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Summary: some produce contains a lot of water, and is normally processed into something with much less water. Like tomatoes into ketchup. This company capture

• Namari 4y ago
  they're talking about 250 million gallons over 90 days
• boredumb 4y ago
  Capturing inefficiencies in processes is a good thing and one of the biggest benefits of capitalism, unless you are proposing we stop growing tomatoes or making ketchup?
  • SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    A comment praising capitalism on a thread about the California water crisis (where multiple massive hedge funds have been investing heavily into incredibly water intensive crops like almonds because they earn the most immediate returns despite long-term ability to not die of thirst) is the most hacker news moment of the day, I swear
    • throwaway6734 4y ago
      Capitalism isn't the issue. Not properly costing water is. Its the same thing with carbon.
      • chowells 4y ago
        This analysis is so shallow it's practically Libertarian. It gets one surface level detail approximately correct: if water or carbon emissions cost more, businesses would work harder to reduce their use. Analysis depth level 1: Where are the prices coming from? What are the incentives for setting them the way they are currently set? What alteration of those incentives would politically-powerful capital holders accept? Analysis depth level 2: Is market allocation moral for resources that are needed both for everyone to survive and for a small group of people to become wealthier? How does that analysis change as survival for the non-wealthy becomes more difficult? You can go deeper, of course. Many have. But just thinking about a few of these questions leads to far more cogent commentary than "capitalism isn't the issue".
        • breischl 4y ago
          >Where are the prices coming from? Ironically water prices are largely set by government bodies that created water projects (eg, Bureau of Reclamation which made most of the huge dams in the west, various California water boards). Much of it was knowingly, intentionally priced below the cost to deliver it for various political reasons. If you want to read an in-depth account of that, I suggest "Cadillac Desert". >"capitalism isn't the issue" In this case, it's _at most_ part of the problem. Government policies delivered artificially cheap water. Capitalism responded to that incentive. Of course people then fight to maintain those policies, so in that sense one could blame capitalism. >This analysis is so shallow it's practically Libertarian. Said the guy who has done no actual analysis, and instead just asked questions. I think we've reached a second peak of HN here.
          • chowells 4y ago
            > >This analysis is so shallow it's practically Libertarian. > Said the guy who has done no actual analysis, and instead just asked questions. I think we've reached a second peak of HN here. Ah, you've misunderstood the point of my post. It wasn't to argue against them. It was to point out that what they presented isn't an argument. For what it's worth, I don't even disagree with "capitalism isn't the issue". I think a big issue is, as my questions would lead you find if you kept exploring, that people mistake economic and political systems for moral ones. Capitalism isn't moral. Or immoral. It's amoral. As such, it's not a valid answer when raising moral questions. Capitalism isn't the problem. The problem is that people accept "capitalism" as an excuse for immoral behavior. My rhetorical goal is to get the person I replied to to expand their thinking. Spend less time quoting the Libertarian party and their conflation of profit and morality. Think about how systems interact with each other when applied broadly. Think about whether the systems in use are even appropriate for your goals. And above all, to remember that nothing ever has only one "the problem".
        • blululu 4y ago
          This is a very uncharitable reading of the comment. Irrigation in the Central Valley could only be called Capitalist in so far is it concentrates resources into the hands of a greedy, wealthy few. But the irrigation does not follow anything close to a free market. The amount of tax payer support for irrigation projects that benefit the massive landholdings of some of the richest farms on earth is pretty shocking, and this leads to massively inefficient uses of water (growing cotton and beef for example). There is no market allocation here but I would be willing to bet that such an allocation would be more moral than the current distribution of resources that grows unprofitable crops while local towns are asked to ration.
      • mc32 4y ago
        Exactly. See the Aral Sea for a non-capitalist version of the problem and results.
    • blululu 4y ago
      Water policy in the San Jaquin valley would better be described as socialism for the rich than capitalism. Nobody is paying anything close to a market rate.
    • boredumb 4y ago
      I didn't praise anything, I pointed out how it's representative of one of the benefits of said economic system. With that out of the way, a comment insinuating that free markets are to blame for the water crisis in California, is the most reddit moment of the day, believe that.
    • wutbrodo 4y ago
      Tell me you know nothing about water policy in CA without telling me you know nothing about water policy in CA. Almond exports (revenue <$11B) use as much water as the cities of LA and SF combined (GDP ~$1T). Has it occurred to you to wonder why the input costs of water to almond exporters doesn't capture the fact this dramatic difference in output? There's no "capitalist" setup in which growing almonds in CA would be feasible, because water prices and rights are heavily controlled. Capitalism is far from a panacea, but the idea that it's causing CA's water woes is ludicrous. This is some real subreddit-full-of-college-freshmen energy
  • jefftk 4y ago
    I'm saying that it's unlikely that extracting water from tomatoes is going to change the water picture in areas where tomatoes are grown, since this only reduces their water usage by ~1%. Either water is so abundant that it's not worth capturing the water released from tomato processing, or it's so rare that it's not worth growing tomatoes.
• yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > It takes ~100x as much water to grow a tomato as ends up in the final tomato. Is that a problem? If it takes 100 times as much water to grow as ends up in the final tomato, then that implies that the other 99 parts went back into the local environment, doesn't it? I would have naively assumed that the local ecology was really only upset when people export water containing products across the country
  • Cerium 4y ago
    Export is one issue, but pumping from an aquifer and then rejecting into the atmosphere is another.
  • thehappypm 4y ago
    Nope, most of the water just evaporates. Plants are great at moving water from the soil to the air.
    • lhorie 4y ago
      Isn't that water vapor still going to be in the local environment? Is the argument here that farm plants somehow prevent water from reaching aquifers (at that 100x magnitude) that would otherwise reach them? If so, how?
      • Manu40 4y ago
        I think the problem with evaporation being made a point of by the GP is that ultimately the water cycle isn't definite on where it will put that water back. Water vapor can travel great distances to the point where the vapor in the breath you exude right now could end up in someone else drinking water some days or years from now, on another continent. But ultimately no, the water doesn't just disappear forever. It just moves to a new location. That is, unless you are doing things that literally split the bonds of the molecules and revert it from being water at all. But that's a whole other level of discussion. (And it's why I am against any form of energy that requires splitting water to create hydrogen. I would much rather we just put our efforts into going to space to collect the hydrogen there instead. Taking it from sea water is, in my honest opinion; extremely foolish.)
• whyenot 4y ago
  It's about 921 acre feet. Not a huge amount, but it would be significant for a town like Coalinga that is on the brink of running out of drinking water.
  • blululu 4y ago
    They are growing cotton and cattle less than 10 miles from Coalinga. There is already plenty of water to be had.
• danans 4y ago
  We could dramatically reduce water requirements of crops like tomatoes with hydroponics, but the reality is that farmland and water are too cheap to make more resource efficient methods economical.
  • openthc 4y ago
    A grow-house is not cheap; harvesting labor is cheap. Once we've got better harveting bots GH/HP/V-Grow will make a lot more sense.
    • nomel 4y ago
      I don't understand the logic here. If the harvesting labor is already cheap, why will better harvesting bots help, since that's not the problem?
      • Manu40 4y ago
        The bots don't need to be paid, so the cost becomes subsidized by not having manual laborers to pay.
        • nomel 4y ago
          > The bots don't need to be paid They're definitely not free. They need to be purchased and maintained. A bot would be a significant initial investment, compared to a human.
          • Manu40 4y ago
            No, they definitely are not free. You are absolutely correct on that. But after having worked in a automated environment where the work force was reduced to minimal required human staff; I can tell you that maintenance is (for some) a last resort. Also, a lot of these sorts of things can have stuff like subsidies for them, which means the tax payer is paying for it, not the company. Finally, sometimes employers just don't want to have to deal with human workers. Sometimes, it's more worth it to just have to deal with machines that don't talk back, just do their work (usually) and don't require benefits, kickbacks, and other such things. A human is an ongoing cost. A machine is as well, but not quite as much of one; depending on the situation. Finally. You could always just have a bot that maintains the bots. Edit: One other thing. Bots don't show up late for work, or require rest as much as humans. So their potential profit margin is higher.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  Your last sentence is true, but somewhat irrelevant IMO. That is, even if it takes 1,000x as much water to grow a tomato as ends up in the final tomato, that's all a sunk cost. That water was going to be used either way in order to make ketchup. The question is: can we recapture some of the water that would have otherwise been wasted in the tomato processing/ketchup producing step? If we can, and as long as doing so doesn't take undue resources (electricity, etc.), then it makes sense to capture the water, right?
  • jefftk 4y ago
    > If we can, and as long as doing so doesn't take undue resources (electricity, etc.), then it makes sense to capture the water, right? Whether it's worth capturing depends on how much water is worth. At 100x it's very hard to have a water price low enough that growing tomatoes is cost effective but high enough that it's worth putting in this kind of effort to recapture 1% of the water from their production. (Part of the problem here of course is that agricultural water is rarely traditionally "priced")