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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

Why is California so fascinated on agriculture which is extremely water intensive? Coffee is up there with Almonds as far as I understand the situation.

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According to http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report14.pdf it requires 140 liters of water to produce 1 cup of coffee. The most expensive source of water that I can think of, from a reverse-osmosis desalinization plant, costs $0.40/1000 liters in Singapore (Hyflux, 20 year contract), - so that cup of coffee has a ceiling of about $0.08/to produce in terms of the cost of it's water content.

The question should never be "how much water to produce this" - but, "what value are we getting from the water" - if you are able to sell a cup of coffee for $5, then it's probably a good investment of that $0.08.

That sounds like a good argument to stop allowing california agriculture to externalize the cost of water.

That is purely a political problem, not an economic one. The economics are forehead-slap obvious.

Alfalfa is a very water intensive crop and is grown all over california. You can get 7 tons per acre per year at a value of $220 per ton [1]. It requires 435,000 gallons of water per acre per year [2].

[1] https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/f2/0e/f...

[2] https://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/workgroups/lcfssustain/han...

Am I missing something? That still sounds profitable just based on the data I read in these comments:

7 ton / acre * $220 / ton - (435000 gallon / acre * $0.40 / 1000 liter)

$881.34 / acre

Your math checks out - of the top of my head, 435,000 gallons is approx 1.6 million liters - 1600 m^3 * $0.4/m^3 = ~$640/acre of water, for $1440 of product, or ~ $800 profit (for just water costs)

One variable we are missing is transport costs - that $0.40 is for generation, and transportation of water from the ocean to the central valley would probably be expensive.

Alfalfa is also a nitrogen fixer, so on top of being something farmers can sell it reduces furtilizer costs.

Obviously your equation is a big simplification, but you’re missing a lot of the input costs.

This depends on water being well-priced in California (i.e. not subsidized, reflective of opportunity costs and externalities). I don't know much about water in CA, but is this the case?

No it is not. The water districts are extremely powerful, and the biggest usage districts are held by agricultural interests. They have staggered elections to stop water board takeovers and ensure that they can shift water costs from usage based to per-meter fees. Captive homeowners in agriculture controlled water districts can end up with $200 a month water bills for a family of four.

Source: Lived in a water district for 7 years with some of the cheapest water in the state (sub $3 a unit) yet a water bill for a family of four with fake grass and small yard of around $180 a month. If we used ZERO water, the bill would have been about $120 in flat fees. We were subsidizing the massive avocado groves and other major agricultural producers in the water district. They brushed off our complaints and the fact that we pointed to neighboring cities with $40 water bills.

Was it $180 per month or $180 per quarter?

Per month. Very small yard. Fake grass in the back.

Just watched a documentary on Netflix about water in California which stated that 80 pct of the water goes subsidized to agriculture which is like 2 percent of the economy. They got into this family, the Resnicks of POM Wonderful and all the shady moves they made to control public water privately which caused this wake of issues including what you wrote about where families either had no water, tainted water or it was crazy expensive. California even bought back it's own water it invested to store in Kern county at a multiple. Insane stuff.

California has a very strange water system. It’s not really privatized, only ~5% of California’s water is provided by private parties last I checked. Californian water rights promise significantly more water than the state actually has (which will cause some problems).

The water districts and utilities do most of the price setting, as I understand it. The water districts are largely controlled by farming interests who do not want pricy water.

This info may be out of date, since I work in a very different water market (East Africa), so if someone knows better please correct me.

Definitely not and it would probably put most agriculture in California out of business. Farmers can't compete with cities on price.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21647994-why-go...

Yep. No more California beef too. Water there is too expensive and there's no free-market in agriculture there.

That's the retail price of the coffee and a whole lot of layers of people/businesses are involved between the grower and the retailer.

> it requires 140 liters of water to produce 1 cup of coffee

Not to mention the milk that people usually add, which is even more water intensive

For someone outside the industry it’s suprisingly hard to get good data on the water needed to make milk. A search has given just under 1000L for Waikato NZ and just over 1000L for Canterbury. However the Guardian suggests 255L of water for a single litre of milk.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-mu...

https://sciblogs.co.nz/waiology/2012/05/24/how-much-water-do...

those reverse-osmosis systems are really expensive.... I wish I could get one at my house that could provide pure water at $0.40/1000 liters over X years... I pay a lot more then that and it it is only to get softened well water (still has 400 ppm of stuff in it)... But the health department just came to test my water and according to them, it doesn't include petroleum products, at least.

that really doesn't sound so bad. at least curiosity piquing enough to work out more of the economics and impact of using reverse osmosis water in agriculture.

I would think it might not hold up so feasible for non-cash crops, but at first glance that seems pretty cool that you might be able to use reverse osmosis water for crops. I guess you just have to convince/get farmers to give up their cheap water ha.

> if you are able to sell a cup of coffee for $5

That's the retail price though, the grower doesn't see much of that.

Those K-Cups bottom out at .25? .08 for the water is a lot.

People and especially agricultural users don't pay anything like the true cost of water: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the.... Charge everyone the same cost per liter or gallon or 1,000 gallons and you will find out what should actually be grown.

> you will find out what should actually be grown.

the problem with that is "what should actually be grown" has different answers depending on whether you value profit or feeding people.

> the problem with that is "what should actually be grown" has different answers depending on whether you value profit or feeding people.

It can only be a choice between making a profit and feeding people at break-even (feeding people while losing money is not sustainable). Beyond that, the profit signal carries useful information about what the people being fed would rather eat, while keeping in line with what is economically and environmentally viable.

The problem with the current situation is that water is mispriced, and mispricing, regardless of whether it favours suppliers or consumers, makes it unsustainable in the long run.

In this case, we aren't feeding people. We're feeding cows.

We're also running into frequent water crises where politicians ask people to shower less while we dump 90% of the state's water on the ground.

Exactly. You want to decrease the water usage inefficiencies up the chain. The govt should advocate eating less animal products (I'm not necessarily saying all) if it really cared about conservation.

In this case though the high water items are not what feed people well - almonds and coffee?

False dichotomy. People will survive just fine with a different crop than almonds.

Exactly. One almond requires about a gallon of water. We can easily replace that with a more efficient food.

The Sierra provide ample water and silt for the central valley that makes it one of the worlds ideal farming lands. It's been very actively farmed for more than 100 years.

Sure, the water situation has gone up and down with the drought, but normally there's plenty of water. A lot of the almond orchards had to be scaled back during the drought, but when there's water they use it. It's a lot more sustainable than many other farming lands because it's not dependent on an underground aquifer that took eons to fill up or water piped in from somewhere far away except for the urban areas of course.

I wish this was true, but it's not:

https://ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/central-valley/land-subsi...

The land in parts of the central valley has subsided by meters due to long-term groundwater depletion.

Oh come on, that's a weird definition of "ample", considering the frequent droughts and that water rights have always been a huge source of dispute in the western U.S.

The question is whether there's enough water for both farming and huge cities. Cities can pay much more, so if water rights were transferrable, farmers wouldn't grow almonds. They would sell their water to cities and retire.

Is it a drought or is the baseline taken from an unusually wet period?

You can grow pretty much anything in California. Soil is great, perfect weather for a wide variety of crops, and the dryness actually helps with pests and disease if you have another source of water.

That’s a hell of an ‘if’. The other stuff is surely easier to get than water is?

>Why is California so fascinated on agriculture which is extremely water intensive? Coffee is up there with Almonds as far as I understand the situation.

Check the Netflix documentary "Water & Power", it gives a good reason to consider why.

Essentially, people trying to control the water.

The logic here is slightly backwards. The reason there's a water crisis in California is because it's a fantastic place to grow things.

People don't ever talk about this, but we still grow rice in California. To grow rice you have to flood a field in several inches of water.

Sounds like rice should be grown aquaponically or hydroponically or not at all.

The better question is why are more states not so fascinated with agriculture?

It pretty much comes down to weather.

Importing water is easier than importing sun and heat.

But who knows, that might change:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/8/1661171...

...until said water runs out, then you’re hot, sunny, and dry.

Climate is the big one, land and access to water (I know this seems weird for California but they do have it). You could grow in West TX, southern NM and AZ but the water logistics are not there. You see the same crops in FL, but they have less land to support the same kind of agriculture infrastructure as they do in California. The labor situation is a symptom of the above factors, by its very nature its mobile. If you had the farms to support it, the labor would follow.

Availability of cheap agricultural labor?

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/california-agriculture-sees-...

Large famers lobbying groups.

Here’s a fascinating long form on CA water, Ag and the largest almond and pistachio land owner in California with 180,000 acres.

The more water a plant takes, the more CO2 it scrubs from the air, right? That's not entirely bad, I would think.

No, that is not how it works. CO2 is only removed from atmosphere if it is sequestered in some solid, like wood — CO2 is not deleted by plants, it’s just transformed to different form. Additionally, plants aren’t really sequestering CO2 from human emissions, unless you bury them underground as you grow them — if you only let it grow without storing it underground, you are only replacing CO2 from deforestation.

I know this, but still, I think temporary CO2 removal from the atmosphere is not totally worthless. It buys us more time until more clean energy comes online. And if this time is paid for by rich coffee aficionados, I think that's not a bad deal after all. Oh, and I doubt there's any deforestation going on in California.

Today? Probably not much. Historically? Yes, a lot. You still need to offset for that first, even if happened 150 years ago.

The majority of the water a plant absorbs is lost to the air as transpiration. Different plants lose different percentages of water this way, so high water use doesn't necessarily mean more CO2 absorption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration

Because it is profitable in California, with arable land and sunshine, to a degree not found in other states.

Your comment got me wondering if cactus juice is a thing, and apparently, it is.

Call it cactus milk and then it’ll sell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

This comes up a lot here, but in theory a government is supposed to make hard decisions to prevent that tragedy. On its own simply saying “tragedy of the commons” is like a trauma surgeon saying, “sucking chest wound,” without stepping in to fix it.

I think it's more like the surgeon is being held back by people saying "No, don't step in because you'll make it worse! The human body can heal itself." And you, the surgeon, can do nothing but mutter "a punctured lung ain't gonna heal itself."

A good surgeon should step in and accept the consequences, while saving a life; that is ultimately what they signed up for. No one said it would be easy or make you happy to do good, right?

Still, I’m not ignoring your point, which is solid.

California has a lot of ag industry and they are interested in making as much money as possible.

California doesn't have a collective consciousness.

Lack of market forces.

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