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Comment by hijinks | Hacker News Reader

once CA dries up the person above will then complain their food prices rose 4-5x because CA can't produce any food for them anymore.

How about CA trades food for water.

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Fruits and vegetables existed before the Central Valley you know. CA doesn’t have a monopoly on producing those.

I’m fine not eating salad in December if you give all the water back from the Colorado river.

Actually, it is a literal monopoly on many things. For example:

> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on).

Those other states are monocultures of federal subsidies like wheat, cotton or corn.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/california-grows-all-of...

The monopoly exists because they pay artificially low prices for water. Those crops grow just fine in many locations and even controlled environments. If ag left the Central Valley, we would find a way. Likely not even a difficult problem and certainly not a problem if the money was used to decentralize Central Valley production.

I am the “person above”, and my family and I have been farming in California the last 23 years. I absolutely would not complain about that; we have been raising our own produce rates in order to keep up with both supply and demand. We do trade our food for water: what resource do you think makes food?

The Great Lakes area is unable to produce food for about 6 months out of the year. So as long as people in the Great Lakes are eating preserved foods only during that time. I am fine with that trade.

Even if this were true, which states are putting sauerkraut on their bratwurst for sport??

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