California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)[1].
There's no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy while giving farmer's a free pass to suck the state dry of usable water which is mainly used for exported profits and not sustaining local industries.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/ag...
edit
For clarification, mentioning the GDP is meant to show that cutting back on agricultural usage will not affect our economy catastrophically even if the industry sinks a bit. Will food prices go up? Perhaps.
Further, if the point is food production and not food profit for the nation then the focus should be on producing the most water efficient foods (per calorie) not the most profitable foods produced under an assumption of free or near free water. So yeah, that might mean less prime rib and more black eyed peas for Americans (figuratively speaking).
The cost of the product should reflect the cost of the resources required to produce. This is not the current case.
There are lots of farm hands who'd be negatively affected. They are at the margins of society as it is.
Water is a limited and precious resource. Prices should reflect that. Anything less is a subsidy padding the profits of industrial agriculture.
You should always look at inefficiencies in the 80% before you squeeze the 20%. And if the industry contracts a bit, it's not the end of the world or even a significant impact on the economy.
You simply can't solve the problem by reducing rural water usage, either.
The most feasible solution would be to build desalinization plants. California is a coastal state, and the majority of its population lives in cities located along said coast; pushing those urban centers to oceanic water will immediately free up that 20% of inland water usage, even more of which could be freed up by farms using oceanic water as well.
There are entire counties who get nothing when they turn on their faucets. Nothing. No more.
Not to mention the ground is sinking.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-famiglietti-droug...
India is getting there [1]
It's more accurate to say, municipal water authorities can no longer meet demand.
And thus, yes, it would make California's tech and other industries less productive, and less competitive with their counterparts elsewhere.
Not that I disagree with you; from firsthand experience, I know full well that there's plenty of room for improvement when it comes to water use on cattle ranches. However, that firsthand experience also suggests that alfalfa isn't the only food cows eat (the family ranch I helped out on through my childhood involved a lot more grazing than even grass hay, let alone alfalfa hay, and pretty much all the pastures I remember were watered by rainfall alone), and that cows aren't the only use for alfalfa (a lot of grazing livestock - horses, goats, etc. - also eat it in large quantities, though I'm sure cattle are the dominant consumers). If alfalfa's using a disproportionate amount of water, then I'd target alfalfa specifically instead of incorrectly antagonizing the ranches buying it.
[0]: http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use...
This is doable. "California is the only western state that doesn’t really monitor or regulate how much groundwater farmers and residents are using."
http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2014/06/02/drought-drives-drilli...
Well, I'm convinced. I'll burn my house down this winter to keep warm, too.
Your black-and-white thinking--and the assumption that mine is as black-and-white as yours--kind of sucks, as does your cite-and-run dismissal. Can you please try to do better?
If no one waters their lawn will you be happy? Is solving the problem your goal or is this just a thrilling political device? That would really suck.
Not to say that water efficiency improvements in the agricultural space wouldn't be welcome, but rather that landscaping is arguably less important than even the relatively-unimportant foods, let alone the important ones.
If the tradeoff is unsustainable and as-we-currently-know-it-irreparable biosphere destruction and more expensive almonds and beef (through higher alfalfa prices), I'm really okay with that trade-off and I think if you dig into the situation you probably will be too. People aren't gonna starve because dead cow costs more--because beef is already nearing "too expensive" for Americans in situations of food insecurity as is.
So far, we've been responding to the crisis in a way that doesn't really allow people to make good trade-offs. For instance, I went to my parents house in a nice warm place, after a week in the fog, and my kids kind of wanted to play in the inflatable pool. My parents were bummed but asked us not to, because they're under mandates to cut back.
To feel better, we all went out for california raised beef burgers and gorged on walnuts. Several dozen inflatable pools of sheer deliciousness, all externalized.
Just kidding (sort of) about that last part, but this is the frustrating thing. Nobody is saying we can't use any water, we just can't use unlimited amounts of it. If someone goes vegan, avoids other water-heavy food sources, and doesn't wash his or her car, well, is it so bad that they might water a small patch of lawn or fill up the inflatable pool now and then?
This is what is so nice about markets, when people have to pay what something actually costs, they are unlikely to use as much of it.
Except, of course, you can now and then end up in a situation where someone rich buys "all" the water. One way to handle this is tiered rates, where it's cheap for the first bit, and perhaps very expensive after that.
http://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=168
Looks like the first 4 units (1 unit = 748 gallons per month) is $5.45, so once you get the tap flowing (sunk cost), I'd say that drinking water is "free". Even showers are pretty cheap.
The problem is that it doesn't go up by much. After those first 4, it's only $7.31. Still pretty cheap for something that we are supposedly in desperate need of.
I suppose we could just crank up that second tier - in theory, that would keep showers, drinking water, and so forth affordable, while properly pricing the use of water to produce burgers, walnuts, swimming pools, lush gardens, golf courses, and clean cars. Now that I think of it, rich people already consume more of that sort of thing anyway...
Also, it is my understanding that there're already two different rates for water in California depending on whether you get in a tap in your house or you use it to water a field by the acre-foot. I'm guessing that legally it is something different than tiered rates, but it barely makes sense.
This post is known to the State of California to cause cancer.If it was regulated and you used your buddy connections to appropriate all the water usage rights then you still have your buddy connections once you have taken my water.
It's not about disallowing the other guy from doing stupid things and not being rich anymore, it's about not allowing someone to waste precious resources essential for human life, so as to not make it harder for others in need to have access (at accessible and fair prices) to said resources in the future.
I'm at the point now mentally where the entire monetary system should be reset to allow a natural relationship between real value and fiat currency to exist. If that means that a bunch of wealthy people are left with nothing, then so be it.
Via: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do... (If you haven't read this, you really, really, really should. It's an accessible, level-headed analysis of California's water situation.)
The primary value to California of exporting food (which is what most California agriculture is) is the economic activity produced.
(Given a global food market with largely equivalent substitute goods, one could argue that the same is true of agriculture that is used for local consumption, as well.)
We could cut our water usage in 1/2 and still produce enough nutritious food for the entire nation plus some.
This coming from someone who has favorite pass time of smoking brisket, ribs, and grilling steaks. It's just the facts.
I'd be fine with agricultural triaging, personally.
However, pinning the blame on almonds and livestock is misplaced (and, in the latter case, characterizing them as "luxury" crops seems misplaced unless you consider basic nutrients like protein a "luxury"). Instead, it would be wiser to focus on things like rice, which consumes absurd amounts of water relative to the amount of resulting food. I don't have any statistics on hand, but I reckon California's rice production alone dwarfs livestock (and possibly even almonds) in terms of water usage, and (I'd argue) would count much more easily as wasted water than livestock or nuts (since, compared livestock and nuts, rice isn't particularly nutritious).
Guess what crop California spends almost 50% of its water on? Alfalfa, which is used to feed cattle.
Also, just cutting out beef can make a huge dent. It's water usage is truly wtf level, whereas chicken is closer to almond level.
Alfalfa isn't used for just cattle, you know.
Also, do you have a source for that number? I'm having trouble finding one from a U.S. or California government source (USGS, USDA, CDFA, etc.), but at least one article [0] pins that number at closer to 15% (and almonds at 10%).
> Also, just cutting out beef can make a huge dent. It's water usage is truly wtf level
A citation is also needed here. According to the USGS's 2010 data (which admittedly is likely outdated), livestock as a whole (beef, chicken, pork, you name it) takes up around 0.5% of California's water [1]. Whether or not this includes alfalfa is unclear, but if the previous figure is correct, I'd suggest that cattle water usage is nowhere near the "WTF" level.
That figure makes a lot of sense to me, having grown up raising angus cattle (I'm not sure whether or not dairy cattle have higher water requirements due to milk production being their emphasis). Alfalfa was certainly a big part of their feed, but grass hay and grazing were just as important to their diet. Larger commercial operations might have different methods, but I'd reckon that most ranches aren't high-scale commercial operations.
[0]: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
[1]: http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use...
I got my numbers a bit mixed up. According to: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft...
Meat and dairy uses 47% of California's water. I'm not sure how I transplanted that into Alfalfa alone.
> I'd suggest that cattle water usage is nowhere near the "WTF" level.
Here I'm merely speaking on how much water it takes to produce a pound of the product. From what I can tell chicken is around 500 gallons of water per pound, but beef is more like 1,500+ - I was mostly looking at waterfootprint.org, but other sources seem to back up these estimates.
Chicken is at least close to almonds, which people are freaking out about since its several times other options, but beef is 3x chicken. Hence, WTF level.
Lets do some math. I have some friends who live in San Francisco, which (going off memory) has an average water consumption of 50 gallons of water/day/person.
But some eat steak for dinner every day of the week, probably around 12 ounces. At 1,500 gallons of water per pound, thats 1,125 gallons of water for their meal. If they switched that to chicken, assuming the same number of ounces (not sure if we can do this though - if people need to eat more ounces of chicken than beef) and 500 gallons per pound, thats 375 gallons of water. A savings of 750 gallons of water per day.
They just reduced their personal water footprint by many times what the water utility sees. They could 100% cut out flushing toilets, taking showers, doing the dishes, doing laundry, and not come even close to what eating chicken instead of beef does.
I've seen some maps comparing SoCal water usage vs NorCal. Going off memory, 50 gallons vs 100-150 gallons day/person. The reality is, the gap between 50 and 150 is covered by choosing to eat chicken over beef 4 times a month.
Dietary water footprint is much more significant than what our water utilities show us.
10%
In contrast, a mere 12% increase in agriculture efficiency gets you the same win.
Targeting residents to curb the water crisis in CA is like targeting SNAP benefits as a solution to the deficit.
It just plain won't work.
GDP is mentioned to show that increased cost of production for agriculture will not have a catastrophic effect on our economy....if you ask most Californians (or others), they often think agriculture is a huge proportion of our economy and requiring water efficiency would have a huge negative impact on our bottom line. Lost jobs, revenue, etc.
Implementing water restrictions is incredibly easy - you declare "no outdoor water usage except on these two days of the week after 5pm" and issue fines to people who don't comply. But it is incompatible with Californian entitlement, because gasp the grass might get a little brown.
I live in Los Angeles proper, and the majority of my neighbors already had low-water lawns to begin with. Those that don't (including me because the owners of the house I rent don't want to change it) are basically just letting the lawn die because we understand the situation and really aren't that vain.
Also, we do have watering restrictions and the city does give out fines if you don't follow them. I'm not sure what you're talking about, frankly.
I'm in one of the few buildings without grass. The sidewalk across the street is damp every morning. Walking around, I often see pools of runoff that have persisted throughout the day. Most all the lawns are still being trimmed every single week. Maybe this neighborhood is just terrible.
Are there actually any restrictions besides http://www.lawaterrestrictions.net/current-water-restriction... ? To someone used to the Northeast's late-summer restrictions those are laughable - you can still water your lawn every day of the week!
Good on you for letting your lawn wither, but I assure you that the out of touch culture is alive and well.
People seek out natural things such as plants. They put them in their homes, they hang paintings of them on their walls, and they decorate their cubicles with them. I don't think it is surprising that people want green lawns. It is depressing to live in a brown world.
The answer seems to be to design _better_ lawns: plant grasses, shrubs, and trees which grow naturally in the area, do not require huge amounts of water, and are drought-resistant. I don't know about LA, but, in my area, this transition has been underway for years.
Why? Why should we not focus on what actually matters?
Note that california's per-person water consumption (including lawn watering) has declined over the past 20 years.
So people are doing a good job.
Note also that parts of LA and other places you are complaining about, have the lowest per-capita water use in california (though nearby have some of the largest) Here are some figures:
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-californi...
But personally wasting water is still insanity. It demonstrates an attitude of being someone else's problem, which ties right in to the general California philosophy of outsourcing personal judgment/responsibility.
I've seen much better conservation efforts during New England droughts, which only ever last a few months and are then followed by an inundation of precipitation.
Feeding people can be done in many areas. Why should one area sacrifice a limited resource when another area can do the same but with more of that resource? If they aren't compensated for the sacrifice of that resource, there is no reason for that resource to be sacrificed. Charity to big business will lead to being left destitute.
If you care about feeding the poor, give them money to buy their food. Don't wreck the environment and distort the market with supply-side meddling.
So, yes, it takes more water the produce a bushel of almonds then it does to produce a bushel of <whatever>. However, that bushel of almonds earns more profit per gallon.
What does this mean? It means if you start charging farmers for water usage (rather than access) then almonds are a more attractive crop then others crops from a profit perspective.
Counter to what most believe, restricting farmer's water access or charging more for water might actually increase the shift to certain water intensive luxury crops like almonds.
Yep. Let's make the poor people dependent on the rich people for basic sustenance instead of allowing food to actually be affordable. Let's also marginalize the people who are just barely not poor enough to qualify for such a thing, because "well, sorry that you're barely keeping your family above the poverty line, but you know, gotta blame the farmers for being inconvenient to the cityfolk, and you're not quite as poor as this family over here so why should we care about your problems?".
Any system that depends on the arbitrarily-defined concept of "poverty" v. "not-poverty" is a non-answer to many lower and lower-middle class households.
Well, actually we can, in the same way we can "grow cars in Iowa" (to borrow an example from economist Steven Landsburg). But do we want to?
See: China's consumption of the California almond crop.
If CA cities start running out of water supply, businesses will be affected. The ones that carry our GDP.
If you're implying that cutting back CA Ag production would be a national harm, then the nation needs to pull it together and help CA support the industry.
But in the end, this is just simple math. You can't solve CA's water crisis by only targeting residential usage. It's simply not a big enough slice of the pie.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't try to fix agricultural water consumption. Just that the calls to cut off agricultural water because "oh no they use 80% of the water" seem to reflect misplaced priorities.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...
When you say "exported" and "local" are you referring to California, or the United States?
States need to be responsible for different resources, but as a whole, the United States must be self sufficient. No reasonable geopolitical strategy would require importing vital resources like food and wter.
"Must be"? No. Perhaps it would be nice, but even that is questionable.
> No reasonable geopolitical strategy would require importing vital resources like food and wter.
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." More to the point, a reasonable geopolitical strategy would do so if self-sufficiency was either unattainable, or merely had an opportunity costs that exceeded the strategic value. Anyhow, the US is a massive net food exporter; and if California cuts backs due to drought, that will make production elsewhere in the world -- including elsewhere in the US -- that would otherwise be economically marginal more viable. Even if self-sufficiency in food was essential, these cutbacks wouldn't threaten it.
Anyway, these cutbacks are because there literally isn't water in the systems in which they hold rights to deliver to senior rights holders, not because farmers (which don't account for all the affected senior rights holders) are being politically targeted. Even if food self-sufficiency was a geopolitical strategic necessity, and even if curtailment would impact it, you can't deliver water that doesn't exist.
Wait, why are we measuring this per calorie? That's a terrible way to measure what should be produced.
The US is still the fattest country in the world[1]. We don't need more calories, we need more nutrients. There are several measures of nutrient density[2]. Fats/sugars/proteins/alcohol (the things that contain calories) are macronutrients, so they are a component of nutrient density, but Americans are getting plenty of these.
Optimizing incentives for calories would drive prices in a direction such that Americans will get even fatter. Let's not make this mistake.
[1] http://www.worldobesity.org/site_media/library/resource_imag...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient_density
EDIT: The popular discussion on this subject often centers around almonds, the comparison being that beef has a much higher calorie efficiency per water. If you look at nutrient density, almonds fare much better.
EDIT 2: Australia has a standard for calculating nutrient density, which has been codified in the Nutrient Profiling Scoring Calculator (NPSC)[3].
[3] http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/industry/labelling/pages/nut...
EDIT - I am mainly talking about Dams and water storage.
"California receives a total of 80 million acre-feet of water per year. Of those, 23 million are stuck in wild rivers ...
All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses. In case you’re wondering about this latter group, by my calculations all water faucets use 0.5 million, all toilets use 0.9 million, all showers use 0.5 million, leaks lose 0.3 million, and the remaining 0.6 million covers everything else – washing machines, dishwashers, et cetera."
Via: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do... which is a really good read.
Have you looked around to see what professional water management people have been saying about that very thing? I bet you a dollar that they've talked about that very thing several times. If you read that Slate Star Codex post (if you haven't, you should), you'll see that already we capture and use most of the water that we receive.
But, for the heck of it, what water sources do you want to see captured, why, how much water do you expect to get out of that source, and what will be its impact on the rest of the ecosystem?
[1] source, personal experience
> Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)
Even disregarding the fact that California's agricultural workforce is a smidge below half of California's total population [0] (which indicates that your "4% of employment" figure is incredibly misleading; I'm guessing you're comparing to national rather than state figures?), the article you cited actually agrees with my observation that a green lawn is far less important than, you know, food on tables, and concludes that the "80%" figure isn't going to be true for much longer as urban sprawl continues throughout California.
(EDIT: it's also not clear that agriculture really does account for 80% of California's water use; while the data is probably outdated, California's agricultural water use was actually around 60% as of 2010 per the USGS [3].)
> There's no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy
It's pretty hard to fuel that economy without food. This isn't Star Trek; we don't have food replicators, and you're severely understating the sheer quantities of food that California's agricultural industry produces. Per the California Department of Food and Agriculture [1], California produces around half of all American fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Along with this, California (as of 2013; the CDFA hasn't published newer data yet AFAIK) is the sole producer (99% or more) in the nation of 14 crops (including almonds, olives, raisin grapes, and walnuts) and is the leading national producer of several dozen more [2, page 2]. Sure, Hollywood and Silicon Valley make a lot more money, but you're grossly underestimating how vital Californian agriculture is to the national and state economy, and money isn't everything here.
So yeah, we can be more aggressive about cutting off agricultural water if you're willing to go without a lot of types of food (either due to being entirely nonexistent from domestic production or - more realistically - much more expensive).
> Further, if the point is food production and not food profit for the nation then the focus should be on producing the most water efficient foods (per calorie) not the most profitable foods produced under an assumption of free or near free water.
I agree with this, and hopefully farmers will continue to make crop selections based on water consumption.
However, profitability is a pretty big economic motivator. Rice, despite being among the heaviest users of water, still netted California nearly $790 million with 25% of American rice having been grown in California [2, page 11], though these figures are apparently on the decline, probably because of the drought.
Also, it's not quite accurate to say that the water is free. Even if the water itself is entirely free (which isn't always the case), a lot of farmers and ranchers (and other inhabitants of rural areas) are facing the prospect of having to redrill wells, which - if you're not aware - isn't cheap. The well at my old house was drilled with this possibility in mind: deep enough that, even with a drop in water, it can still pump.
> The cost of the product should reflect the cost of the resources required to produce. This is not the current case.
I take it you're not poor? Having grown up in a low-income household, I have a very hard time agreeing with this sort of attitude knowing that putting food on the table was hard enough as it was.
This isn't to say that I disagree with you entirely here. I think there's room for something along the lines of a tax on crops that require large amounts of water or a tax break on crops that are less water-dependent, which would achieve what I'm guessing to be your intention without having such a broad negative impact on those in lower income brackets.
-----
[0]: http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?PAGEID=158
[1]: http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
[2]: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publ...
[3]: http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use...
This is not an economically-optimal approach.
The problem is that all this "short-term regulation" has caused increasing and cumulative lopsidedness in all sorts of relatively harmless areas of the market. That if we were to now "resort to the free market approach", we'd have a huge swath of population up in arms while the market self-corrects.
I.e. Farmers lose profits, forced to reduce water costs or close down. Then you'd have have all the consumers complaining about the rising costs of X,Y,Z. Then, you get the farm-workers unions (farms closing, jobs lost, etc) complaining. Then the politicians who want to cry-foul and make a campaign out of yet-more-free-stuff.
It's a snow-ball effect, and I exaggerate a little for effect above. Point being, there is no such thing as a "short-term regulation" fix without long-term dependency and momentum.
I dunno about the wisdom some times of people expressing "markets solve problems best."
I.e. Almonds, as one of the other responders mentioned to your comment. This is not something people "can't live without". If they wanted it prior to this market-adjustment, they'll probably not want it now that it's price has doubled. Or tripled if local shops start importing it from foreign suppliers.
And before anyone tells Californians "just consume less", the problem is that California exports a lot of what is produced. I can't think of a better way to tell outsiders to consume less than to raise prices on exports.
"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
edit: apparently i misunderstood the parent and it cost me 5 downvotes
It is then obvious that since no-one in SoCal is incentivized to save water by the market on a timely basis, this scheme to have people pay more as they use is not a good way to keep thirst down. If you listen to radio/TV you see a lot of ads trying to get people to use less voluntarily. This is because it is very difficult for people to even know how much water they are using in the first place.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-24/california... described prices at $1,100 per acre-foot, but that's just $0.003/gal
This is the easily the best proposal I have heard but it stands no chance of passing. Paying farmers in the desert to not grow crops is ... unamerican.
[1] """I realize that paying people subsidies to misuse water to grow unprofitable crops, and then offering them countersubsidies to not take your first set of subsidies, is to say the least a very creative way to spend government money – but the point is it is better than what we’re doing now."""
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...
[2] """His [Major Major’s father] specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce"""
Why should the desert be special in this regard? Paying farmers not to grow crops has a long history in America.
"A widespread lack of snowfall this season has left Washington state in a deepening drought, and the prospects are grim: threats to crops and fish and increasing worries about wildfires."
If you want to see how it is done, China recently built a north south water diversion canal. Though it hasn't paid off yet.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/rain-soaked-se...
Although that has more to do with Seattle's aggressive environmental policy than supply of water.
It's actually kind of funny: when they first raised the price of water in Seattle, people cut back their water usage so much that revenue fell... so they had to raise prices more!
a) they're also experiencing less water b) it'd be crazy expensive... like billions and billions and billions. c) they don't necessarily have all this extra water to feed the nation with
EDIT: To clarify, consensus on the role of prices on economic allocation goes back to Adam Smith, but using prices specifically to regulate allocation of natural resources only really goes back to Henry George, which I guess is a bit younger than California's misuse of water. Regardless, we're still about a century behind economists in knowing exactly what to do about this problem.
Water, air, these belong to the commons and should be allocated and used primarily for the sustenance and benefit of the commons. Not private industry.
[1] http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2015/03/05/bottling-wate...
The list of horrors that the free market visits upon the non-rich is truly shocking. After all, by your logic all non-regulated goods must be affordable only by the rich.
The level of economic ignorance in this thread is stupefying.
!!! WATCH THIS VIDEO LINKED AT THE END !!!. It was for MIT club of NorCal and is like 2 hours, so its far more technical/deep and BALANCED than anything you'll find on CNN/nytimes/etc.
I'll try to summarize some of her points here that I think would be useful and relevant, but really you should watch her speak in that link.
1) We talk about 80% going to agriculture, as if there some single reservoir that we all drink out of. Everyone gets their water from different sources, and they're all suitable for different uses. SF, for example, has an exclusive license to Hetch Hetchy water source. Agriculture is never going to see that and doesn't affect us.
2) There are rural parts of CA that have no water coming out of the tap. She said that was her #1 priority right now.
3) We need lots of water to feed the nation. CA is one of 5 Mediterranean climates in the world, and that makes it suitable to grow all kinds of stuff that doesn't grow anywhere else. 2% GDP is irrelevant because you die without food.
4) As a culture we don't have a connection to agriculture, and it is causing drifts on both sides. The farmers are pointing fingers at urban areas, and vice versa.
5) We have less a rain problem and more a storage problem. 1900-2000 was unusually wet for CA and so we didn't build enough storage for the dry years. Groundwater is actually the most environmentally friendly storage and we get something like 40% normally of our water from it, and 60% now (I think?)
6) We don't have a market planned economy. You can't tell farmers what to grow. There is no 5 year plan -- this isn't china.
7) The state is doing a lot of things to combat these issues all simultaneously. The issue is extremely complex and multi-pronged. You'd likely be impressed with all the projects under way.
8) Ground water rights can be changed at a local county level very quickly. They have a huge amount of power and need to be first to do so. It's a bit of a mexican stand off between them, but this is where culture and local advocacy can make a difference. Santa Cruz has done really well with this, and I think San Diego as well.
9) CA does have the power to come down on people/counties/companies that they view as using excessive resources... it's built into the CA constitution. All they need to do is threaten and people change. They've done that several times.
10) We say oh, my shower is like 1% of the problem. Getting water at a restaurant is 0.5% of the problem. It's still water, waste is waste, and we need everything we can get.
11) We don't reuse/capture water efficiently or at all. Especially floods. To combat this we need lot of small efficient that add up. Capturing storm water is one example. Recycling waste water is another, and there's an additional 10% that can be gained through forrest management in the sierras better directing the melting snow run off (!).
12) CA is seeing the mistakes of San Paulo and Australia and trying not to repeat them. They're collaborating world-wide on these issues... lots of Israeli tech is making its way to desalination. Smart people are being resourceful and not isolationist about this.
WATCH THIS: [1] http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/mitcnc/videos/31839-califo...
You can live perfectly fine without Mediterranean food and if California stopped growing water-intensive crops it would cause a shortage of those crops, not a shortage of food.
We are talking about luxury items. If you want crops that only grow in Mediterranean areas, great, so do I. We enjoy our luxuries, but we should not subsidize the unsustainable production of luxuries, which is what we are doing by giving them water at far bellow market rates.
Watersage.com
Earthquakes of any consequence are extremely rare on the east coast (basically non-existent).
Most of California's population centers are humid in fact. Los Angeles averages around 71% daily humidity; San Diego is 70%; San Francisco is 74% (among the highest in the US). By comparison Washington DC averages 64%; Pittsburgh averages 68%; NYC averages 63%. And for contrast, Denver averages 52% daily humidity, and Vegas is 30%.
At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year.
Without water, locavores will have to become televores. Calif produces food for the whole nation. So while as a percentage of economic output farming is relatively small, as a percentage of food production it's high and thus critical to maintain viability.
The Japanese expend enormous resources on keeping their rice farmers viable in the face of cheaper alternatives, but, in some ways they have a point. Without your farmers you starve.
Yes, farmers should try to use water more efficiently and the gov should encourage that adoption via stick and carrot, but vilifying farmers is not the way to go.
And, this should have been started years ago. Not just now. Surprise, your water is cut, sorry for not preparing you for this via policy!
Even if water demands in farming are relatively inelastic, cutting statewide water use by 25% is literally impossible without cuts to farming use, and at the end of the day the rainfall doesn't care how much water you think you need to farm.
The agrilobby is incredibly powerful, and lobbies are famously uncompromising even to the point of working against their own best interests.
Hell, it might still wind up ruining several political careers.
Farmers don't need state policy to be able to slowly adapt. Farmers (and other senior rights holders) can choose to invest to prepare themselves, or they can choose to take the risk that someday the water that they have a right to, subject to more senior rights being filled first, simply doesn't exist any more after those more senior rights are filled, and they stop getting it suddenly.
> At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year.
Urban direct water usage (ie., showers, watering lawns, flushing the toilet, etc) only accounts for 4% of the State water budget. FOUR PERCENT. [0] Cutting your shower from 15 mins to 5 is utterly meaningless compared to agricultural use.
[0] PDF warning: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft...
Cutting residential usage is comparatively easy because we don't actually use that much water at home. See the study I linked above if you don't believe me.
You could cut it to zero. We would run out of water in the same amount of time.
Yes, we need water efficient farms (or, perhaps, farms in places that aren't so hostile to agriculture). But it's very hard to make a farm water efficient.
Kind of a sweeping statement. Here's an inexpensive product that reduces water usage by 90%, aimed to farmers and especially good for citrus: http://treetpee.com/ttp-u/
For the record, I've lived in several places with water shortages since I was a teenager. I believe every one placed restrictions on certain activities (no washing car at home, water lawns only on designated days, no water for ornamental ponds, etc.) instead of simply raising the price of water.
I believe California could fix its problem with a lot less trouble by letting the price of water reflect its supply and demand.
Which would force a significant reduction in agricultural water use.
But the people making the decision would be people who know how much water their crops need, what the alternatives are, how profitable their crops will be in six months, etc. I simply don't have much faith in across the board cuts.
That is, I agree that water needs to be conserved. But I think there's a better approach; namely, letting the market work.
There are other places in the world to farm that are not currently suffering droughts.
Further, if there's a national interest in sustaining CA agriculture it's time for the rest of the nation to devise a plan to get CA agriculture the water it needs. The state can produce plenty of produce for local consumption while using much, much less water.
Driving away the urban centered industries would be disastrous for the state and for the nation on a much larger scale.
Isn't that the opposite of the truth? I've seen statistics about the water efficiency of agriculture, and it seems to be that relatively modest investments can drastically increase the efficiency. Of course, when water is cheap, there's no incentive to increase efficiency.
And if the price of California-exported food goes up, televores in the other 49 states will become locavores.
The fact that California is a huge net exporter of food suggests that the latter effect will dominate the former.
From what I understand most of California's agricultural throughput goes to exports. Japan may have their rice farmers, however in terms of area the US is 24 times bigger than Japan, with only 2.5 times the population. So that's comparing apples and oranges.
On the other hand, food you can import so your assertion is wrong. However if water goes out, then you will either move or die of thirst ;-)
Not quite. Without farmers you starve. Japan doesn't need the rice farmers to be theirs.
Eating local has always meant moving where the conditions support the food you want to eat. The idea that you can be a "locavore" without being sensitive to shifts in water availability and other things that directly affect the viability of food production in the local area is silly.
> Calif produces food for the whole nation.
California exports food for the rest of the world, not just the nation. But it also competes with lots of other places to do so, and the opportunity cost of delivering water to farmers may far exceed the benefit from continuing to do that.
> The Japanese expend enormous resources on keeping their rice farmers viable in the face of cheaper alternatives
And, still, much of the rice eaten in Japan is grown in California.
> Without your farmers you starve.
Without sufficient farmers somewhere willing to take your money in exchange for food, you starve. There's no reason they have to be in your immediate area, though, as California's agriculture -- which is largely for export -- demonstrates.
> Yes, farmers should try to use water more efficiently and the gov should encourage that adoption via stick and carrot, but vilifying farmers is not the way to go.
This isn't about vilifying farmers (and, in fact, the presentation of this action as being about farmers is inaccurate -- its about senior water rights holders, some of which are farmers, some of which are not.)
This is quite an extraordinary statement, very likely to be false. Can you source it? The first article I found says: "Japan allows imports of 770,000 metric tons of rice, about 9% of annual consumption. California farmers account for the lion's share of that amount"
From the LA times. So no more than 9%
Yes, but it's not like the rest of the nation can't pick up the slack, just that we export a lot of food from California. For example, there are lots of places in America where cattle are farmed, and cattle farming if water-intensive, so do we really need to be rasing cattle in California? I am OK with paying a bit more to get beef from other states.
California has a huge comparative advantage in the production of some crops like wine grapes and almonds, there is some economic value in preserving a comaparative advantage where one already exists. But we could probably shut down quite a bit of our agricultural production without creating any national drop in food security, it would just make California a bit more expensive of a place to live.