Topical!
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It’s what they get for backing crooked Hillary. Sad!
Almonds is much of it, actually. A cash crop mostly exported to China.
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What about the less vital stuff, but high profit stuff like grapes for wine?
The problem with SOME agriculture, is we are growing things in places nature never intended. If this shit keeps up, you will HAVE to adapt, or it will all fail.
Before reading the bit about the drought, insect damage was my first thought.
Are those forests normally as lacking in midlayer as the one shown in the picture?
Without some dense midstory shrubbery, there’s no safe habitat for the small insectivorous birds; without the small birds, the tree-boring insects have nothing to control their population.
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Growing good wine grapes doesn’t require a ton of water. Growing cheap, sugary grapes for sweet, high alcohol wines actually uses more water than low-yielding vines that are used for high end wines. A vine that suffers produces the best fruit.
So maybe just cut out the cheap stuff.
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Figure 1. Water applied to crops, in acre-feet per year (2010).
Figure 2. Revenue by crop, in $ per acre-foot.
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/where-does-californias-ag_b_7172200.html
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In 2014, 99% of all US almond production came from California.
The US was the second-largest consumer of California almonds (25% of the total crop value) after the EU (29% of total crop, 38% of exports).
India ran a distant third at 7.7% of total crop (10% of exports), while China came in fourth at 6.9% of the total crop (9% of exports).
[All numbers from California Department of Farms and Agriculture annual reports.]
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I’m trying to determine if you are obliquely offering an opinion or just data here.
Interesting stats. Some of those high water crops might need to be bought from other regions if this keeps up.
There are 101 million acres of land in California. So that means that you want me to believe that there are only 3 trees per acre in California. Someone better check their numbers.
Yes, “someone” better!
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You realize that not all of CA is forested, right?
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Good! Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do, according to Saint Reagan.
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Especially the parts covered in dirt, dust, and dry riverbeds.
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I was providing a statistical context for your assertions about California produce.
Just for fun, here are some other figures:
California produces between 80% and 90% of the total US production of:
Carrots (fresh)
Leaf lettuce
Apricots
Avocados
Grapes
…and between 90 and 100% of:
Artichokes
Broccoli
Celery
Garlic
Tomatoes (processing)
Almonds
Strawberries
Dates
Figs
Kiwifruit
Lemons
Nectarines
Olives
Peaches (cling)
Pistachios
Plums
Dried plums
Walnuts
(For commodities in boldface, California is the sole US supplier, with 99%+ market share.)
I thought the graphics I posted had already done that?
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Which state(s)?
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How are you going to get it there?
The current proposal is from the Columbia, actually.
Giant pipe.
Note, BTW, that those statistics are from 2010, before the beginning of the current drought.
Aside from serious drought cycles (which happen periodically), the State Water Project often has an annual surplus which it sells, in part, to farmers. The state has encouraged farmers to plant alfalfa with that surplus, as it’s a drought-hardy leguminous cover crop that fixes nitrogen in its deep root system, thus enriching the land it grows on. It’s excellent for use in crop-rotation cycles that reduce fertilizer use. It’s a fabulous habitat for wildlife. It’s one of the best cattle fodders available.
And it collided with a weird market distortion: The US trade deficit with China resulted in many shipping containers returning to China empty. So shipping companies offered bargain rates on transport of lightweight, low-risk cargo to China.
Alfalfa hay commands high prices in China due to growing demand for beef and limited domestic supplies of forage, so farmers could make more money shipping alfalfa in (otherwise-empty) containers to China than they could selling it locally.
The State specifically recommends against using variable surpluses for long-lived orchard crops like almonds, since the all-too-common drought cycles could destroy the investment.
Some farmers ignored that advice, using their purchased surpluses to water high-value crops like almonds and pistachios, falling back on their own pumped groundwater during drier years.
So now the current sustained drought has those farmers overtaxing their aquifers.
Those SWP surpluses were mostly going away anyway. Much of the previously-sold surplus belonged, by right, to urban water agencies that had not previously used their full entitlements.
But with continuing urban growth, increasing demand will consume those surpluses — and the current drought has accelerated the timetable of that process considerably.
The subleties of water-use decisions are often obscured by simple acre/feet-per-crop and dollar-per-acre/foot graphs.
Consider what a University of California Agricultural Extension Service agent has to say about alfalfa on their blog:
Why Alfalfa is the Best Crop to have in a Drought
It’s never as simple as it looks on teevee, nor even on the pages of the New York Times, these days. (-:
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