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Comment by kickout | Hacker News Reader

Please stay away from our water. I want no part in helping California become more unsustainable.

ETA: to westerners- You have enough water to maintain first class lifestyles. Allocate/ration it better or cap population. Stop stealing from others.

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80% of water in California is used by agriculture, we’ll stop “stealing” water when you all stop “stealing” Cattle and Dairy, Almonds, Grapes, Lettuce, Strawberries, Tomatoes, and more a that we grow with water. Unless you’d rather buy that all shipped in from South America instead….

Sure, we'll just grow it in the midwest, ie, the rest of the country. Only reason we grow mostly corn is because of subsidies. That can be easily changed. If you're suggesting CA is the only viable farmland in the country, you are mistaken.

I don't think that's the only reason, and it is not by choice either. California weather is more temperate than the rest of the US and it is more suitable for many types of crops compared to the rest of the US.

We can engineer the crops (plant breeding) or engineer the water (current system). Eastern geographies that are rain fed could replace CA production no problem

No. Firstly because California doesn't grow crops, it grows fruit and nuts, that grow on trees. Secondly because look, flavor and shelf-life all matter for these far more than crops, one cannot simply conjure up the desired properties. It's hard enough to create decent commercial fruit varietals as it is - a vast amount of effort and research has gone into creating the fruit and veg you see in the supermarket and there's already plenty of money to be had if you can, say, improve the self-life of an avocado without making it taste lousy. This work takes decades.

Appreciate your comments but your simply wrong or misunderstanding what biologists can do.

Also, those nuts and fruits and avacados you currently like weren’t bred for taste. Likely bred for transportability and shelf life. That’s why export markets exist is the produce can withstand long journeys with variable parameters and arrive “fresh”.

Thirdly, to another comment you make saying engineering acres is science fiction while building a water canal is less so. We can build retractable roofs and keep heat and light in pretty easy. Glass houses and/or greenhouses can likely be scaled up to replace whatever CA crop you seem to think is untouchable. Those crops can and do grow just fine in other places. Maybe not year round but there exists options to fix that and remove CA from equation

Lastly, i see many people chiding the subsidies of corn and soy and wheat. What do they think the water in the Central Valley is if not a subsidy? Farmers most certainly are not paying a fair market price. Artificially low. But it’s ok. We need food. No point in bashing subsidies without proper context.

You can't grow any of the mediterranean/mid-east fruit or nut trees in the midwest as they are killed by frost. That rules out most of the stuff that California is famous for exporting - almonds, pistachios, citrus. Many of the ones that do grow won't be commercially competitive - the seasons can be short. And of course, unlike corn, you're going to have to find people to pick all this fruit.

Respectfully disagree. We can engineer the 150k nuts acres to grow just fine. Or Modify the plants to be cold tolerant. We know a lot about Plant genetics and physiology. Just haven’t had the incentive.

California exports $5bn worth of almonds a year. That's plenty of incentive. What you are talking about is science fiction - it literally doesn't exist. Humanity has been growing almonds for 5000 years and they're still killed by frost. The trees take five years to reach maturity - this is research that takes decades, if not lifetimes.

> We know a lot about Plant genetics and physiology.

lol, no we don't. We can't even make grocery store food that doesn't taste like crap. Sometimes fruit trees skip a season - why? Nobody knows. Sure, we've gotten pretty good at messing around with corn, but it's simple, forgiving, not eaten fresh, and planted from seed every year. It's basically a model organism.

Not true. Nuts that can be grown in Iowa include black walnuts, Persian (so-called “English”) walnuts, heartnuts, pecans and other hickory nuts, hazels, almonds, chestnuts, and perhaps a few other minor species. [0]

[0] https://practicalfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Tom-...

I think we need a come-to-Jesus talk about almonds. The water required per nut is not sustainable.

The water consumed per calorie of almond is well within the range of other crops. And I do think it's important to measure on a per calorie basis rather than weight, because otherwise all you're doing is proxying water.

If only there was some way for the sale price of a bag of almonds to incorporate the costs of the materials required to produce the almonds.

Yep! 5th largest producer of food in the world.

Get Iowa to grow your almonds which alone would solve the water problem. Almonds are by far the top crop in California in terms of both acres harvested and production value. The most recent data shows there were about 1.25 million acres of almond trees, the production value for which is more than $5.6 billion. [0]. Almonds make up almost 13 percent of the California's total irrigated farmland using 9 percent of the state's ag water.

[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Less-rice-more-n...

But then how would I get all my vegetables out of season ? I don't want to know what season it is. I don't want to have to know what season it is. Don't make me think about cycles of nature or cycles of astrophysics. I live in a timeless, seasonless, natureless intellectual vacuum. I want avocados. Period.

Agreed. I’m in California and it is pretty obvious our water problems are due to outflows exceeding inflows. They are draining the reservoirs faster than ever. They were full three years ago and are supposed to last five to seven years of drought, by design.

Meanwhile, natural reservoirs like Tahoe do not even recognize there in a drought.

The outflows exceed the inflows suddenly because the inflows have dwindled of late.

Lake Tahoe has dropped from it's most recent peak in 2019 and inflows do appear to be lower than normal, though perhaps normal should just be thought of as having changed

It’s mostly used by agriculture. A large portion of the food you’re eating come from CA. I think there are some major crops that need to be rethought, but a broad crop failure would be pretty devastating to a lot of people in the US

Consider the difference between stealing and buying water, and that often, in the Mississippi watershed, there is too much water.

Selling water you don't need or want and getting paid for it doesn't seem like a bad thing? Although, a lot depends on the price.

selling mineral or water rights for a dime today is poor short term thinking.

How did the owens valley owners make out after selling there water?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars

ETA: although only optics, very bad look for the richest state to “buy” water from one of the poorest states in what would almost 100% be a poor long term deal for Louisiana.

> Consider the difference between stealing and buying water, and that often, in the Mississippi watershed, there is too much water.

Tapping into the Mississippi is the more sensible megaproject than the great lakes. Prevent the great floods by redirecting that water to the reservoirs out west.

It's still a mad plan. Don't get me wrong.

Would you dare to elaborate?

I frequently see this sentiment, yet have never once seen any detail made as to how it’s possible. Please explain.

once CA dries up the person above will then complain their food prices rose 4-5x because CA can't produce any food for them anymore.

How about CA trades food for water.

The Great Lakes area is unable to produce food for about 6 months out of the year. So as long as people in the Great Lakes are eating preserved foods only during that time. I am fine with that trade.

Even if this were true, which states are putting sauerkraut on their bratwurst for sport??

I am the “person above”, and my family and I have been farming in California the last 23 years. I absolutely would not complain about that; we have been raising our own produce rates in order to keep up with both supply and demand. We do trade our food for water: what resource do you think makes food?

Fruits and vegetables existed before the Central Valley you know. CA doesn’t have a monopoly on producing those.

I’m fine not eating salad in December if you give all the water back from the Colorado river.

Actually, it is a literal monopoly on many things. For example:

> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on).

Those other states are monocultures of federal subsidies like wheat, cotton or corn.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/california-grows-all-of...

The monopoly exists because they pay artificially low prices for water. Those crops grow just fine in many locations and even controlled environments. If ag left the Central Valley, we would find a way. Likely not even a difficult problem and certainly not a problem if the money was used to decentralize Central Valley production.

Why should you be guaranteed water if you live in CA? It’s an arid ecosystem that naturally has fires (chapparal) and low rainfall. It can only support so much life. Just because there are great views and great climate, the fatal flaw is lack of fresh water.

Just about every region requires some human intervention for comfortable living. Would you say the “fatal flaw” of living in CO is the lack of heat? Or the lack of AC in Texas?

I would say heat can be produced locally without having to raid other states natural resources. Ditto for AC in Texas.

Better analogy would be like shipping beach sand from FL to Wyoming because they want beaches and FL has a lot of sand.

Certain luxury foods or at least less necessary foods take a large percentage of water that could be reallocated to more critical needs. Meat also takes 10x the water needed for many crops. There are many ways to reduce water usage.

This is true. But, some places like native grasslands have no other viable economic use other than raising cattle/beef. These grasslands are fed by rainfall so the displacement cost is zero.

Different story when there are competeing interests for the land and inefficient uses (I.e growing alfalfa in a desert) are adapted and cemented into law. It’s complicated no doubt.

Sure, though I believe the vast majority of cattle are not raised on rainfall-fed grassland.

Yes, very complicated. The issue is definitely going to come to a head when the authorities have no option but to start pulling water rights.

You are correct most beef is grain fed or at least grain finished. I believe that can be changed easily enough though. It’s an economic choice they make to grain finish, not necessarily an ecological one.

This is not a west coast problem. North of sf, we get all our own rain water up until Canada. This is a central and southern Cali problem.

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