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Comment by pash | Hacker News Reader

I don't suppose California's farmers are stupid, so I presume it's someone else's stupidity that has made it attractive to grow coffee, the latest in a long line of water-intensive crops, in dry southern California.

When are Californians going to realize that it's this sort of thing, not a decent shower, that is the cause of the ill effects of a decade of drought? And why do Californians keep subsidizing farmers' water-usage when that is plainly the root of the problem?

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In the state assembly, there are a lot of reps who answer directly to farmers, and there are a lot of reps who answer to people with a romanticized notion of farming (and an overestimated idea of the importance of agriculture to CA's economy).

Also, the problem you describe is enormous, and not limited to water. I think it's a problem of innumeracy and lazy thinking. "I drove 6 miles to the grocery store in my SUV, but I brought a few reusable bags so I'm doing my part!" seems to be a common sentiment. The fact that they burned 2 or 3 pounds of fuel but brought an ounce (or less) of reusable plastic with them doesn't cross their mind.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/food-water-footprin...

> Coffee requires almost 10 times as much water [than tea], using 1,056 gallons of water per gallon of brewed coffee.

That's a lot.

There's a good deal of variation. Without digging into how that figure was produced, it could be worthwhile to mention that the production process Jay Ruskey says he's interested in cuts a lot of water out of the process. Once coffee cherries are picked, getting down to the seed inside (aka "coffee bean") can happen one of roughly three ways: "natural process", letting the coffee fruit dry out like a raisin on the seed; soaking/fermentation, letting the coffee soak in water for 24-48 hours once (or often twice in Kenya); mechanical demucilagation, separating the seeds from the rest with a machine. The demucilager is common in Costa Rica. I can dig up some more material later, but the government in Costa Rica is strict about water waste, essentially requiring farmers use demucilagers to process their coffee. I don't know how much this would affect the water involved in coffee production, but I would guess it would drop the amount necessary for production in cases like Ruskey's.

Coffee seems to be more comfortable in warmer and drier locales than tea though, and very high lands. Furthermore, I don't know about tea but coffee can be shade-grown in polycultures e.g. in the shade of fruit trees.

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