Hacker News Reader

Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

More info from WashPo, "Agriculture is 80 percent of water use in California. Why aren’t farmers being forced to cut back?":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...

Lays out some on both sides, but still seems jarring to me that a state that sometimes contends with droughts is fighting to maintain so many water hungry crops.

Good discussion here of what might shift if agricultural water had a price, or some kind of pigouvian tax: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...

Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.

View on HN

There's another side to the Alfalfa story. In recent years, much of the Alfalfa grown in California has been sold and shipped to dairies in South China [0]. This happens because of increased demand from the Chinese for dairy products coupled with the lack of available water for dairy farms in that region, combined with the astounding fact that it's actually cheaper to sell and ship to China than it is to sell and ship within California.

[0]: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-feeding-china-hay-2014...

> Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.

More water is used by cows. They drink lots of water, plus the food that they eat requires water. The only thing is that their food was most likely produced in another state.

Then they pee it out

Yes, it always amazes me that we grow rice in a desert. But you might say the same for cotton, but in the case of cotton, long-staple cottons derived from ancient Egyptian cottons make superior cloth because of the longer fibers, but are susceptable to boll rot if it gets rain at the wrong time. It isn't always a simple analysis. If you want to give up growing cotton in California, be prepared for the quality of your shirts to go down.

The bottom line is it isn't the farmers who are the ultimate consumers of the water. We all use ag water when we buy food at the grocery store. We eat the water. You can't make an impact on ag water without impacting the consumer also, and that connection needs to be acknowledged. The farmers use the water, but they don't consume the water. We do.

Your arguments would be correct if consumers footed 100% of the ag water bills. Want a premium-quality t-shirt? Go pay for superior cotton grown in a desert. Sounds fair to me.

The question is in subsidies on water for farming; without them, much of the ag on California would become unsustainable, or, hopefully, would turn to modern practices that allow to grow vegetables in places like Middle East with very moderate water supply.

This doesn't have to mean an across-the-board increase in food prices, though. Prices that consumers pay for goods should reflect the cost of the resources consumed in their production. If almonds in particular become more expensive at the grocery store (it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond), and this causes people to buy fewer almonds relative to other foods, and water is conserved as a result, then this seems like the right outcome. (If we did see an across-the-board increase in food prices, that could be fixed with government subsidies, if that were necessary to prevent the change from being a regressive tax.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com