Growing carrots in an arid area is wasteful, because you could grow them at a place where water is more abundant. Then, carrots can be transported and they don't need almost any water anymore.
Doing the same with taxpayers would be problematic.
Doing the same with taxpayers would be problematic.
it's odd that you focus on "growing carrots" is wasteful when if you got rid of lawns and golf courses in the desert you'd immediately save enough water to fix the problem in this article. at least when you grow carrots you have a product. a suburban lawn produces nothing whatsoever.
suburbia is, in it's current form, far more wasteful of water and also produces far less carrots. but far more tax revenue.
That's simply not true. 75%-80% of the water use in the southwest is used for agriculture [1]. Even if "lawns and golf courses" are the remaining 20-25%, it is a minority of the water use. Furthermore, food doesn't have to be grown there. Bananas come from South America, oranges come from Florida, why does alfalfa (the food for livestock) need to be grown there? The answer is it does not but the current water is so cheap that people don't care salting the earth to line their personal pockets.
[1] - https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/impacts/society/water_deman...
if it's good enough to shift the high water use crop farming elsewhere, then why isn't it good enough to shift the golf courses and lawns, to say Iowa then too?
it's the same answer for houses, the climate is good and the land/houses/water/etc. is cheaper. you choose the characterize the farmers as "don't care salting the earth to line their personal pockets" while excepting the developers putting big cities in the middle of a desert for the same reason and for the same result.
That's very easy to answer. Because the number of humans impacted is minimized. An average farm size is ~400 acres. This is around 0.6 square miles. SLC's density is 1,800 per square mile so 400 acres is ~1k people. What do you think is easier? Displacing 1k people in a city center or 1 farmer? No one is saying the solution is perfect but between nobody being able to enjoy SLC due to inaction, 1 farmer, or 1k people, the obvious solution is for the 1k people to band together, buy the farm, and shut it down.
As per your last comment, no one here is saying that other people choosing to live in the desert are nobler than farmers. No one is "blaming" the farmers for making use of cheap water and fertile land. It all makes economic sense. The reality is that there is a finite resource and we should be working together to maximize societal benefit otherwise the tragedy of the commons will ensure none of us can. At this point in time, the most good least harm principle makes the calculus straightforward that agriculture is where the ROI is at.
you don't need to displace anybody. you need to stop blaming the farmers and/or taking their water and start ENFORCING reasonable water restrictions on the existing developments. About 50% of the water being used by municipalities is potable drinking water being sprayed on lawns and golf courses. You get rid of that before a telling a farmer to get lost because it's "easier".
Per acre suburbia consumes more, but as it stands farming is the vast majority of water consumption overall. It doesn’t matter how efficiently they use it. If farmers don’t make major cuts the lake will be gone.
Getting rid of lawns and golf courses will barely slow down the decline, let alone change the direction. You’re talking about optimizing 20% of the water users and suggesting the 70% is fine, which is insane.
Put another way, if all urban usage stopped immediately, the lake would still dry up because of the farmers irrigating away with reckless abandon.
As the article points out, this happened once already when SLC was much smaller and it was just lucky enough to be rescued by a thousand year rain event.
Farmers can pound sand, regardless of their water rights. Constitutional water rights for a shared resource are a travesty. They should pay for it like the rest of us so market dynamics can properly identify what is important and the lake can be protected.