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Comment by EE84M3i | Hacker News Reader

Could someone chime in with how these farmers physically get this water?

The article says "tap in" to the streams. Does that mean the farmers themselves drop a hose with a pump (or some other means of limited diversion) into the stream? Do they own the land the steam is on or does the government own the streams and provide permits for access? Is it generally the farmers themselves doing this or is there some middleman (public/private?) water distributor?

If there's any suggested reading on this I'd be curious. I would have expected the state to simply charge more and more for this access rather than cut it off all at once.

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California Agricultural Products summary report from 2016 weighs in at about 1000 pages. Farmers, crop-types (and their water districts), use patterns vary dramatically. Depending on conditions and the politics of the time, various sections of the Central Valley and particular landowners get increased scrutiny. Needless to say, any walking human has an opinion on water use, and the opinions are sometimes vocal. Every CA commercial operation has passed some kind of challenge to remain open today, for decades.

The total dollar volumes of some of the crops may surprise the first-time reader. For example, the famous California wine industry is not anywhere near the most valuable total value crop, and yes they use water.

The Pacific Institute is a commonly cited reference center for water issues in the US West

https://pacinst.org

the US Global Change research project has some detail about the situation

https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/10/

> The total dollar volumes of some of the crops may surprise the first-time reader.

Doing a quick search:

   1. Dairy (milk and cream) $6.56B

   2. Grapes $5.79B

   3. Almonds $5.60

   4. Cannabis (legal sales) $3.1

   5. Strawberries $3.1

   6. Cattle and Calves $2.63

   7. Lettuce $2.51

   8. Walnuts $1.59

   9. Tomatoes $1.05

   10. Pistachios $1.01

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_California

However agriculture in general makes up less than 2% of GDP:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Sectors

While using 39% of the water:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_wa...

From a strictly utilitarian perspective, it may not be worth the effort to support agriculture. Or at the very least, if you're going to triage usage, it may have to be the first thing to be cut back on during dry spells.

Your argument doesn't factor in that people need to eat, and they well, are making food.

And they can get their food grown in a region that does not have a water issue.

After referring to them as flyover states, they might be reluctant to send California any food.

I don't know much about farming, but I doubt farms that refuse to sell their crops stay farms for very long.

Not to mention that official state travel to many of these states is banned...

With the attendant increase in carbon emissions to transport it though.

Sure. And where food production is the policy concern, part of what you want would be incentives to produce high nutrition with water efficiency.

Not a big problem. Can be imported from non-afflicted areas. Perhaps local shortages of certain products, but I doubt anyone will starve. It's pretty bad for the farmer in question, though, who will undoubtedly lose a lot of money.

The big issue here in CA is that farmers are growing water-intensive crops that offer a better return (like almonds), but they're growing them in the desert known as the central valley. That leads to water shortages.

As someone living in California I certainly appreciate the huge variety of great produce that's available because of CA agriculture, but even the almond farmers know this isn't going to last forever. They're all in a race to drill deeper wells than their neighbor and make a quick buck before the aquifer runs out. At that point we'll have no reserve at all and the party will grind to a halt.

The better idea would be to grow different crops here, not to stop agriculture altogether. That requires some kind of rationing.

We really need to re-think our water sources in CA. We have nearly unlimited solar potential that can be used to power desalination and pumping of the water were we need it. Best part - we don’t need to worry about power storage (just transmission, which is not trivial, but can be done), it’s not an issue if we cannot desalinate at night.

I was curious about the energy requirements, so I did some envelope math.

The average US household consumes 11,000 KW-hours of energy per year. Let's say an average person uses 80-100 gallons of water a day, so a low end of about 30,000 gallons of water per year. One article [1] suggests desalination takes about 15kJ/kg water at the most efficient plants. That translates to 473 kilowatt hours of energy required per household each year:

30000 gallons * 3.79 kg/gallon * 15 kilojoules

So that's about a 4% increase in household energy usage just for domestic water for one person (domestic is less than 10% of our water use in CA). I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but I suspect that it isn't practical to use desalination as a primary source of water. I also expect that much salt would become an environmental problem to dispose of. Once we drain our aquifer, the water shortage will be really severe and we'll need to cut back on agriculture regardless of desalination, but it could help a lot in urban areas.

[1]: http://www.desware.net/Energy-Requirements-Desalination-Proc....

Seems to work just fine for Israeli farming: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

Percentage of household use is a strange measure to use here - Ivanpah plant produces nearly 400 MW and it’s relatively small plant. We have a lot of desert to go around.

Producing more solar for the regular grid is not very practical because we can’t use all that up during daylight. If you have dedicated use for desalination that is concurrent with peak production of power, you can bring online a lot more production without risking destabilizing your grid. In effect, desalination can be used to balance the excess supply of solar - the more sunlight we get the more water we can produce. Water is relatively easy to store, modulating the demand to match the available excess supply.

If you care about limiting agricultural water usage, the first target to go after is dairy and animal ag, not almonds.

Almonds are on the high side compared to other plants but their water usage per calorie is much less than animal ag.

Also consider that almonds flourish in the mediterranean type of climate that California has, whereas dairy and beef (and their feed crops) can be raised almost anywhere.

> Almonds are on the high side compared to other plants but their water usage per calorie is much less than animal ag.

The world produces far more calories of food than is needed, so water impact per calorie is a dumb metric since calories aren't the critical figure of merit.

What matters is water impact per $ of dependent economic activity.

In a strictly capitalist sense yes, but then by that argument we should just completely cut off all California farmers since they seem to make less money per water used when compared to California cities (I'm just stating your argument, which I would argue is "dumb" and overly simplistic way of looking at the world).

You're missing the point that we are talking about regulating water usage external to the industry (in which people should and do care about water usage as it relates to sustainability of California as a whole), and water usage internal to the industry (in which an individual farmer cares about yields, efficiency, and economic value of crops).

Internal to farming the entire reason we have so many almonds in CA is exactly because it's a high-efficiency and high-value crop.

https://slate.com/business/2015/04/almonds-in-california-the...

"In a real sense, the almond industry is the future of California agriculture—high value, high efficiency, but still high consuming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it makes most sense to use a scarce resource for the highest value application possible."

> by that argument we should just completely cut off all California farmers since they seem to make less money per water used when compared to California cities

Well, no, because I was positing a better metric for competing agricultural uses, not the one-true-metric for all uses and, also, because even if it was the one true metric for all uses, unless water was the limiting factor for urban economic production, while it kight imply all cuts needed fron current consumption should cone from ag, it wouldn't imply additional cuts to ag to increase urban alotment. And, while the reverse allocation of cuts would cut all urban use in a foreseeable shortfall (because its such a small share to start with) any shortfall that would require ebough cuts to equal all agricultural use would be a a cataclysmic disaster no matte how the cuts were apportioned (and most would cone from agriculture because, even after you stopped giving any to people—whom you need for agriculture, anyway—you’d barely have dented the necessary total cuts.

okay, so you're arguing internal to farming. But then it's obviously being planted in huge numbers in modern times because it's a high-yield crop economically. Why else would farmers be planting it? Are you arguing that farmers are currently doing something that's against their economic best interests?

From a strictly utilitarian perspective, it may not be worth the effort to support agriculture.

That really depends on the economic impact of the other sources of water use, most of which, 50% of total use, is for "environmental" purposes that do not directly impact GDP in the same way as agriculture. [0]

I'm not saying Environmental use is less important: I'm saying that a utilitarian GDP focused policy on water use is probably not the best metric to use: There's simply too little other water-reliant commerce in CA to use GDP as a yardstick here. That just leaves balancing 40% use by agriculture against 50% use for environmental purposes.

[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

More like 80% of the water, because IMO the 50% of water use that is "environmental use" -- AKA not drying out all the rivers entirely-- isn't directly used by humans.

So they make around 1 dollar per 1000 gallons? People rationing their shower time as urged by authorities must be proud that they could save a farmer somewhere a cent or two.

This is what burned during the last drought.

I let everything in my yard die because we were only allowed to water 1 day a week. Thousands of dollars worth of landscaping died-- and for what as you say?

So a farmer could make a little more money that year?

Sounds like the landscaping picked wasn't the right choice for the climate you reside in.

Rain patterns and seasonal temperature have changed over the last 20 years, landscaping that made sense when I was a kid no longer works in many areas without daily watering.

So you're correct of course, but, ironically, I lived in a historical area which had strict rules about what could and could not be landscaped. I literally had the plants that were legal for me to have.

Please find attached a story about the City of Orange suing its residents for landscaping with drought resistant plants.

"Orange officials sue couple who removed their lawn By Amina Khan March 2, 2010 12 AM PT

Some Southern California cities fine residents for watering their lawns too much during droughts.

But in Orange, officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for removing their lawn in an attempt to save water.

The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their frontyard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water -- and hundreds of dollars -- each year."

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-mar-02-la-me-ba...

Be careful with this line of "utilitarian" thinking. Food production is not easily replaced.

California produces 95% of tomatoes grown in the USA.[0] 18.5% of milk.[1]

These volumes can't be readily replaced by other states' production. California is an agriculture powerhouse. Certainly luxury export crops like the oft-vilified almond might not be sorely missed, but staples like tomatoes, lettuces, dairy, and beef would be in shortage at sky-high prices without California's production.

[0]https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... [1]https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48685/milkcowsand...

> California produces 95% of tomatoes grown in the USA.[0] 18.5% of milk.[1]

The US overproduces milk from what I've read. Reducing some output may actually be a good thing:

* https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2019/07/29/milk-too-much-of-a-...

More generally, perhaps measuring dollar-of-GDP-per-gallon-of-water or some such may be of some use to prioritize which crops should be discouraged may be worth examining.

That's an opinion piece you linked there.

I'll reiterate that dollars are not a good way to measure the value to society of agricultural products, especially necessary vegetables like tomatoes. How do you measure the second- and third-order effects of the population having access to an affordable nutritious diet?

> More generally, perhaps measuring dollar-of-GDP-per-gallon-of-water or some such may be of some use to prioritize which crops should be discouraged may be worth examining.

The normal way to "measure" and "discourage" such inefficient things is by prices. However, the price of California water is inordinately cheap so long as you are dumping it on the ground in the desert.

> California produces 95% of tomatoes grown in the USA.

Live in the US. About 5 years ago I got into the habit of leaving tomato off my sandwiches because they just started tasting bad across the board, no matter where I got them from.

I wouldn't mind trying some other places tomatoes.

Come to the northeast. In season, we have great tomatoes. You can even grow your own! There is nothing like a thick slice of a home-grown beefsteak tomato sprinkled with good quality salt.

Out of season, don't even bother. But Americans need to get used to eating seasonally anyway.

I wouldn't mind trying some other places tomatoes.

I believe a lot of grocery store heirloom tomatoes these days are hydroponic from Canada, might be worth looking into and sampling.

Denying large swaths of agriculture just so that you can grow a yard, or take a long shower, is the kind of stupidity that has landed California where it is in the first place.

Why doesn't California use a more market-based approach? It could simply decide how much water can be sustainably consumed and then auction-off rights to that amount of water.

Because water rights in California are extremely complicated, many water rights predate California being a state.

> Why doesn't California use a more market-based approach? It could simply decide how much water can be sustainably consumed and then auction-off rights to that amount of water.

Because it would have to first seize by eminent domain lots of permanently held rights in order to put them into an auction, and the costs of the initial purchases would be prohibitive.

In the US, a State can't just up and decide to conduct, say, an annual auction for use of property that someone already permanently owns, and that's how a lot of water rights are.

The water in aquifers, streams, rivers and lakes should not be considered something you can hold the right to as private property.

These are public resources, and in many other places you can own the land below a lake or river, but you do not have a right to divert or impound said water, and the Department of Natural Resources will serve you notice and take corrective action (eg: blowing up your dam, seizing your pumps and destroying your pipe/trench) if you do not comply.

But it was, and then sold, by the government to these farmers. And the real issue is, of course, not that they want it back, but that they want it back without paying for it. And people are mad because their water use for lawns is billed very differently, and rationed, because they never purchased the rights to it.

So government did something stupid, not paying for it made the problem get delayed, and grow massively, and now it’s critical. The government, especially now that the problem is so much bigger, definitely doesn’t want to pay.

“The initial purchases would be cost prohibitive”.

> The water in aquifers, streams, rivers and lakes should not be considered something you can hold the right to as private property.

Maybe it shouldn't be, but it has been historically, and reversing that under the US Constitution requires compensation for the value of the property thereby deprived, see the 5th Amendment. It is not something that can be reversed by state fiat without compensation to owners.

Short of a federal Constitutional amendment or California seceding from the Union, your desired model of water property rights can't just be willed into existence in the state.

> Could someone chime in with how these farmers physically get this water?

on my grandparents ranch they dig a hole in the river from which they pump the water.

> Do they own the land the steam is on or does the government own the streams and provide permits for access? Do they own the land the steam is on or does the government own the streams and provide permits for access?

they own the land on either side of the river and have water rights to the river (or at very least they have taking water from the stream for over 100 years ... it's an old family farm). though apparently fish supersede their water rights.

> Is it generally the farmers themselves doing this or is there some middleman (public/private?) water distributor?

no middle man

> they dig a hole in the river

Maybe a silly question, but why did they dig a hole in the river? Wasn't there water there already, at that time?

Or maybe the river is dried up in the summer, and they dig a hole (dig? drilled?) to access water in the ground below?

> though apparently fish supersede their water rights

I'm curious about what your grandparents think about the water restrictions (if you happen to know, and if I may ask)

I assumed they meant that they dug a hole in the river to create a tunnel/pipe that conveys the water out of the river and into their irrigation system.

They could also have dug a hole adjacent the river to take advantge of the filtering properties of the soil (gravel, sand, clay or whatever it is along this river), reducing algae, contaminants and eliminating fish from the water for free.

Pipes and ditches, often agreements or easements with neighbors.

In general just because you own land a river runs through doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want to the river.

Maybe the university of california has some information, i don’t know anything specific other than seeing first hand irrigation ditches in the sacramento valley

> "In general just because you own land a river runs through doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want to the river."

Indeed there have been more than a few disputes, incidents, and court cases throughout history leading up to the current rules and agreements surrounding the various ways it's often handled nowadays. One must have consideration for "downstream neighbors". Easy way to spark an incident is doing something "untoward" or inconsiderate with the water upstream of a neighbor.

I’m pretty sure you never own the river.

Man-made irrigation channels run through the farms. It can be as simple as opening a gate on the channel to let the water into the fields.

Something to be aware of is a lot of farms have have these canals, but they're often attached to a managed water system (usually called irrigation districts). This is distinct from what the article is talking about. Those are riparian water rights:

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

This article is about farms that take directly out of streams, with siphons and diversion dams. However, that is a minor component of how California farms get their water. Most of them are getting it from pumping out of aquifers or from the giant aqueducts of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project (weirdly, not the same thing).

As the article itself says: "Most farmers who rely on the State Water Project or the federal Central Valley Project are already struggling with dramatically reduced allocations. The proposed order released Friday covers those thousands of farmers with direct legal rights to pull water out of the rivers."

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