Hacker News Reader

Comment by luma | Hacker News Reader

I still marvel at the thought process that leads a hundred million people to move to the desert and then to be surprised that there isn't enough water.

View on HN

I marvel at the bounty of delicious and nutritious food that arises from ambitious irrigation projects. California produces an insanely high share of the fruits and vegetables grown in the US and it is largely because man made water transportation projects turned a desert into fertile land.

True, but that comes at the expense of local farmers in places like, say, Ohio where it's not economical to grow strawberries because California has so much sun and can grow them better - the whole proposition rests on cheap energy and water. If California farmers paid more in costs it's likely that other regions with perfectly fine growing climates could just restart production and then we'd solve a love of problems. California growing all of these fruits and vegetables is basically "the suburbs" in a nutshell.

Even if California had infinite water, there's something kind of "sad" about losing seasonality of various fruits and vegetables - it used to be that "strawberry time" was worthy of festivals (which still remain in many areas even though strawberries are available year-round at the store). And if you find a local place that does grow in season, you find that what we get at the stores aren't necessarily as good as they could be.

Shipping produce across the country (and across the world) has been a net negative for taste.

No. You should still be able to buy fresh strawberries from your local farmer at any time they are in season. Which might be almost never, same as it used to be. And sometimes more expensive, also same as it used to be. But you haven't lost that due to cheap strawberries coming in from another place in addition to the locally produced ones. People eating fresh avocado in Chicago haven't lost anything at all.

When people make the argument OP is making they're leaving out that they don't want agriculture to leave. If it did, the state would probably go through a very long recession due to home prices diving and the economy tanking.

This story also has to do with California's centralization of economic power and influence, which is why so many water ways have been moved here.

Are you suggesting that we should move the sun to Ohio so that strawberries could be grown there? Water is an easier thing to move but maybe I'm not understanding.

It's actually the other way around- California is being turned into a desert by water transportation projects. The central valley was originally a seasonal wetlands and you could canoe from Bakersfield to Shasta. The largest freshwater lake west of the Missisipi was in the central valley and was drained down to nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake

Yes but how much of what you could buy at a supermarket produce aisle came from those wetlands? I know irrigation destroys ecosystems that it drains water from, and am just pointing out that it also results in higher food production. Both things are true.

Yes, but it's not true that they "turned a desert into fertile land". The land was fertile and is now being turned into a desert.

Agreed the approach resulted in higher food production for many decades. But diverting water means diverting it from filling up lakes or going into the ocean- both of which devastated the fishing industry. And the diversion from the ocean now threatens agriculture itself- the salinity of the water in the river delta is increasing. Diversion for agriculture also means diverting it from aquifers- it remains to be seen what will happen to agriculture if the wells end up dry. Maybe the system was working before climate change. But now we have to wonder if the ability to export almonds to China is worth not having the largest freshwater lake of the western US. There was probably a middle ground where California could have one good wet season for agriculture and one season for dry weather crops rather than growing whatever we feel like all year round.

Did they, though? If it's not sustainable can it really be considered a success? It sounds like it's on the brink of collapse with water shortages getting worse ever year.

Once we actually make it sustainable maybe then we can evaluate the success of the project, imo.

Blockbust failed to innovate, but they were certainly a success of the time.

I find it odd that we expect everything to be a sustained success. Society progresses. Our needs change.

For environmental impact? .. yea, i'd think so. We can rape the land and call it a success all day long but when it brings us to ruin i'd hardly call that success.

Short term profits are the ruin of humanity in my view. Doubly so when human lives and environmental damage is the cost. Lets not play stock market with those, please.

The people living in the semiarid region -- most of whom do not live in a true desert -- are not the ones using all of the water. The water is used to grow food and cotton, which is consumed all over the country, and in many cases, exported.

Jogged my memory to share this: https://twitter.com/NealSpackman/status/1510297102915571716

"An estimated 20% of alfalfa in the American SW, meaning about [20%?] of all water in the Colorado watershed, goes to foreign nations like KSA to feed their dairies. Related: if Lake Mead drops another 75 feet, the Hoover Dam will stop producing power. #virtualwater"

It's silly to blame the people who buy strawberries and almonds for the water problems in California. If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.

California doesn't merely produce "fun" foods. Most of the agricultural land outside California is being applied to its most economically efficient use case. Plenty of the remaining viable land is ecologically valuable in itself. There's no scenario where agricultural production plummets in CA yet remains steady in the US as a whole.

>If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.

The history of the region begs to differ. Water management in the West was deliberately pursued by the federal government to promote agriculture.

I never said anything about fun foods or whether things were economically efficient. I simply said it's absurd to blame consumers in Ohio for lack of water in California. If you want to blame politicians, go for it. If you want to blame California farmers for it, be my guest. But if everybody in the midwest stopped buying CA food, that wouldn't change anything in CA. It's not up to the OH consumer to fix CA farmer problems.

Their use might be economically efficient but it seems like it isn’t ecologically sustainable.

I still marvel that people think California is a desert.

A not-insignificant part of it IS desert - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_of_California but most people mean "LA doesn't get a lot of rain" when they say it's a desert.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com