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This is basically classic arbitrage. Water in the American West is badly mispriced, so ranchers in China, Japan and Saudi Arabia are essentially buying this wat
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
This is basically classic arbitrage. Water in the American West is badly mispriced, so ranchers in China, Japan and Saudi Arabia are essentially buying this water for a very low price because their own water price is very high.
I'm hoping there is eventually enough outrage in these areas to change policy. Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns and trying to guilt folks into feeling horrible if they take a shower a minute too long, meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem.
- davidw 3y agoIt drives me absolutely bonkers when I see someone complain about some new apartments "because water". I live in a city in the west where there's a pretty severe housing shortage, and water is also a concern. But when you dig into the water issue... it's all agriculture, and even there they have so much leeway to eliminate waste. I saw an exhibit at the airport of a "pipe" they dug up less than 5 years ago that was made of wood squeezed together with bailing wire. The "Total Water Use" chart here is pretty similar throughout much of the West: https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/drought-and-the-deschutes-looking-at-the-same-river-twice https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug... And denser housing tends to use water more efficiently. Edit: dug up a picture of that pipe I took. https://photos.app.goo.gl/PisNhiA81Rsw45Rx8 https://photos.app.goo.gl/PisNhiA81Rsw45Rx8
- ajmurmann 3y agoIt's frustrating that there is no political way to prices water at real cost rather than use archaic water rights. I can't even see a reform to water rights major conflicts in those communities given the very real impact on people's lives and the common "don't tread on me"-attitude.
- davidw 3y agoYes, it's pretty bad. Around Bend, where I live, there isn't a ton of 'serious' agriculture. Lots of hobby farms and some alfalfa operations, but the climate isn't really conducive to growing a lot. We're just a bit too high up to reliably grow many things commercially. Further down the Deschutes river, in Jefferson county, there are a lot of real farms that produce much more important crops ("Approximately 55% of the US domestic market carrot variety seed production is grown in Jefferson County"). Guess who has more water rights?
- s0rce 3y agoI like the carrot honey from the carrot seed producers. Pretty unique to eastern Oregon as most places have cross-pollination with varieties to grow carrots for seed and the places that grow carrots for carrots don't get flowers so they don't produce honey.
- kolanos 3y ago> ... but the climate isn't really conducive to growing a lot. We're just a bit too high up to reliably grow many things commercially. Didn't you answer your own question here?
- tcmart14 3y agoOur water in Central Oregon does help to grow things though. One of our biggest water sources is snow melt, which get transported down a canal to farms in southern Oregon. So even though water locally may be used for any serious farming locally, it does get used for serious farming water down stream.
- davidw 3y agoThe canals go around central Oregon, but not to southern Oregon. Cool to see someone else from Bend here though!
- tcmart14 3y agoHere in Bend also! There is also a lot of water that gets used up out on the East side of Bend on Old Deschutes Highway for ya, pretty much hobby farms for Horses.
- rtkwe 3y agoIt's because it would effectively kill farming in a lot of these places because the only reason it makes sense there is because land and water was cheap and the water prices haven't updated to match the ever increasing usage.
- jibe 3y agoDon’t ignore what’s downstream from farming - food. Cheap water is subsidizing cheap food.
- 0xB31B1B 3y agoNo, it’s not. The surplus created by cheap water is captured by the hedge funds buying up artificially cheap water rights then selling foods at market rates for a large profit. Growing alfalfa in California for cows in China or Saudi Arabia does not impact the price of California beef in a measurable way.
- kolanos 3y agoYes, it is. Have you quantified this claim? Do you know how little alfalfa is exported? > Based on USDA data for 2022, only 4% of all U.S. dry hay produced and 6.5% of all harvested alfalfa hay entered the export market. So 96% of all hay and 93.5% of alfalfa is used domestically. [0]: https://hayandforage.com/article-4300-hay-exports-in-2022-offered-mixed-news.html https://hayandforage.com/article-4300-hay-exports-in-2022-of...
- Vvector 3y agoAny solution is going to be very painful to a large section of the area. It's going to get a lot worse before there is any chance of a resolution.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThere's a simple political way that's been successful several times. The political decision is made to buy the water light rates and then the state owns it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoWhy is that the only solution here? If the problem is exactly one crop (or hell, even 2 or 3), can't we just stack a gigantic export tax on it? It wouldn't even have to affect domestic use.
- ajhurliman 3y agoLevying a tax on international consumers might be an easier fix than completely rewriting water rights legislation. Also: our usernames are oddly similar!
- seanp2k2 3y agoTheir great grandpappy, who immigrated from Eastern Europe, stole that land from the Native Americans fair and square!
- scoofy 3y agoBe careful what you wish for. The existence of places like Los Angeles, itself, effectively exist because of these same water rights. Why do you think LA is allowed to just pump an entire major river all the way from near Mammoth Lakes to the coast? Out of the goodness of the folks on the Owen's River's hearts? Fuck no. Los Angeles lied, cheated, and stole to get those water rights, and if you think Los Angeles isn't going to have to pay through the nose if we reset water rights, you're sorely mistaken. You look at the history of water in the American West, and you'll see that everyone has done everything wrong since the 1920's, when water rights were designed to prevent migration west. Then you'll understand why this mess is much, much bigger than we can imagine.
- joshjob42 3y agoI'm sorry but the 10M people of Los Angeles County with 3.5% of the GDP of the United States which if a country would put it between Poland and Switzerland would, on an open market for water, absolutely crush the ~100x fewer people who live around Mammoth Lakes, Owen's River, etc. We import ~800k (in 2018 it as ~750k, latest number I found) acre-feet of water a year to LA County via MWD, or 0.08 per person per year, or ~100m^3 per person. That's used to generate ~$72k of economic activity. Alfalfa for instance uses ~0.4acre-feet per ton. Alfalfa prices haven't ever been higher than $300/ton. That means that if water cost more than $750/acre-foot, they'd be out of business on water cost alone. At that price, the average Angeleno would have to pay a shockingly high... $5/mo for all their water. Oh wait, no, that's less than 0.1% of GDP per capita in Los Angeles County. The fact is urban dwellers don't use much water, and are enormously economically productive, much moreso than rural areas, and so in any kind of open market for water, the urbanites will win handily every time. The city will get it's water, no matter what, and the fairly economically unproductive areas will have to adapt. It's only through political interventions like silly "water rights" designed for the benefit of farmers that a city has to resort to more expensive sources. https://ourcountyla.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Our-County-Water-Briefing_For-Web.pdf https://ourcountyla.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/... https://archive.is/7BNdF https://archive.is/7BNdF https://hayandforage.com/article-4472-Another-drop-for-hay-prices-in-June.html https://hayandforage.com/article-4472-Another-drop-for-hay-p...
- kedikedi 3y agoThat wooden pipe looks very cool actually :) Do you know when did they make it/installed it? And how did they joined them, more wood?
- davidw 3y agoI don't know anything more about it. My guess is that it's pretty old. The book pictured next to it says 1914, and that broad time frame feels about right.
- Flow 3y agoWhat's the metal on it? Lead?
- bombcar 3y agoSearch "wooden water pipes" and "wooden sewer pipes" and you can find a lot of them.
- innagadadavida 3y agoThe other issue is that California is taking away jobs of farm workers south of the border and uprooting their lives and causing the influx of migrants to exacerbate. Farm owners here are wealthy and have the politicians in their pockets and it will be very difficult to change the status quo.
- offsign 3y agoWater infrastructure in the west is highly fragmented and locally rate limited -- you can't just reroute water from large swaths of the state like you can with electricity. Additionally, the water consumed by agriculture is often different than the 'treated water' needed to serve residential communities. So yes, water is major a bottleneck for residential development out west. But to solve this you need new means of transport (pipes / channels), storage (reservoirs), and treatment (plans)... infrastructure that doesn't currently exist, is hard to get approved, and would likely need to be paid for by increasing the cost of living for existing residents. Agree that we should be smarter about how water is allocated / used out West, but 'taking from ag' isn't going to make it any cheaper for you to buy a home.
- RoddaWallPro 3y agoAs someone who also lives in Central Oregon (and was born and raised here), I will say this: this article is profoundly misleading. They state that the Upper Deschutes CFS goes from ~1200->~65, and state that is from irrigation. But they don't actually prove that. Much of that CFS decline could be observed out of irrigation season, because that section of the Deschutes dumps a ton of water into lava tubes/back into the ground. You'd have to measure the CFS at the end of that section prior to irrigation getting turned on, then after, and then the difference is what is going to irrigation. And CO Land Watch doesn't do that. Hell, they don't even state where their data is coming from. You can get a better idea of this drop by instead looking at official US govt data where the Deschutes drops into Lake Billy Chinook: https://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv/?cb_00060=on&format=gif_default&site_no=14076500&legacy=1&period=&begin_date=2021-01-01&end_date=2021-12-31 https://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv/?cb_00060=on&for... That is for the year 2021, when that article was written. You can see the drop in April, which is when irrigation starts. It's about 500CFS,or ~half the river at that point. That is NOT 95% of the river, as CO Land Watch would have you believe. (Side note: CO Land Watch has a bit of a reputation around here. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like they would gladly end all farming in Central Oregon to save a few salmon.)
- davidw 3y agoThe chart I care about is the 'city vs everything else' one, TBH, and that one is broadly accurate. There's a lot of room to provide more water for both fish and farmers by 1. eliminating waste and 2. fixing some of the weird water rights stuff where people are really just wasting it.
- RationPhantoms 3y agoWho in the US profits the most from Alfafa exports to these countries?
- jahnu 3y agoThe farmers who get this water cheap?
- rs999gti 3y agoProbably the governments that grant the permits and collect the taxes for these foreign farming operations
- whinenot 3y agoIt's illegal to grow alfalfa in Saudi Arabia. That's why Fondomonte Arizona was created by the Saudis to grow alfalfa in the unregulated and easily paid off state of Arizona.[0] [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/16/fondomonte-arizona-drought-saudi-farm-water/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/16/fondomont...
- ethbr1 3y agoWhen agriculture uses 70+% of all water in the Colorado River system and California’s Imperial Irrigation District is the largest consumer [0], we should probably start there. At some point, people need to vote in their own interests. Farming is important, but it isn't the only thing that's important. Ripping up use-it-or-lose-it and grandfathered water rights (with compensation and phase-out times) should be on the table. It's a vestige of a different world and isn't appropriate for today. Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints? Shifting policy to promote less water-consumptive agriculture and penalize high-consumption agriculture seems like a reasonable bargain. [0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/colorado-river-water-cuts-will-ease-in-2024-despite-long-term-challenges https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/colorado-river-water-cut...
- mike_d 3y ago> Ripping up use-it-or-lose-it and grandfathered water rights (with compensation and phase-out times) should be on the table. That is a battle that will be tied up in the courts for 15+ years. What we need to do right now is add a 200% export tax on high water items (alfalfa, almonds, etc) leaving the country. Incentivize farmers to divert water usage to feeding domestic animals or growing crops that feed people domestically.
- trealira 3y ago> That is a battle that will be tied up in the courts for 15+ years. What makes you say this? Is it already being fought in courts? Or is this just educated speculation?
- ceejayoz 3y agoThere's plenty of evidence water rights cases/disputes take a long time. https://www.justice.gov/enrd/arizona-v-california https://www.justice.gov/enrd/arizona-v-california has been running since 1952.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoCases get caught up in court because for the most part government agencies try to rip up contracts without paying and they often lose. Most Farmers have a price that they willingly pay to give up their Perpetual water rights. In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation. Similarly, it looks unfavorably on taxing someone out of business to avoid buying their property. This is because it's essentially a workaround for the former. If the state want's mike_d's house, They cant impose a 200% property tax on to force him to sell
- epistasis 3y agoThis largely comes down to "land" ownership. Water rights are real property like owning a piece of land, and just as with a vacant lot in a city in the midst of a severe housing shortage, the land owner pays no cost for hoarding a very valuable resource that many other people could make far far better use of. Natural resources, when "owned" in this way, should also have very high taxes associated with them so that they are not squandered and instead used much more efficiently.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt's mispriced in a lot of places I think; more and more countries and regions will face water shortages soon, but the prices towards industry isn't going up yet. If anything will make the large consumers finally reduce, it's going to be increasing the cost. But the government doesn't want that, because they would just add it to the price of the agricultural produce. And governments want to keep that value low, so that one the one side, people can afford to eat, but on the other side because else the local markets will be out-competed by importing it from places that don't do as much water management. It's protectionism at the cost of the water supply. In my neck of the wood (west Europe) we've already had instances of water pressure being reduced so that the reservoirs have a chance to refill overnight; in other places, tap water has already become unavailable. In 10 years that will be commonplace, water will be rationed. While meanwhile, there's datacenters using tens of millions of liters of drinking water for cooling: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-holland-discovers-microsoft-data-center-slurped-84m-liters-of-drinking-water-last-year/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-...
- ajdude 3y agoFrom what I'm reading, the problem appears to be growing water hungry crops and then shipping them overseas. I think we can accomplish keeping the price of US produce down by granting lower water prices for farmers to grow crops intended for domestic use while not doing the same for farmers shipping alfalfa to China?
- BurningFrog 3y agoAs I remember it from the California water crises some years back, a LOT of California water rights are owned by the original farms that first started using the water, and they pay very close to zero for using it. Thus we have rice farms in the desert and other such madness. This would actually be fine if "better" water users could buy those water rights from the rice farmer. The farmer would make a lot more money than growing rice could yield, and (say) LA could ease up on the lawn shaming. But for some ungodly reason, such trades are not legally possible, and the madness will continue.
- mrguyorama 3y agoWhy would the rice farmer ever give up free water that all legal documents say they are entitled to? Why would the rice farmer ever sell?
- PeterisP 3y agoBecause in this scenario selling the water rights to someone else would bring more money than not selling and using those water rights themselves for e.g. farming rice on that land.
- BurningFrog 3y agoIt's simple: He'll sell when he's offered more money that the free water is worth to him.
- avgcorrection 3y ago> I'm hoping there is eventually enough outrage in these areas to change policy. Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns and trying to guilt folks into feeling horrible if they take a shower a minute too long, meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem. A classic. 1. Problem is too obvious to ignore 2. Get in front of people finding the root causes by blaming individual citizen/consumer choices 3. Less of a need to actively run propaganda on behalf of the actual entities that are making the problems (e.g. apparently alfalfa agriculture in this case)
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoYeah, this also reminded me of plastic recycling: Convince people that recycling is actually a good solution for dealing with waste, to the point of shaming people who only have a single garbage can. Then have plastic companies claim their products are recyclable, to the point of putting those 3-arrow-triangle symbols on their packaging, so people will dutifully sort out their waste into different bins. And then promptly take all those bins and dump them into the landfill anyway[1]. When the real problem is that there is too much single-use plastic created in the first place. 1. To clarify, some recycling definitely is a great idea and makes sense, like recycling of aluminum cans. But it rarely makes sense when there is not a positive economic outcome to do so.
- hot_gril 3y agoIt's even worse with electricity in California. No I am not going to save energy or install solar+batteries to help cover for PG&E's negligence. We live in a calm climate where there should be no problem transporting energy and no need to subsidize inefficient home power plants. Don't let them shove their problems onto us.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RC_ITR 3y agoNothing offends me more than the billboards of a young girl watering a houseplant saying “just a sip.” Of all the water use cases to go after, they want to make children think water is so scarce that spilling one can of it is somehow a problem? Meanwhile, eat whatever produce you want at any time of year, as long as you can’t see the water being wasted, it’s fine right?
- whinenot 3y agoAt least the farmers have to pay something. At least one company gets all the water it can for free in California.[0] Not a bad deal for a bottled water company! [0]https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/la-times-today/2022/02/10/the-fight-over-the-source-of-arrowhead-bottled-water- https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/la-times-today/2022/02/...
- jimbob45 3y agoEspecially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns Lowkey though…it’s high time for the cult of lawnship to pass. I don’t want to stop people from having lawns if they really want them but we’re to the point where people have lawns just because everyone else does or their HOA forces them into one regardless of whether it makes aesthetic sense or sense with their weather patterns.
- zackees 3y ago[dead]
- toast0 3y ago> meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem. That's because the actual problem is intractable. Urban metropolises shouldn't be built where profitable farming can make better use of the water. But good luck evacuating the greater Los Angeles area. Or getting people to move to areas better suited for living, in general.
- baggy_trough 3y agoThat is not the actual problem. The actual problem is a badly mismanaged regulatory system for water pricing.
- g_sch 3y agoAs noted in the linked article, people in urban areas are paying many times the price for water that farmers are. If farmers had to pay municipal water prices, it's much less clear whether their farming would be profitable.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> Urban metropolises shouldn't be built where profitable farming can make better use of the water. You have it exactly backwards: planting crops that are only profitable (and MUCH less profitable than comparable urban uses would be), and which make a horrible use of water, due to outdated legal ownership theories of water.
- coryrc 3y agoIt's because they own "water rights", but instead of buying it out, why can we not tax it? Of I barter eggs for cheese, I'm legally supposed to pay tax, so why can't we just tax water use period? Just conveniently make it high enough to make water rights net-zero value, then buy then for nothing. Oh, right, Saudis would lose money.
- kolanos 3y agoThey do get taxed. It is called property tax. Land with water rights is worth a lot more than land without water rights in the same area. In my area water righted land is worth ~10x what land without water rights is worth for the same acreage. It is the farmer's version of beachfront property.
- seanp2k2 3y agoMeanwhile, a drive down I5 will show many farms with political signs complaining about how water is too expensive and advocating for conservative viewpoints while they shamelessly employ underpaid illegal immigrants while enjoying the spoils of corporate welfare.
- PaulHoule 3y agoI went to the Nea York Farm Show this winter and there were representatives of a group in Ontario that sells hay internationally that had brochures printed in Chinese and Arabic. At least in Ontario they have water.