools. In fact speaking of silicon valley let's talk about the first rush of San Francisco. It wasn't gold, it was whale oil in the 1830s-1850s. San Francisco was the perhaps the largest whaling port in the world as people were highly encouraged through aggressive economic incentives to go and wipe out every species of whale off the planet. And they were well on their way to success when cheaper substitutes, by pure chance, became available. This is the problem. There's nothing "natural" about these things - they are human created systems that we have constantly redefined and had to because the base driving force is one of negligent exploitation and extraction. We have other systems, driven by hate and violence for example, such as racism and war. We don't make peace with richly rewarding and encouraging them. We instead seek to minimize these human tendencies. We don't look kindly on war profiteers or race-baiting crowd agitators. These things existing are as inevitable as any other human behavior, there's an angel and devil inside all of us, what we choose to reward and structure things around is a choice we can make. We can do better than total war, we can do better than Jim Crow, and we can do better than cooking the planet with capitalism. We have to. There's no choice.