Without Enough Water to Go Around, Farmers in California Are Exhausting Aquifers

There is an argument for subsidizing farmers, but it also effectively makes them part of the government and somehow those two things are kept very politically seperate.

Residential and city use is a) a drop in the proverbial bucket (20% of California water use) and b) comes from a completely different system. For the most part it's drawn from snowmelt in the Sierras, and even when drought gets pretty bad it's been sustainable. Fingers crossed it will stay that way.

Really it's farmers who should pay for water, and hard limits on aquifer withdrawal. They'll hate it but there's not enough to go around and I don't see an alternative.

Also worth pointing out that California is an enormous place and what applies to the Central and Imperial Valleys doesn't apply to, say, the San Joaquin Delta. There's no good reason to stop growing rice in the latter, because the acre-feet of water which go into doing so are just going to flow directly into the Bay otherwise.

Maybe we could pay for more of it to be diverted into the Central Valley if there was some sort of profit in it. Water auctions, say.

Pop is 90% to 99% water and far worse for people than just water even the diet types.

Only 0.005% ends up actually in the alfalfa to be exported to wherever the exported alfalfa goes.

Similar for almonds. I don't know the exact amount, but an upper limit is 0.03% of the water exported with the almond, and 99.97% left behind in the local atmosphere or local ground. That upper limit comes from counting the entire mass of the almond as water.

There are legitimate grounds to criticize growing high water usage crops in regions that do not have enough water naturally, but exporting water is not one of them.

Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.

Re-nationalize them or at the very least make them expire in 10 to 20 years. The current developments are serious enough to justify taking these "rights" away.

Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good.

I would say that while I think a market on water prices would fix the problems with wasteful usages, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to support a market on water rights allocation, since there are other uses other than agriculture. But maybe the transfer liberalization program you suggest would just be within existing agricultural uses?

I did see an article a while back that was discussing micro-metering which allowed farmers to sell slices of their allocation - seems like there is a technical challenge here as well.

I expect the actual process of water right reforms in CA will be messy and tilt mostly towards the farmers, as there is no focused special interest group to fund lobbyists against theirs.

This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, tailor-made for the ranchers and farmers who control the water. I will try to dig up references...

But just like T. Boone Pickens buying up water rights in Texas, open markets for water don't solve the fact that the American West is out of water, and no amount of legal entitlement is going to create any.

But I think it’s sensible to have a high-level allocation where first we make sure that there is enough water for people to drink, and if you want to call that your “water right” then I’m on board.

We also allocate a bunch of water to recreational and conservation/wildlife purposes, and again I wouldn’t want to auction off all of the national parks of course.

But within the (very large) remainder that we allocate to productive usages, I see no reason to get in the way of the invisible hand. If almonds are higher yield than alfalfa then we should not divert water from almonds to alfalfa. A liquid (pardon the pun) market would make these allocations more efficient.

I have no idea whether this results in a currently-justifiable practice, but it is a simple fact that change is going to be forced on agriculture (and all of us, as its dependents), one way or another.

This seems to directly contradict your claim: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08...

Small farms. Less than 600 acres. Not much water, here.

The almond thing is basically a meme in comparison. Not that the almond farms shouldn't also be made to deal with this. Someone else in this thread mentioned Israeli almond farms that use 1/20 of the water the Californian ones do because they have smarter methods of irrigation.

https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/blaming-almonds-for-ca...

> Start with basic geography. California’s two largest rivers don’t flow to the Pacific Ocean — at least not directly.

Oof, that certainly doesn't seem to be a good faith argument on the article's part.

$$$ and power

Agriculture is a politically powerful industry and water usage hasn’t been enough of a crisis to override normal political influences for that long. I remember the drought in the 90s where they were basically telling you to let your lawn die and it was still basically presented as “we can’t ask farmers to use much less unless we buy them out”.

California is reaching the limits of population and agriculture it can support. People and farms are free to relocate