
Another toll of the drought: Land is sinking in San Joaquin Valley - 11thEarlOfMar
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-groundwater-20150819-story.html
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kator
Almonds, what about rice?

~~~
tzs
Rice and almonds appear wasteful when measured by mass produced per unit of
water used, but that's not a particularly useful measure for food. More useful
is calories per unit of water and protein per unit of water.

Rice measured by calories per unit of water is more efficient than lettuce,
celery, tomatoes, spinach, cauliflower, lemons, raspberries, peaches, and
broccoli. It's less efficient than carrots and strawberries.

National Geographic has a nice interactive display of the efficiency of
various crops as measured by three factors (water/weight, water/calories, and
water/protein) here: [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150508-which-
cali...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150508-which-california-
exports-crops-are-worth-the-water/)

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SovietDissident
Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is _completely missing the issue_. The
fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped
building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population.
LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water
infrastructure is _necessary_ for humans to live in most regions of California
and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago.

This is a must-read to understand what's been going on:
[http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-
tale](http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-tale)

 _" Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased
traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the
population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the
California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early
1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental move-ment would
one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the
14,000-acre Sites Reser- voir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los
Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced
County; and the Temper-ance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of
Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been
canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Ah Pah reservoir would have been the
state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it
might have stored fifteen million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San
Francisco for thirty years. California’s water-storage capacity would be
nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just
as difficult to imagine that envi-ronmentalists would try to divert contracted
irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they
did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage
resources at 1970s capacities...

In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought,
the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond on
the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go to
construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the bond’s
provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access to
groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more than a
century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to
pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft
the bill failed to grasp that farmers’ drilling and pumping is driven not by
greed or insensitivity to the environment but by a doubling in the state’s
population and a water infrastructure that has not kept pace. A better way to
regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to increase vastly the
reservoir surface water for agriculture so farmers would have no need to turn
on their pumps...

Continuing drought means vast tracts of westside farmlands will turn to dust.
California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export industry—led by dairy,
almond, and grape production—is in grave peril. Its collapse would crush the
economic livelihood of the Central Valley, especially its Hispanic com-munity.
When the five-million-acre west side goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people
will lose their jobs in a part of the state where the average unem-ployment
rate still hovers above 10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of
dollars to further deepen their wells and save what water they can. Everything
they and their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with
extinction.

Water use in California is being curtailed by those least affected, if
affected at all, by the consequences of their advocacy. But environmental-
ists, who for forty years worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the
state’s water infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon.
No reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduc-tion of
their salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to claim possession
of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what was above it...

Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert, the exasperated left is
damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like
hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But corporate
giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their
multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not
one large enough to service their growing populations. I have never met a Bay
Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower
with water imported from a far distant water project. And as the Hetch Hetchy
Reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made stor-age lakes will necessarily follow.
Another year of drought will deplete even Southern California’s municipal
reserves sooner rather than later. When Silicon Valley tech lords and
academics can’t take a shower and find them-selves paving over their lawns and
gardens or letting their pools stand empty, perhaps they, too, will see the
value of reservoir water for people rather than for fish. The new dust bowl
may see a different generation of Joads abandon-ing California for a
wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest."_

~~~
bsder
> Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is completely missing the issue. The
> fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped
> building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population.
> LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water
> infrastructure is necessary for humans to live in most regions of California
> and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago.

If you reduced direct human usage of water to _ZERO_ in California, you still
wouldn't have enough water for agribusinesses.

This is playing out. As water prices rise, the coastal cities will turn to
desalinization, and the agribusinesses will be left to knife each other.

------
1971genocide
I am in the UK and I brought almond hair oil - at the back it said "almonds
grown in California".

How does this make any sense ?

Its not even almond but almond OIL. Knowing what I know now I look at the
bottle and wonder how many thirsty Californian babies did I just kill buying
this.

Its the same feeling you get when wearing Nike shoes that you know were made
in some sweatshop.

~~~
JPKab
Just for perspective:

There isn't any kind of issue where people aren't getting water to drink, but
yes, growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state.

I've seen this sentiment a few times, and it's never made sense. Crop growth
isn't determined solely by water availability. There's plenty of water in
Florida, but the climate there is likely less almond-friendly than the
California climate. In a toy world with just those two states, you'd have to
pick your preference: climate control in Florida, or water importing in
California. Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is
giving up on the whole idea of growing almonds in particular and of
comparative advantage generally. Maybe California's exceptional climate
justifies doing a certain amount of work you wouldn't have to do to grow crops
somewhere else.

I've also seen two more sensible points about almonds and California water:

\- It's difficult to make property rights in water work, because two people
drawing from two wells into the same aquifer both just lower the level of the
aquifer everywhere. Off the top of my head, you'd need tradable allotments,
like ocean fisheries, rather than property lines which I believe are what we
currently use.

\- If you own a field and want to grow alfalfa (hugely water intensive), you
can just let the field lie fallow if the price of water goes too high. You'll
lose that year's alfalfa crop. But, if you own an almond orchard, you can't
abandon it just because it'll cost more money to water it than you can make
back selling the almonds -- if you don't water your orchard, all of the trees
will die, and you won't own an almond orchard anymore. Since the California
precipitation cycle is much longer than one year, it might be good policy to
discourage crops that require maintenance on a yearly basis.

~~~
hussong
Seems like a false dichotomy, you could also just have zero almonds and grow
something else.

~~~
thaumasiotes
>> Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is giving up on
the whole idea of growing almonds in particular

