The primary contribution of agriculture is feeding people, not GDP. What does watering one's lawn contribute to?
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.
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.
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.
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.