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Comment by pilom | Hacker News Reader

If agriculture uses like 80% of the fresh water, why not just make water a public good and make people pay equal amounts for irrigation water so we stop subsidizing water rich plants like pistachios and almonds and alfalfa. All it requires is a little political backbone. Though I guess billions of dollars might be easier to find.

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While I agree, we’ll have to be careful that the incentive encourages productive transition to more sustainable domestic farming rather than outsourcing our food production to another country or continent.

It would take a lot of thought and planning to manage that transition. Of course the status quo appears to be untenable.

Based on really rough estimates, the value of California's cropland is about 325 billion dollars.

So the state could ... buy all the farms? The annual CA budget seems to be in the $250 billion range.

If it's a catastrophe I don't know why the government should have to buy everyone out. The insurance companies should just stop insuring the crops and let the market sort it out.

I don't think this is a good idea specifically, but I do think state acquisition is an under-utilized tactic. For example the SF-LA railroad would be much cheaper if the state simply acquired the Union Pacific, which would hardly cost anything compared to the total project. But according to our state law, eminent domain can only be used when the acquisition is minimal and there are no alternatives, so the state could only buy such things on the open market from willing sellers.

I feel we could use more "government buys a thing, does a thing, sells the thing" - not quite eminent domain but also not entirely "let the market figure it out".

CA could have bought the entire UP for $150 billion or so, done a high-speed rail, and then sold it back to Buffet or whatever. But our system isn't setup to handle that kind of scenario.

Food isn’t a free market activity and you can’t just shut down a huge portion of the production and not bother to even cursorily think about the rest of the system.

The point I was trying to make is that food security is one of the most basic elements of national security.

You can’t just stop farming in California (or raise the price to obscene levels) and expect things to sort themselves out on their own.

Basic large scale food production does not work as a pure free market activity. It would have wildly oscillating prices and large portions of the population would periodically starve. That’s during normal times, and is purely economically driven, not even counting a climate crisis.

We should stop animal agriculture first, since it is by far the least efficient use of water in agriculture. Virtually all of the alfalfa grown in CA goes to animals.

Fuck almond milk, by the way. We don't need any "milks" per se, but oats are way better.

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