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Comment by wudangmonk | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they have ever added one of these useless restrictions on California yet it's been mostly posturing. They blame the lawn, and you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points. I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.

Meanwhile even if no grass was ever watered and no pool was ever filled it would amount to absolutely nothing since those things are measured in billions but the water used by farms is measured in trillions.

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Agricultural use of water is actually productive though. Most of us prefer having food to starving. Having a lush, green front lawn in the desert however helps no one (and actively harms the natural plants and animals that belong in a given climate).

Additionally, while some water issues are over very large areas (eg, piping water from Colorado River to LA) lots of places have far more local water issues, where a given aquifer or reservoir provides water to a single city (but no agricultural users) and lawn watering really is a major drain on that local resource.

That said, yes, the situation in California is a mess in large part because people are growing ridiculously water-intensive crops in the desert because someone in the 1800s acquired senior water rights which our government granted in perpetuity.

If you ever drive through the part of the Imperial Valley which is just artichokes, you'll viscerally get the point I'm about to make: you shouldn't be deciding whether square miles of artichokes are a more productive use of water than someone's lawn. No one is starving without artichokes, lawns make people happy.

We solve this kind of problem with markets, or in California's case, we flagrantly ignore the solution and start fucking with people's supply.

Markets solve problems efficiently, but not equitably. In the case of water, an equitable solution is a moral prerogative, no?

Everyone has a different option about equity when it comes to distribution of natural resources. It's highly subjective.

For other natural resources, sure. But without water humans _die_. That's not subjective.

How about making the price graduated. Each household has a low price up to a certain point (a reasonable amount for indoor use of the household) and after that it's market price.

Some households have more residents than others. I don't particularly want intrusive government monitoring of who lives where just for the sake of water allocations. No thanks.

I don’t know that any such tiered pricing needs to be down to the liter.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that agricultural water from individual farms dwarfs that of individual residences, so you just need to find the cutoff at which residential allowance stops applying.

Get an estimate of the maximum people/bedroom in the area, then judge each house based on that. I think the city already knows how many bedrooms each house has.

Don't be ridiculous. No one is seriously proposing completely cutting people off from water. Flow restrictors still allow customers enough water for personal consumption and hygiene.

When were we ever talking about flow restrictors?

You were defending a market-based solution to water usage, which I asserted would be inequitable and therefore immoral.

Flow restrictors are pretty anti-market, and I think they're a great solution to penalizing those who repeatedly break the rules.

Yes ideally free markets should be used to allocate limited resources. What's your point?

People die without water to drink. Nobody dies without water to grow artichokes.

As a bonus, not using all that water to grow artichokes leaves more water for people to drink.

So, yeah. Like samatman said, "Let's try making it efficient first, and then see if we need to add equity."

California's solution is feudal title to customary water rights, which is neither efficient nor equitable.

Let's try making it efficient first, and then see if we need to add equity. Kraft Dinner is very efficient to make, we add equity with EBT cards.

Source needed on lawns making people happier than having access to water and food.

Artichokes are only nominally food. Functionally, they're recreation.

Counterpoint: source not needed, it's clearly an opinion or a conjecture, not a reference missing its citation.

> We solve this kind of problem with markets

Aren't you glaringly forgetting diminishing marginal utility of money in personal consumption?

No, I'm pointing out that the artichoke crew don't have to pay for water at anything resembling a market rate.

Californian citizens pay for water. Agriculture doesn't work that way. It should.

Productive is relative. Certainly the most water-needy crops can be grown in countries (or states) with more abundant rainfall than that of California. The water used for those crops grown in California has a better purpose down the line..

> Agricultural use of water is actually productive though

Depends on what food is being produced. Some foods are significantly more water intensive than others [0] or are inefficient to grow in droughts [1]. Perhaps cutting back on non-essential crops that require tons of water would be a method to meet halfway?

[0]: nuts primarily, you may recall the hullabaloo about almonds which is somewhat inaccurate about them specifically, but true about nuts generally

[1]: asparagus is very inefficient as well

Nobody is going to starve if California stops agriculture growing the wrong plants in arid climates. There are plenty of places to grow things that don’t require abusive amounts of irrigation (and many that require zero irrigation at all)

Someday we will face hunger, because the short term economies of scale associated with “the miracle in the desert” made farming economically unviable elsewhere.

Places like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, etc have and are continuing to permanently lose prime farmland to subdivisions because nobody can compete with growing in the desert.

Also because people insist on living in single-family-houses in subdivisions located in places that are better used as farmland, rather than in denser cities.

A recent article local to me, Mid Atlantic Coast USA, that touches on farmers quitting. From the article this one happened to be the largest privately owned farm in the State.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey/farming-farms-produ...

Wonder who bought it? We can certainly anticipate food prices rising as the core needs in life; air, water, and energy become the next hot commodity as the "nice to haves" supply chain suffers and those with liquid capital seek returns.

I worked as a teenager for a farm that had been continuously operating since the Dutch colonial era.

There are few continuously operating entities that are 300+ years old in the US. That farm managed to operate for all of that time, but went dormant about 20 years ago. They board horses and lease the land for hay to pay the property taxes, and will probably sell it when the current family owner gets older.

It’s just not possible to compete against scaled agribusiness. To borrow another example in this thread, you can’t sell artichokes from your 500 acre farm when the competition plants 20 square miles of artichokes in a desert with government provided water.

Same with grain. We’re emptying an ancient aquifer in the Great Plains to grow wheat, corn and soy and have eliminated those crops everywhere else as a result. All good until the water runs out.

>Agricultural use of water is actually productive though

Then they should have no problem paying fair market value for their water...

That food is exported for profit, not used to feed hungry people in precarious situations.

If farmers want to pay the same rate as someone watering their lawn (less a volume discount) I'm all for it. But of course they're not, they're paying a well below-market rate to grow water intensive crops in arid environments where a lot of water is wasted through evaporation. And we'll guilt individuals to stop watering their lawn and take shorter showers.

Yes, because children in the inner city are subsisting on ALMONDS.

> I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.

I understand these figures may not mean anything because private individuals consume relatively imperceptible amounts of water compared to (the agriculture) industry.

But reflect for a moment that Kim Kardashian blew through over one quarter million gallons of water in June. [0] (There are other offending celebrities listed in that article. Kardashian is the most egregious of them.)

I’m all for restricting and regulating agricultural waste of water. But surely some attention should be given to flagrant offenders among individual citizens.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...

No. There’s an extremely simple way to solve this problem that would work; Everyone pays the same price for water. If the government is not going to do that then blame the government.

Are you suggesting the same dollars per gallon? Because I callus also see a reasonable argument to charge for water in percentage or person that per gallon. As the article mentions, some people are perfectly happy to pay more money. Which’d be fine if there was a guaranteed supply with enough for everyone. But that’s not how the water supply in CA is today. Poor people should not die of dehydration just because rich people want lawns and pools.

It should be simple enough to have a baseline allocation, along with an increased price after that's used up.

It's also worth noting that water probably doesn't need to be very expensive before usage starts getting curbed quite heavily by the main consumers. If there's no price, might as well use as much as you're allocated - there is no direct consequence for doing so.

But, as has been pointed out many times in this thread already, it’s not because of pools and lawns.

The prices should not go up a lot, because if they did, farming would become unprofitable.

E.g., tomato farming produces around $4000 worth of produce per acre and year[0], and requires 2.5 feet applied water. ($4000/acre)/(2.5 feet) = 0.5 cents/gallon. If the water got that expensive they'd need to stop growing tomatoes, since just the water would already cost more than the produce would be worth.

By contrast, residential water is 0.7 cents per gallon[1], so the prices involved are really tiny compared to what human users are already paying.

[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

[1] https://www.calwater.com/docs/rates/rates_tariffs/ela/202201...

Noooo… tomatoes would just get more expensive to the point where demand balances out. You need to think beyond the first effect. All of this stuff ripples through the entire market.

You can still grow tomatoes outside California though, surely production would shift to a place with cheaper water? And if the prices are too high people would stop buying tomatoes.

I agree that the prices would not be exactly the same, my point is just that these prices are still extremely low. You don't need to fear people dying from dehydration (like the comment above suggested).

You mean farming of water-intensive crops would become unprofitable. Yeah that is fine.

The flip side of this is that it never was profitable to begin with and only was done because citizens gave enormous handouts to these companies (paying for all their water). You can keep doing that, but make it more explicit: Make them pay for all the water, but give them a subsidy of $X and change it if they waste water.

> Poor people should not die of dehydration

Places that do charge for water (places like Perth, Western Australia) charge a few dollars per thousand litres - enough for several months of drinking water. Nobody is going to die from dehydration.

Probably pay the same price such that water doesn’t deteriorate past a point though right? It does need to be affordable for families. If you don’t also put some usage level maintenance then it’ll get depleted to the point that it remains too expensive for all but the wealthiest users (personal or corporate or government.

If everyone, farmers, industry and people all paid the same per gallon as Kim kardashian water use would be cut in half

Flagrant offenders?

You’re begging the question. They are only offenders at all because the law against residential use has been passed. The claim is that it’s a useless law, and your response is to say that people should be punished under the law.

For context vs the quarter million figure for a month for a celebrity:

yesterday it rained about 20 million gallons of water on my family’s small Iowa farm. Like a middle class income size of farm.

Or, to put it a different way she used as much water as 4 acres of farmland in California (averaged over all crops, only 3 acres if its growing almonds).

The largest agricultural crop in the US by acre is lawn. It's not just the lawns, it's the sod fields, it's the grass seed fields, it's all the support those things need.

Lawns are incredibly wasteful, much much moreso than pools or other uses. Yes, urban water use is small compared to agricultural use, but lawns in the desert really are inexcusable.

That last sentence blew my mind.

We have a brown lawn because our water district was given a budget based upon population, and they decided to enforce it by restricting outdoor use.

You have a brown lawn because you haven’t embraced xeriscaping.

"... you have people peacocking about their dry lawns in an effort to gain social brownie points". Nicely done!

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