For centuries, societies have taught themselves to believe that the most productive agricultural regions have great soil, but need water. A colonialist impulse?
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And water-hungry crops for export to the rest of the world, too. It’s insane that California is exporting our water outside the country in the form of almonds, alfalfa, pistachios, rice, etc. (The almonds alone use 17% of the agricultural water.) Agriculture as a whole is only 2% of the economy, and water-intensive crops are only viable exports because the water is (artificially) so cheap. Which means we’re basically losing money by exporting things like almonds.
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Agrivoltaic farming is interesting too. Solar panels on crops fields. Used for crops that benefit from midday shade. Both solar energy and water conservation by reducing evaporation.
https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/newsroom/sustainable-farm-agrivoltaic
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i think this and the idea that it’s generic “farmers” that are the worst offenders is wrong. and i think blaming the wrong people can result in the wrong fixes
as you(?) mentioned about the almonds, it’s hedge fund and commodity traders that are driving much of this. and like with the alfalfa being grown for livestock - it’s agricultural giants pressuring government and farmers to produce certain kinds of crops ( and meat )
farming’s hard as you probably know. and even if you’re lucky enough to still own your own land and make your own decisions about what to grow: you still have to worry about being able to keep that land. farmers don’t always have the flexibility to grow what or how they’d choose
policy in that case matters much more than individual choice. blaming farmers for the system of neo liberal capitalism won’t get us very far
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I’m all on board with that! More efficient land use will save us all. All arable land on the planet is currently in use. We literally can’t grow more food than we do without burning down more rainforest, or making much better use of the land we have. I think can all agree the latter would be better. 
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Really interesting to learn that nut trees are so water intensive. I’ve always considered them something you could plant and then pretty much leave them to the care of the local weather…but I suppose that’s some of the difference between a residential nut-bearing shade tree and a tree being used to make a living
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Not desert, but without irrigation much of Southern California is too arid to grow the crops that people are growing there. And without subsidized irrigation and an exploited non-citizen workforce much of it would be economically untenable. Water hungry industries, green lawns, and golf courses just add to the problem. Similar to vacation houses on the outer banks, I don’ think that it is wise to encourage land uses that are only going to be even more difficult to support as climate change slowly makes everything worse. As bad as it is now, it will almost certainly be significantly worse 50 years from now and worse than that 100 years from now. Just as cutting carbon NOW is necessary, so is making planning decisions that put fewer people, their livelihoods and futures at risk as the climate changes,. Band-aiding infrastructure to support people where they are is important, but we should be planning for a significantly worse picture on the future, rather than piling sandbags on the low-tide line and saying “we’re done.”
Agreed! What do you suggest? Where else do you think that farming can take place without reducing food available to the country?
I don’t think anybody here would support any of those things, nor is advocating for any of that. Least of all me, as I’ve said repeatedly upthread.
Again, nobody here is advocating for any of that. We”re certainly open to your solutions though.
It’s easy to sit and point out everything that the west is doing wrong with water management. There’s lots to choose from. People tend to be a little shorter on solutions, though.
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To me it’s a matter of “what,” not “where.” California could produce just as much food using less water if we grew different kinds of food than we do now. Why should California be expected to grow and export ridiculous quantities of almonds and alfalfa when we could use that same land to grow water-efficient crops like beans, okra, etc.? If we make that switch nobody’s going to starve, they’ll just have to pay a bit more for certain products like almond milk and ground beef.
Edit to add: the idea that we should even consider building energy-intensive desalinization plants to increase our water supply at the same time that we’re exporting alfalfa to Saudi Arabia is a little crazy. If it makes sense to grow alfalfa with desalinized ocean water then let Saudi Arabia do it themselves, and we can all avoid the extra hassle and environmental cost of shipping.
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True dat. Personally, I don’t think that there IS a “solution.” At least where a solution is defined as a something not too unpleasant to be politically feasible until things get even worse. History is littered with things that just got worse and worse partly because of the inaction of people that could not accept how bad they were getting. It’s not just wars that suffer from a sunk cost fallacy.
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No disagreement here. It wasn’t intended to be an optimistic comparison; but healthcare struck me as the most visible example of another area of American life where you get profoundly perverse outcomes from a system that looks kind of capitalist in terms of the existence of profit motives and a willingness to let the poor die; but which is far too dysfunctional to actually be either described or modeled as anything resembling a market capitalist system.
I suspect that the intrusion of the finance guys into water allocation will lead to more examples of people outright being denied water(since, in absence of some sort of legally defined ‘x amount per person is free’ allocation, it’s entirely likely that poor people in drought areas simply will not be able to pay the market equilibrium price for water); but it will, if it manages to chip away at some of the legacy allocations, potentially mop up a number of the most visibly wasteful uses; since many of those aren’t actually that profitable; and absolutely aren’t profitable enough to pay anything like the market equilibrium rate for the water they need.
My back-of-the-envelope best case would probably involve the definition of the minimum amount of water needed for the aqueous equivalent of ‘living wage’ conditions, and the exemption of that amount, per person, from market pricing; along with similar exemptions from market pricing for lakes, wetlands, aquifers, etc. that have water requirements to remain ecologically sound; but wouldn’t be against market pricing, in principle, as a replacement for the hodgepodge of legacy allocations that are effectively massive subsidies for specific legacy users. That’s what always irks me about the ‘should we fine golf courses in drought areas’/‘what to do about people watering their lawn in the middle of an environmental catastrophe’ stuff. In absence of better options I’d certainly rather do that than not; but I’d prefer it if being in a drought area made it so that obtaining water in excess of the ‘living wage’ amount was sufficiently expensive that frivolous use would be largely priced out even before we identify and legislate against specific instances of it.
Something like a golf course or a mcmansion lawn in the southwest certainly doesn’t deserve water; but the fact that we need to talk about bans or fines suggests that part of the problem is that they are getting their water at absurdly low rates. Because we have grotesque levels of inequality and wealth concentration there would still be some people who would be golfing on lovingly nurtured green right out to the point where the rest of us are wearing stillsuits; but at non-nonsense prices that sort of behavior would be a lot less accessible to the low-mid 6 figures set; and closer to being confined to the genuinely plutocratic.
I suspect that this change would lead to intense opposition from the sort of people who also fiercely guard the tax advantages given to mortgage holders but not renters; but were it to be rammed through I suspect it would be good for them: it’s easy to pretend that drought isn’t a real problem if it’s still cheap to water your lawn and the only obstacle is narrowly tailored ‘don’t water your damn lawn’ ordnances; while being technically allowed to water your lawn, if you can deal with it costing more than sending a couple of your spawn to a good private school, would give the impression that you are dealing with a scarce commodity.
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Certainly. On that, everyone in this thread agrees. As has been said main times upthread, we shouldn’t be growing almonds and alfalfa and the other silly water-heavy crops. No arguments here.
Strong agree here as well. Efficiency should come first in all climate-change mitigation efforts. In many areas, efficiency is most or all of the wins needed.
For sure. Unfortunately, I think we will end up at “engineering solutions” in this case, not because it’s a good idea, but because the political clusterfuck that is western water rights will never be sorted out. The incentives in the system are all wrong, and the incentives to fix it are not present for the people who need to do the fixing. That was my thesis at the top of this thread, though I didn’t articulate it well initially.
Short of some sort of Federal court order to redo the whole system of water regulation and rights across western states, I’m not sure there’s any way out of this. We literally have farmers growing alfalfa to intentionally waste water so they don’t lose their allocation. That’s a seriously broken system that needs to be nuked from orbit.
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