Hacker News Reader

Comment by Siddarth1977 | Hacker News Reader

Siddarth1977

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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

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..

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.

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com