California moves to cut off water to thousands of farmers
sacbee.com
sacbee.com
The article says "tap in" to the streams. Does that mean the farmers themselves drop a hose with a pump (or some other means of limited diversion) into the stream? Do they own the land the steam is on or does the government own the streams and provide permits for access? Is it generally the farmers themselves doing this or is there some middleman (public/private?) water distributor?
If there's any suggested reading on this I'd be curious. I would have expected the state to simply charge more and more for this access rather than cut it off all at once.
The total dollar volumes of some of the crops may surprise the first-time reader. For example, the famous California wine industry is not anywhere near the most valuable total value crop, and yes they use water.
The Pacific Institute is a commonly cited reference center for water issues in the US West
the US Global Change research project has some detail about the situation
Doing a quick search:
1. Dairy (milk and cream) $6.56B
2. Grapes $5.79B
3. Almonds $5.60
4. Cannabis (legal sales) $3.1
5. Strawberries $3.1
6. Cattle and Calves $2.63
7. Lettuce $2.51
8. Walnuts $1.59
9. Tomatoes $1.05
10. Pistachios $1.01
However agriculture in general makes up less than 2% of GDP:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Sectors
While using 39% of the water:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_wa...
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, it may not be worth the effort to support agriculture. Or at the very least, if you're going to triage usage, it may have to be the first thing to be cut back on during dry spells.
California produces 95% of tomatoes grown in the USA.[0] 18.5% of milk.[1]
These volumes can't be readily replaced by other states' production. California is an agriculture powerhouse. Certainly luxury export crops like the oft-vilified almond might not be sorely missed, but staples like tomatoes, lettuces, dairy, and beef would be in shortage at sky-high prices without California's production.
[0]https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... [1]https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48685/milkcowsand...
The US overproduces milk from what I've read. Reducing some output may actually be a good thing:
* https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2019/07/29/milk-too-much-of-a-...
More generally, perhaps measuring dollar-of-GDP-per-gallon-of-water or some such may be of some use to prioritize which crops should be discouraged may be worth examining.
I'll reiterate that dollars are not a good way to measure the value to society of agricultural products, especially necessary vegetables like tomatoes. How do you measure the second- and third-order effects of the population having access to an affordable nutritious diet?
The normal way to "measure" and "discourage" such inefficient things is by prices. However, the price of California water is inordinately cheap so long as you are dumping it on the ground in the desert.
Live in the US. About 5 years ago I got into the habit of leaving tomato off my sandwiches because they just started tasting bad across the board, no matter where I got them from.
I wouldn't mind trying some other places tomatoes.
Out of season, don't even bother. But Americans need to get used to eating seasonally anyway.
I believe a lot of grocery store heirloom tomatoes these days are hydroponic from Canada, might be worth looking into and sampling.
That really depends on the economic impact of the other sources of water use, most of which, 50% of total use, is for "environmental" purposes that do not directly impact GDP in the same way as agriculture. [0]
I'm not saying Environmental use is less important: I'm saying that a utilitarian GDP focused policy on water use is probably not the best metric to use: There's simply too little other water-reliant commerce in CA to use GDP as a yardstick here. That just leaves balancing 40% use by agriculture against 50% use for environmental purposes.
[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
I let everything in my yard die because we were only allowed to water 1 day a week. Thousands of dollars worth of landscaping died-- and for what as you say?
So a farmer could make a little more money that year?
Rain patterns and seasonal temperature have changed over the last 20 years, landscaping that made sense when I was a kid no longer works in many areas without daily watering.
Please find attached a story about the City of Orange suing its residents for landscaping with drought resistant plants.
"Orange officials sue couple who removed their lawn By Amina Khan March 2, 2010 12 AM PT
Some Southern California cities fine residents for watering their lawns too much during droughts.
But in Orange, officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for removing their lawn in an attempt to save water.
The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their frontyard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water -- and hundreds of dollars -- each year."
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-mar-02-la-me-ba...
As someone living in California I certainly appreciate the huge variety of great produce that's available because of CA agriculture, but even the almond farmers know this isn't going to last forever. They're all in a race to drill deeper wells than their neighbor and make a quick buck before the aquifer runs out. At that point we'll have no reserve at all and the party will grind to a halt.
The better idea would be to grow different crops here, not to stop agriculture altogether. That requires some kind of rationing.
The average US household consumes 11,000 KW-hours of energy per year. Let's say an average person uses 80-100 gallons of water a day, so a low end of about 30,000 gallons of water per year. One article [1] suggests desalination takes about 15kJ/kg water at the most efficient plants. That translates to 473 kilowatt hours of energy required per household each year:
30000 gallons * 3.79 kg/gallon * 15 kilojoules
So that's about a 4% increase in household energy usage just for domestic water for one person (domestic is less than 10% of our water use in CA). I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but I suspect that it isn't practical to use desalination as a primary source of water. I also expect that much salt would become an environmental problem to dispose of. Once we drain our aquifer, the water shortage will be really severe and we'll need to cut back on agriculture regardless of desalination, but it could help a lot in urban areas.
[1]: http://www.desware.net/Energy-Requirements-Desalination-Proc....
Percentage of household use is a strange measure to use here - Ivanpah plant produces nearly 400 MW and it’s relatively small plant. We have a lot of desert to go around.
Producing more solar for the regular grid is not very practical because we can’t use all that up during daylight. If you have dedicated use for desalination that is concurrent with peak production of power, you can bring online a lot more production without risking destabilizing your grid. In effect, desalination can be used to balance the excess supply of solar - the more sunlight we get the more water we can produce. Water is relatively easy to store, modulating the demand to match the available excess supply.
Almonds are on the high side compared to other plants but their water usage per calorie is much less than animal ag.
Also consider that almonds flourish in the mediterranean type of climate that California has, whereas dairy and beef (and their feed crops) can be raised almost anywhere.
The world produces far more calories of food than is needed, so water impact per calorie is a dumb metric since calories aren't the critical figure of merit.
What matters is water impact per $ of dependent economic activity.
You're missing the point that we are talking about regulating water usage external to the industry (in which people should and do care about water usage as it relates to sustainability of California as a whole), and water usage internal to the industry (in which an individual farmer cares about yields, efficiency, and economic value of crops).
Internal to farming the entire reason we have so many almonds in CA is exactly because it's a high-efficiency and high-value crop.
https://slate.com/business/2015/04/almonds-in-california-the...
"In a real sense, the almond industry is the future of California agriculture—high value, high efficiency, but still high consuming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it makes most sense to use a scarce resource for the highest value application possible."
Well, no, because I was positing a better metric for competing agricultural uses, not the one-true-metric for all uses and, also, because even if it was the one true metric for all uses, unless water was the limiting factor for urban economic production, while it kight imply all cuts needed fron current consumption should cone from ag, it wouldn't imply additional cuts to ag to increase urban alotment. And, while the reverse allocation of cuts would cut all urban use in a foreseeable shortfall (because its such a small share to start with) any shortfall that would require ebough cuts to equal all agricultural use would be a a cataclysmic disaster no matte how the cuts were apportioned (and most would cone from agriculture because, even after you stopped giving any to people—whom you need for agriculture, anyway—you’d barely have dented the necessary total cuts.
Because it would have to first seize by eminent domain lots of permanently held rights in order to put them into an auction, and the costs of the initial purchases would be prohibitive.
In the US, a State can't just up and decide to conduct, say, an annual auction for use of property that someone already permanently owns, and that's how a lot of water rights are.
These are public resources, and in many other places you can own the land below a lake or river, but you do not have a right to divert or impound said water, and the Department of Natural Resources will serve you notice and take corrective action (eg: blowing up your dam, seizing your pumps and destroying your pipe/trench) if you do not comply.
Maybe it shouldn't be, but it has been historically, and reversing that under the US Constitution requires compensation for the value of the property thereby deprived, see the 5th Amendment. It is not something that can be reversed by state fiat without compensation to owners.
Short of a federal Constitutional amendment or California seceding from the Union, your desired model of water property rights can't just be willed into existence in the state.
So government did something stupid, not paying for it made the problem get delayed, and grow massively, and now it’s critical. The government, especially now that the problem is so much bigger, definitely doesn’t want to pay.
“The initial purchases would be cost prohibitive”.
on my grandparents ranch they dig a hole in the river from which they pump the water.
> Do they own the land the steam is on or does the government own the streams and provide permits for access? Do they own the land the steam is on or does the government own the streams and provide permits for access?
they own the land on either side of the river and have water rights to the river (or at very least they have taking water from the stream for over 100 years ... it's an old family farm). though apparently fish supersede their water rights.
> Is it generally the farmers themselves doing this or is there some middleman (public/private?) water distributor?
no middle man
Maybe a silly question, but why did they dig a hole in the river? Wasn't there water there already, at that time?
Or maybe the river is dried up in the summer, and they dig a hole (dig? drilled?) to access water in the ground below?
> though apparently fish supersede their water rights
I'm curious about what your grandparents think about the water restrictions (if you happen to know, and if I may ask)
In general just because you own land a river runs through doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want to the river.
Maybe the university of california has some information, i don’t know anything specific other than seeing first hand irrigation ditches in the sacramento valley
Indeed there have been more than a few disputes, incidents, and court cases throughout history leading up to the current rules and agreements surrounding the various ways it's often handled nowadays. One must have consideration for "downstream neighbors". Easy way to spark an incident is doing something "untoward" or inconsiderate with the water upstream of a neighbor.
As the article itself says: "Most farmers who rely on the State Water Project or the federal Central Valley Project are already struggling with dramatically reduced allocations. The proposed order released Friday covers those thousands of farmers with direct legal rights to pull water out of the rivers."
This isn't exactly an unusual stance, but I'm increasingly convinced it's a terribly ineffective way to handle a crisis.
If you're closely monitoring the situation you might be able to trim it down to a very short term sort of hindsight, but, yeah, it's hard to see how that's a winning strategy in the long run. Even just barely too late is still too late.
Telling people they have to pay an extra $1 in taxes for renewing stockpiled medical equipment gets you booted out of office by voters.
Asking people to pay $1 during a pandemic is obvious to everyone and agreed.
Was it any less of a good idea in the first time period than the second?
And I'm supposed to spend my own money on FOIA requests to see if my tax dollars are being spent wisely? Fat chance it is.
Edit:
> If you're not willing to put in time (a basic search engine query)
I went straight to the official ASPR website as you suggested.
> auditing government records probably isn't a good fit for you
That was never the question.
Moreover a number of the people making such decisions didn't follow their own rules. There are so many instances of this in particular that it's probably not necessary to cite them.
What were those papers? In fact, they had no data about effectiveness of many (if not most) of the restrictions when they passed them early last year. They had absolutely no data about economic cost either.
> I’ve heard stories about internal conversations over economic concerns and pressures and secondary impacts.
You make it seem like I should praise them for having conversations about economic concerns, as if it was some kind of going above and beyond, instead of barest of the bare minimums one would expect from government officials enacting highly disruptive policy by fiat.
Anyone wishing to debate my view of politicians, first do your research on how many decades ago they had advance warning all these things we hear, read, and see in the news these days were exceedingly likely statistically speaking, but were avoidable with appropriate actions being undertaken to avoid the worst. Pandemics, climate causing weather to freak out, extinctions of entire species, civil unrest, financial craziness. All predicted by many scientists who devote their lives to studying those topics decades ago.
It seems like we are approaching two problems: economic collapse for middle class and poor people, and problems with food production. I wish that news media would cover these topics.
The problem is that the only things on the table for discussion by our governments and news media is the promotion of things that maximize corporate profits or otherwise cater to special interests.
But it could be, even taking account that they urinate most of what they need, they still need a lot more water per calories than other foods.
I don't eat beef because of the environmental impact, but I recently discovered that the impact of beef has been exaggerated.
It still has a big impact and I will keep not eating red meat, but I am more prudent with the numbers around beef I read in the news.
However it doesn't help if California is using millions of gallons of freshwater to irrigate some crops and it is evaporating and ending up on the other side of the Rockies, or in the Pacific.
Ruminant animal meat is here to stay, for the plain old reason that with a lot of land and natural rainfall water, the only way you can get food from that land is from ruminant animals such as cows and sheep. To not use it would make the price of plant food skyrocket as food demand gets redirected onto plant crops from beef and plant food supply cannot redirect nearly as fast in that hypothetical situation.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
And even if the rich almond growers could somehow afford dramatically higher water prices, it still doesn't make sense to allow them to consume so much of California's water - water which is a critical, scarce public good being converted to very narrow private wealth.
The correct solution is to ban the growing of all almond, pistachio and walnut crops in California. The minimum they should do is ban the export of those crops, although that is likely still not enough.
I've heard other suggestions to mandate more conservative water practices aka drip irrigation and ban water hungry crops and sure that kinda works -- but this is exactly what higher prices is supposed to fix already. There is no magical solution to the now permanent decreased water per year, it's not a 'temporary drought' anymore. Eventually the price of water will be set back to normal either through dollar cost or with lottery random shortages as the agency is currently forced to do.
The link title implies all of these things were associated, but the article summary says only ischemic heart disease, and no association for the others, if I read correctly.
Water prices in urban areas are $1000 per acre-foot of water, because distribution is expensive. Desalination of brackish water can cost $1200-1500 per acre foot, and moderate improvements in costs could make desalination economically viable for urban water.
But it would require a truly massive improvement to be competitive for agricultural water use, and because most use of water is agricultural, we can only reap small benefits from desalination.
There is not enough flat, cultivatable land closer to the coasts to move much agriculture out of the central valley towards the coast, even if desal'd water was free.
For the upstream cities that use the Colorado River this could be quite beneficial.
I pretty sure most Californians would be happy if they got a few strategically placed desalination plants.
The best table salt we can currently get, it stuff mined from old oceans. No contaminants, no plastic, etc. For example, Windsor has huge mines in rural Windsor, ON, Canada.. and doesn't just supply table salt, but road salt, water softener salt, etc, the supply has been used for 100 years, sold internationally, and shows no sign of exhaustion... from one old-sea underground deposit.
(There's plenty of table salt, no shortages...)
It’s also that even the most water-conscious agriculture practice uses obnoxious amounts of water just because of the sheer size of land involved. Supplying that kind of water via desalination plants pretty much by definition means having done all prior optimisations to the max before tapping into that stream.
If you’re interested in agriculture from a layman’s perspective, I recommend Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video, where Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear figures out how to farm right, long way round.
That said, seeing water prices from desalination, I'm very frustrated California wants me to take a shorter showers when I would very happily pay an extra 50 cents for that long shower.
But even 10% of thousands of plants is a lot.
Just as one example, Tulare is at 300 ft, ~100 mi from the ocean.
Should one very political and well connected family control 1/3 of the massive states entire irrigation water? How could they abuse that to enrich themselves and california's elite? Who are the largest donors to newsom in the recall?
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...
Edit to add more:
So in 1995, state officials agreed to a deal or, as it has been suggested, a staggering giveaway. The farmers had to relinquish 14 billion gallons of “paper water”—junior water rights that exist only de jure, since there simply isn’t enough rainfall most years to fulfill them. In exchange, they got ownership of the Kern Water Bank, a naturally occurring underground reservoir that lies beneath 32 square miles of Kern County, which sits toward the southern end of the Central Valley. The bank held up to 488 billion gallons of water, and because it sat beneath a floodplain it could be easily recharged in wet years with rainfall and surplus water piped in from the Delta. The Resnicks, who’d given up the most paper water rights, came to hold a majority vote on the bank’s board and the majority of its water.
Adam Keats, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety, describes the transfer of the water bank to the Resnicks and other farmers as “an unconstitutional rip-off.”
And here’s a key fact to consider against this backdrop: The Resnicks aren’t just pumping to irrigate their fruit and nut trees—they’re also in the business of farming water itself. Their land came with decades-old contracts with the state and federal government that allow them to purchase water piped south by state canals. The Kern Water Bank gave them the ability to store this water and sell it back to the state at a premium in times of drought. According to an investigation by the Contra Costa Times, between 2000 and 2007 the Resnicks bought water for potentially as little as $28 per acre-foot (the amount needed to cover one acre in one foot of water) and then sold it for as much as $196 per acre-foot to the state, which used it to supply other farmers whose Delta supply had been previously curtailed.
Last I heard, a reporter said he was stealing the water for them. That ought to make it easier to get it blocked, but I bet it makes it harder, instead. Better just to drive a truckfull of thrift-store rags up to where he is tapping the canal, and feed them in one at a time.
- reclaim runoff
- more efficient growing methods
The capex and research are there. I wonder how the Boise startup scene is handling it?
The hard part is convincing the cities to stop fining and harassing folks who choose that over a standard "golf course" lawn.
Most likely it will need a ballot measure, because what legislator is going to vote for cutting off the golf courses?
2 days a week is not enough water to keep a lawn alive when the highs hover around 100F in the summer. Many people converted to “drought friendly” landscaping, and there was a boom of lawn painting services. (Painting your dead lawn green so it still looked alive)
I ask because experience in Florida (of all places, did not expect but was pleasantly surprised by!). They reprocess waste water back to non-potable, but sterilized standards, then run it out a parallel pipe system for irrigation use.
Makes perfect sense, especially since you effectively get (1) geologic filtration & (2) lower discharge volume treatment effort for free.
You don't really control the upstream: someone flushing their toilet, or a laundromat dumping solvents down the drain?
But it's a solved problem to continually test the incoming water supply for the basics (pH, TDS). Plus intermittent checks for full workup (heavy metals, etc).
After that, it's a question of working it through the appropriate steps to get it to the state you want. Sort of like a continuously operating manufacturing line, except you get to blend the product at the end and only have to QA the blended result.
As someone quipped, "Dilution is the solution." Given enough volume and time, you can dilute even an arbitrarily large amount of lead to safe levels.
His verdict: 9/10 it's rat feces at the processing or packaging plant.
But from a marketing perspective, field crop contamination is an act of God. Can't be helped.
Plant contamination would actually mean someone was at fault. And would require (expensive) changes.
So reclaimed water is typically dealing with "anything anyone puts down a piped drain in their house."
(That said, I think there are also runoff processing requirements before discharge into waterways too)
https://ucanr.edu/sites/UrbanHort/Water_Use_of_Turfgrass_and...
…a week?
…a month?
I suggested this in another thread and got a mix of responses:
- You can't touch the Great Lakes.
- You can't steal another region's water.
- Pumps consume electricity.
- Grids are a security vulnerability.
to which I'd say:
- Water would be drawn from a number of sources, and having a grid would allow the draw to be distributed, lessening the impact to any single source.
- No one complains that the rest of the US is stealing CA's agriculture. If there is an exchange of funds, there should be no objection to an ecologically responsible exchange of water for local funding.
- Desalination also consumes electricity. Shipping imported food from other countries also uses energy(and has inherent national security risks above a certain level).
- Insecurity is not an inherent quality of a grid. Poor implementation of our electrical grid is not sufficient evidence against a national water grid. In fact, they enhance regional security by allowing us to cope with climate change and unforeseen weather events.
We could draw the water from regional flood control systems and the mouths of great waterways (St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Columbia, etc). We could leverage a larger system of reservoirs for gravity based energy storage systems.
I don't know, it just seems to make perfect sense to me. Right now, we treat water as a regional issue and have an antiquated system of treaties and agreements that favors entrenched parties and fails to serve the needs of society.
There are many areas where we would grow even more food if we could only supply the water, and many areas of the country where we often have too much water. Why not solve both issues?
Desalinization also uses pumps and most heavy water users(Ag) are nowhere near the ocean so I'm not seeing your point.
Why not use that solar and wind power to move water from areas with too much water to areas with too little water?
You could even start with a bifurcated grid which avoids the Rocky Mountains if that satisfies your concerns. There is quite a bit of excess water up north. You could even pipe the freshwater through pipelines sunk near the seafloor. Imagine if the coastal CA metropolises got their water from an off-shore pipeline coming from Alaskan river mouths while the inland water they're currently using stays inland to feed big Ag. If you made the pipeline flexible and used one-way valves, you might even power it with tidal motion.
What makes it a "crazy" shortage? Current wheat future prices is around $700[1]. That's definitely high at the last 5 years, but it's still lower than 2011-2012. If we zoom all the way out, we see that it was peaking at around ~$550 in the 70s-90s. Adjusted for inflation that's anywhere from $850 to $1650 in today's dollars. Was there "crazy shortages" during those time periods?
[1] https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=CBOT%3AZW2%21
edit: fix link
That video is a good example of why not to ignore the 'conspirational tone'.
[1]https://www.iceagefarmer.com/2021/07/21/global-wheat-supplie...
Variations in crop production especially regionally are quite normal, perhaps a little irritated because of climate issues, but the conspiracy and exaggeration are not at all necessary.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2021/04/28/shrinki...
People choose what to plant or to plant at all in marginal land, they choose cultivars targeting specific weather patterns that are right or wrong, or a weather pattern makes a great year or a terrible one. This is all situation normal.
A lot of market analysis is just filling space with words or inventing attribution.
Change is hard but necessary and will involve some difficult choices.