How do we save water: Stop growing alfalfa in Imperial County
desertsun.com
desertsun.com
I'm hoping there is eventually enough outrage in these areas to change policy. Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns and trying to guilt folks into feeling horrible if they take a shower a minute too long, meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem.
But when you dig into the water issue... it's all agriculture, and even there they have so much leeway to eliminate waste. I saw an exhibit at the airport of a "pipe" they dug up less than 5 years ago that was made of wood squeezed together with bailing wire.
The "Total Water Use" chart here is pretty similar throughout much of the West:
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug...
And denser housing tends to use water more efficiently.
Edit: dug up a picture of that pipe I took. https://photos.app.goo.gl/PisNhiA81Rsw45Rx8
Around Bend, where I live, there isn't a ton of 'serious' agriculture. Lots of hobby farms and some alfalfa operations, but the climate isn't really conducive to growing a lot. We're just a bit too high up to reliably grow many things commercially.
Further down the Deschutes river, in Jefferson county, there are a lot of real farms that produce much more important crops ("Approximately 55% of the US domestic market carrot variety seed production is grown in Jefferson County").
Guess who has more water rights?
Didn't you answer your own question here?
Cool to see someone else from Bend here though!
> Based on USDA data for 2022, only 4% of all U.S. dry hay produced and 6.5% of all harvested alfalfa hay entered the export market.
So 96% of all hay and 93.5% of alfalfa is used domestically.
[0]: https://hayandforage.com/article-4300-hay-exports-in-2022-of...
A lot of "studies" on water efficiency of crops ignore yield, which is kind of the whole point of agriculture.
And regarding your export claim:
> Based on USDA data for 2022, only 4% of all U.S. dry hay produced and 6.5% of all harvested alfalfa hay entered the export market.
[0]: https://hayandforage.com/article-4300-hay-exports-in-2022-of... [1]: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1772...
> In the seven Western states of Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, hay exports play a much larger role in impacting both markets and prices. Based on USDA export and hay production data for those states, 19% of their alfalfa production was exported in 2022 and 26% of the grass production found its way into shipping containers. As such, hay prices in the Western states play a large role in setting market prices.
>...According to an analysis by the conservation non-profit Pacific Institute, alfalfa production in California uses around 5 feet an acre (6167.4 cubic metres) of water, making it one of the most water-intensive crops alongside the likes of almonds, pistachios and rice. Crops such as sugar beets use roughly 3 feet an acre (3,700 cubic metres), and dry beans as little as 1.5 feet each acre (1,850 cubic metres).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado....
>>...Based on USDA data for 2022, only 4% of all U.S. dry hay produced and 6.5% of all harvested alfalfa hay entered the export market.
It is misleading to just talk about the entire US production of alfalfa since in many places water is not nearly as limited as it is in California.
>...Government figures compiled by Putnam and fellow researchers William Matthews and Daniel Sumner show about 15 percent of alfalfa and more than 44 percent of other types of hay produced in the West have been exported in recent years.
>The share exported from Southern California farms is significantly higher than the regional average, the researchers said, because the closeness of the port makes trucking costs relatively inexpensive.
That percentage is from an article in 2017 - it sounds like the percentage today is at least that high or higher.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2017/09/28/...
I'm fine with American taxpayers subsidizing water so that American food is cheaper for Americans.
I'm less fine with American taxpayers subsidizing Saudi Arabian food.
Perhaps any water used to grow something that is exported could be priced at market value, while water pricing for products consumed domestically can remain the same.
This also works as a signal to help water-thirsty industries to locate or relocate themselves.
There's a balance to be struck between using an unsustainable amount of desert water, and using none of it.
If you have a counter-example, I'm interested.
But I do see the possibility of solving the problem by using photovoltaic energy (though maybe not optimally, because not having to move the water would allow to use the electricity for other usages).
Bear in mind that the alternative is to grow crops in countries where it is raining most of the time.
Plants fare really really well in rainy countries, they don't mind at all that the sun is less present.
The only real drawback is the shortened growing period, if the country is too far north or too far south.
If a farmer could take their water and sell it for more money to somebody who would then treat it, transport it, and resell it to the public, the farmer would do that. It might be counterintuitive to a lot of people, but if you want to stop farmers from using their water to grow crops, raise the price of potable water.
The farmer understands markets very well. They buy and use water based on market values. What you're hearing is a lot of complaining from people who do not understand markets and think that they can dictate market prices just by word alone. Markets don't usually work that way.
Because farmers can't take their water and sell it for more money to someone else, and they have no incentive to economize on water usage. Water prices are not set by supply and demand, they are set by government regulation. The "market" that farmers buy water in is not a free market.
Governments can absolutely buy out water contracts from farmers on the open market.
In the cases where water is tied to land title, it can be separated, as is common with other natural resources like natural gas and minerals
ELI5 Where I can buy me some water rights. Imagine I represent a consortium of commercial salmon fishers and we want (need) to buy the water to keep salmon healthy. We'll pay fair market value. Who do we pay? How much?
How am I supposed to secure this additional unconstrained water flow the entire width and breath of the Columbia Basin water shed by buying water retail in Spokane? If I buy a cubic hectare of water in Spokane, what's to guarantee it'll reach the ocean, vs slurped up by farms along the way?
Apologies for being thick, but this doesn't much seem like buying eggs.
Please explain it so I can understand.
It's a legal arbitrage. The valuable thing is the water because it can be used to make relatively expensive plants. The only permitted delivery mechanism is plants. So he follows the incentives.
> If a farmer could take their water and sell it for more money to somebody who would then treat it, transport it, and resell it to the public, the farmer would do that.
They can't do that. It's not a market issue, it's a water rights issue. The farmer is "entitled" to a quantity of water each year by virtue of owning the land they are on. If they do not spray that quantity of water onto that land, then they lose the right to get any water in future years.
> What you're hearing is a lot of complaining from people who do not understand markets
Thus, it is not markets, but water rights, that are not understood by the people that I hear complaining.
Secondly, where there exist rights there is usually a market for those rights. For instance, people buy and sell publishing rights or the right to first refusal. So it is with water rights. If I need more water than I have the right to use, I talk to my neighbor to see if I can buy her rights. If she won't sell them, maybe she'll let them. I can tell you exactly what the market price is for a share of water (a water right) where I live in the American West. I can tell you what it was last year and what it was 20 years ago. And there is a very active market to buy or lease water. My local municipal water company can require somebody wanting a new meter to sign over an irrigation water share to the company. The company pumps water from a well, processes the water and delivers it to the meter for a fee.
It sounds like where you are, the irrigation water and the municipal supply is also co-mingled in pipes? Where I am the systems are entirely separate, there's the potable municipal supply, and separately a series of surface canals operated by irrigation districts that bring water directly from the Deschutes river to fields.
For this reason (canals delivering irrigation water from source to destination via gravity), irrigation rights are fully tied to the land as they require adjacency to these canals. Properties may not sell their rights, even to other users of the same canal. Either they use it themselves, or they lose it and the rights revert back to the management of the irrigation district who may sell those acre-feet to a different user of the same canal.
It's not a great system, but unfortunately as the irrigation districts here are privately owned rather than public, the people required to change this are those currently benefiting from the status quo.
And you know there's a huge power imbalance between employer and employee that's at work here as well. Magnify that times a bunch when that employer is a rich, overseas company that can offer what would be starvation wages at home, but princely wages for the folks in Asia, South America, or Africa.
Labor prices are not subsidized by china.
Also: our usernames are oddly similar!
Why do you think LA is allowed to just pump an entire major river all the way from near Mammoth Lakes to the coast? Out of the goodness of the folks on the Owen's River's hearts? Fuck no. Los Angeles lied, cheated, and stole to get those water rights, and if you think Los Angeles isn't going to have to pay through the nose if we reset water rights, you're sorely mistaken.
You look at the history of water in the American West, and you'll see that everyone has done everything wrong since the 1920's, when water rights were designed to prevent migration west. Then you'll understand why this mess is much, much bigger than we can imagine.
Alfalfa for instance uses ~0.4acre-feet per ton. Alfalfa prices haven't ever been higher than $300/ton. That means that if water cost more than $750/acre-foot, they'd be out of business on water cost alone. At that price, the average Angeleno would have to pay a shockingly high... $5/mo for all their water. Oh wait, no, that's less than 0.1% of GDP per capita in Los Angeles County.
The fact is urban dwellers don't use much water, and are enormously economically productive, much moreso than rural areas, and so in any kind of open market for water, the urbanites will win handily every time. The city will get it's water, no matter what, and the fairly economically unproductive areas will have to adapt. It's only through political interventions like silly "water rights" designed for the benefit of farmers that a city has to resort to more expensive sources.
https://ourcountyla.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/... https://archive.is/7BNdF https://hayandforage.com/article-4472-Another-drop-for-hay-p...
It’s exactly what happened in the Owen’s valley last century.
So yes, water is major a bottleneck for residential development out west. But to solve this you need new means of transport (pipes / channels), storage (reservoirs), and treatment (plans)... infrastructure that doesn't currently exist, is hard to get approved, and would likely need to be paid for by increasing the cost of living for existing residents.
Agree that we should be smarter about how water is allocated / used out West, but 'taking from ag' isn't going to make it any cheaper for you to buy a home.
They state that the Upper Deschutes CFS goes from ~1200->~65, and state that is from irrigation. But they don't actually prove that. Much of that CFS decline could be observed out of irrigation season, because that section of the Deschutes dumps a ton of water into lava tubes/back into the ground. You'd have to measure the CFS at the end of that section prior to irrigation getting turned on, then after, and then the difference is what is going to irrigation. And CO Land Watch doesn't do that. Hell, they don't even state where their data is coming from.
You can get a better idea of this drop by instead looking at official US govt data where the Deschutes drops into Lake Billy Chinook: https://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv/?cb_00060=on&for...
That is for the year 2021, when that article was written. You can see the drop in April, which is when irrigation starts. It's about 500CFS,or ~half the river at that point. That is NOT 95% of the river, as CO Land Watch would have you believe. (Side note: CO Land Watch has a bit of a reputation around here. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like they would gladly end all farming in Central Oregon to save a few salmon.)
There's a lot of room to provide more water for both fish and farmers by 1. eliminating waste and 2. fixing some of the weird water rights stuff where people are really just wasting it.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/16/fondomont...
At some point, people need to vote in their own interests.
Farming is important, but it isn't the only thing that's important. Ripping up use-it-or-lose-it and grandfathered water rights (with compensation and phase-out times) should be on the table. It's a vestige of a different world and isn't appropriate for today.
Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints?
Shifting policy to promote less water-consumptive agriculture and penalize high-consumption agriculture seems like a reasonable bargain.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/colorado-river-water-cut...
That is a battle that will be tied up in the courts for 15+ years. What we need to do right now is add a 200% export tax on high water items (alfalfa, almonds, etc) leaving the country. Incentivize farmers to divert water usage to feeding domestic animals or growing crops that feed people domestically.
What makes you say this? Is it already being fought in courts? Or is this just educated speculation?
https://www.justice.gov/enrd/arizona-v-california has been running since 1952.
In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.
Similarly, it looks unfavorably on taxing someone out of business to avoid buying their property. This is because it's essentially a workaround for the former. If the state want's mike_d's house, They cant impose a 200% property tax on to force him to sell
For the poor: Civil Asset Forfeiture "We'll take what we want, when we want, without trial."
For the rich: "Sorry sir, here's a blank check, how much do you want to get paid to not waste water?"
We should work to get rid of asset forfeiture, not work to normalize arbitrary seizure
What are you trying to say?
Do you think a legal system where the government can simply take anything it wants on a whim will end up better or worse for the poor and powerless?
Somone can be paying the full rent unimproved value of their land, and the government might decide to void their lease and turn over all of their land, improvements, and work to someone else.
The only thing that stops this is if governments respect the contracts they enter into, be they established property rights (in our system), or land lease contracts (in a Georgist system).
[1]https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-residents-discuss-lasting-in...
[lots more]https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=urban+renewal+eminent+domai...
Now you have more garden-variety free market development corruption, where "We buy ugly houses" companies transfer ownership en mass to enable gentrification or capture value from unannounced city infrastructure improvements.
Unfortunately, the obvious solution (strengthening property rights) effects its own drag on city improvement by empowering one-asshole-with-the-last-necessary-parcel.
If the interest is "we want their water so that we can use it instead" then it very much similar. This is very different than if the purpose of the alfalfa tarrif was somehow National military security, and cities getting more water was simply an unintended a side effect, not the primary purpose
Why would any farmer in California, making bank because they have basically free water, give that up, for ANY single payment?
Even a truly perpetual guaranteed income stream is worth a certain finite single payment, that's how rates of return work given the standard assumption that future money is worth less than cash in hand now.
Say a farmer with free water can make $1m a year from his farm, working hard on it.
So offer him more than $1m a year. Buy it outright for $100m and they'll start to jump on it. Index funds on that would return more than $1m a year with no digging.
Nothing is being taken away. It is closing a loophole.
> If the state want's mike_d's house, They cant impose a 200% property tax on to force him to sell
Because laws can't target individuals, only classes of behavior which a tariff would.
/s
More generally, these aren't loopholes. They're often clear and explicit laws that specify exactly who has the right to water. They are often explicit contracts signed by the government. Some are as explicit as you have purchased the right to use 100% of the water from this River for all of time, or you are guaranteed x amount of water at y cost for a hundred years.
Sellers remorse is not the same as a loophole.
At some point in the history of Mike D's hypothetical property, the government acknowledge the private land grant. The law has written and interpreted acknowledges the transfer of property from owner to owner overtime. Changing the law to unwind property rights is an example of ex-post recontracting.
The same is true with water rights codified and law and case law
Fun fact:
California grows rice and exports it to Asia. There isn't an export tax; in fact the rice is taxpayer subsidized.
If you drive north of Sacramento on the I5, you'll see the rice paddies all over the place.
All the more reason to get started ASAP.
Aren't those basically the same things just at different stages? Where should the food production move to? I ask because there is a strong movement to re-shore everything so moving it off-shore probably won't get much traction.
It's probably a different topic all together but I would agree that most things we produce are not required for healthy well nourished people but there would probably be a diverse range of opinions on what foods those might be. My personal preference would be to nix anything that is not Paleolithic, i.e. get rid of anything that is not meat or vegetable or does not contribute to that chain so we keep the things that feed livestock and stop producing the rest
About 20-60% of US agricultural value is exported, mostly in unprocessed form, so there's little danger of the US becoming dependent on food imports. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
High-water use crops are only economical to grow in the southwest because water is mispriced.
Absent that, farmers would grow something else.
They'd probably make less money, but that's something we address via subsidies (gradually phasing out).
They'd probably make less money
There is no incentive for farmers that already operate on razor thin margins to make less money. They will produce whatever makes them the most money. How do we incentivize changing behavior without putting farmers out of business? Or I guess another way to put it is, how do we correct the system that got us here without punishing the farmers? AFAIK they are not the bad guys, rather they are the ones feeding us and are subject to operating in the system that was created before they were born. Changing water rights does not feel like it addresses the problem in a way that does not harm innocent people. Maybe that should happen long term when water demands are lower but it feels like the demand should shift first through some incentives.
How do we change incentives without harming people so that we can later change the water rights without as much push-back?
No, prices of whatever they switched to would adjust, and farmers would be back to razor thin margins just like anybody else. Thats how a market do. Except this time there would hopefully be a bit less of a massive externality
If economic structural changes impact them, they can't pack their bags and move their farm to a different region.
Morally, what feels right to me is "Let no person have their livelihood demolished by that which is completely outside their control".
Sometimes, that's unavoidable, but I think with water use we could fold policies in over 50 years to lessen the velocity of disruption.
And hell, why not bind it to subsidies for building out solar/wind renewables on their land, while we're at it?
Off and on I’ve been trying to find a video I saw on YouTube several years ago where an ag-ed group had found (and I’m going to get this way wrong) growing lichens along with crops trapped a lot of moisture near crop root systems providing a significant reduction in irrigation requirements. But if water is cheap, why would a farming operation introduce risk or complicate their operation.
I’d personally like to see AZ get some of its water rights to the Colorado river back. Our state government is talking about building and operating desalination plants in Mexico to meet future while CA sits on hundreds of miles of coast, takes about 60% of allocated CO river water, and already operates a desalination plant. For the ongoing cost of a plant and operations, no one is willing to give up an equivalent portion of existing water rights?
I agree that if we are to centrally plan it, we'd want to have things like roots, leaves, and the most sustainable animal proteins we can find. Eggs are great, but allergies are relatively common. Milk is the same. Farmed fish can be done well, but that also has allergies among those who also have shellfish allergies. Plant proteins work well for people who don't have legume allergies, but they aren't that sustainable for rice or soy. Pea is ok... maybe just egg chickens and the old hens go to those allergic to eggs?
All this water is used by humans. Farmers, and the people who eat the food they make, are all humans.
Anyway, for farmers in CA and you get different results than optimizing for say everyone in the CA or even better everyone in the US. Cheap land + old water rights is profitable for individuals but extremely wasteful or water and results in massive and unneeded infrastructure to move water around. The amount of water wasted due to evaporation is a direct result of subsidizing wasteful use.
Such inefficiency is bad for humanity but profitable for a few individuals.
The water evaporates because of the sun. Have you solved the growing crops without a sun problem?
Everyone wants to make one of the most efficient crops (alfalfa) the enemy. But alfalfa growers are not subsidized by the government at all.
Do you know which crop is? Corn. Corn wastes many times more water per acre than alfalfa, but is rarely mentioned in such HN threads. Gotta keep that "clean" ethanol flowing.
Center pivot irrigation requires very little infrastructure for a farmer, but spraying a light mist is a great way to evaporate water before it even reaches any plants.
Similarly, water pooling on the surface evaporates faster than water sitting just an inch below the soil. Alpha doesn’t directly care about this difference, but one is far cheaper than the other if and only if you price that water at close to 0$.
Of course if farmers needed to price in water then things like crop choice would change, but that’s simply the market reacting to price signals. Aka the vary basis of our economy.
Because nobody gives a fuck about wasting water in Kansas, because most of the places where significant amount of crops are grown don't have water problems like california
The issue at stake is wasting water in california and your attempted pivot to pretend this has anything to do with "crop water efficiency" outside of that context is nonsense.
[0]: http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/california-corn.html [1]: https://apps1.cdfa.ca.gov/FertilizerResearch/docs/Alfalfa_Pr...
But, the reality is completely eliminating California’s water problems is easy on a legal and technical level but not a political one. There is little incentive to let water flow into the ocean so CA is always going to sit right on the edge of a significant issue.
By not eating? Because starvation is what is going to happen when the price of food increases by 10X or 50X. Visit your local food bank and see how many people can't afford food now.
You might say, "well, the U.S. will just have to import more food". One problem with that: the U.S. is the largest producer of food by a wide margin. What country is going to pick up the slack?
> Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints?
These are one and the same. Almost all agriculture is either directly or indirectly for human use (food).
* take those water thirsty crops in California and start growing them in places like Iowa, where water is plentiful and labor costs are lower
* use that freed up land to build more housing, lowering the cost of living in CA
win-win
Israel gets 55% of their water this way and California can too.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
Natural resources, when "owned" in this way, should also have very high taxes associated with them so that they are not squandered and instead used much more efficiently.
But the government doesn't want that, because they would just add it to the price of the agricultural produce. And governments want to keep that value low, so that one the one side, people can afford to eat, but on the other side because else the local markets will be out-competed by importing it from places that don't do as much water management.
It's protectionism at the cost of the water supply. In my neck of the wood (west Europe) we've already had instances of water pressure being reduced so that the reservoirs have a chance to refill overnight; in other places, tap water has already become unavailable.
In 10 years that will be commonplace, water will be rationed. While meanwhile, there's datacenters using tens of millions of liters of drinking water for cooling: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-...
Thus we have rice farms in the desert and other such madness.
This would actually be fine if "better" water users could buy those water rights from the rice farmer. The farmer would make a lot more money than growing rice could yield, and (say) LA could ease up on the lawn shaming.
But for some ungodly reason, such trades are not legally possible, and the madness will continue.
He'll sell when he's offered more money that the free water is worth to him.
A classic.
1. Problem is too obvious to ignore
2. Get in front of people finding the root causes by blaming individual citizen/consumer choices
3. Less of a need to actively run propaganda on behalf of the actual entities that are making the problems (e.g. apparently alfalfa agriculture in this case)
1. To clarify, some recycling definitely is a great idea and makes sense, like recycling of aluminum cans. But it rarely makes sense when there is not a positive economic outcome to do so.
Of all the water use cases to go after, they want to make children think water is so scarce that spilling one can of it is somehow a problem?
Meanwhile, eat whatever produce you want at any time of year, as long as you can’t see the water being wasted, it’s fine right?
[0]https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/la-times-today/2022/02/...
Lowkey though…it’s high time for the cult of lawnship to pass. I don’t want to stop people from having lawns if they really want them but we’re to the point where people have lawns just because everyone else does or their HOA forces them into one regardless of whether it makes aesthetic sense or sense with their weather patterns.
That's because the actual problem is intractable. Urban metropolises shouldn't be built where profitable farming can make better use of the water.
But good luck evacuating the greater Los Angeles area. Or getting people to move to areas better suited for living, in general.
You have it exactly backwards: planting crops that are only profitable (and MUCH less profitable than comparable urban uses would be), and which make a horrible use of water, due to outdated legal ownership theories of water.
Oh, right, Saudis would lose money.
It is the farmer's version of beachfront property.
Almond farmers have margin to pay for water. Alfalfa should be grown where water is cheap.
> Failure to apply a water right to beneficial use when water was available for a period of ten or more years results in a rebuttable presumption of abandonment.
This leads to huge amounts of wasted water and alfalfa growing.
https://dwr.colorado.gov/services/water-administration/water...
Not really.. without stupid legislation we'd let it rot which in the case of water would be exactly what we'd want.
But, it's never just that simple.
Is that $800/foot-acre just the cost of the water? Or does the bill for the consumer household water use also include the incredibly expensive infrastructure to pipe water to each little suburban house across California? Low density housing (pervasive because NIMBYism) also means high infrastructure costs. Someone has to pay for all the work to build and maintain those water lines down each street. (And yet, people living in a condo where one pipe serves hundreds pay the same rates!)
Agricultural use often requires just dropping a hose into the river, and they business will handle those costs themselves.
In short, the water problem in California is more than just "blame China for stealing our water". It is that too, yes, but there isn't just one problem.
... Or I'm completely off base and that $800 figure is just the water and includes none of the other costs...
If infrastructure costs are higher that’s not that big of a deal when 80% is being used to grow thirsty crops in droughts.
But when we criticize a problem, it's important that we are very accurate in the size and scale of the issues. Over-stating the costs to consumers by ignoring other components of the price tag runs the risk that those who are on the other side of this issue will use your oversight as a defence. "Oh clearly you aren't being honest, as you're hiding this other fact".
What if the agri-business now publish a report that shows that in actuality, when you factor in infrastructure costs, they are actually paying more for water? (I doubt it, but it's entirely possible).
The history of water management and delivery in the American west has been one of corporate greed, regulatory capture, and massive environmental damage in the interest of profits. The author details all of this dating back to the Dam boom and the Army Corps of Engineers being in cahoots with agro-giants early in the 20th century and damming rivers all over the west with the primary (but not admitted) purpose being cheaper water for corporate farmers.
By "archaic" do you mean they got there first? Because farming has been around in (e.g.) Arizona for >100 years, and there weren't any problems back then when there was mostly a whole lot of nothin' in the region.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-arizona-farmer-on-h...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-the-real...
Then folks decided that building large population centres in the middle of the desert was a good idea, and here we are.
It should also be noted that Native Americans were also living and farming before white settlers arrived:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#Early_history
Though it's not like having large civilizations living in a desert is unique to the American (South-)West: see Mesopotamia and Egypt. They're just usually huddle around rivers.
Efficient water usage (e.g. drip irrigation) and not growing comically unsuitable crops like alfalfa would solve this problem, even in the face of climate change.
Its pretty disingenuous to argue the impacts of agriculture today is the same as >100 years ago and act like all the expansion has been the cities.
“However, Nestlé paid only $524 a year under a 1978 permit that expired but which the company continued to use. The U.S. Forest Service issued a new permit in 2018 for $2,000 despite local protests”
https://www.sunset.com/food-wine/bottled-water-companies-are...
> Wave goodbye to $13,000 worth of scarce water that was sold to agribusiness for just $1,000 and is now headed overseas on that truck
Actually there is only about $0.65 worth of water headed overseas on that truck because while it takes 5 or 6 acre feet of water to grow an acre of alfalfa only 0.005% of that water actually ends up in the part of the plant that is harvested and ends up on that truck.
Where does the other 99.995% end up? I have no idea because every single article I've seen about water use in agriculture fails to cover what happens to that water.
All I've been able to find is that almost all of it goes into the air around the farms via evapotranspiration. But what happens after that?
Eventually, rain. Usually somewhere else.
> Actually there is only about $0.65 worth of water headed overseas on that truck because while it takes 5 or 6 acre feet of water to grow an acre of alfalfa only 0.005% of that water actually ends up in the part of the plant that is harvested and ends up on that truck.
Apple doesn't give me a discount on my Macbook to account for the material they burned/trashed during its manufacture.
It's why often farm water usage is not nearly as bad as it superficially seems, and why farm water usage of a river can be multiples of the actual river flow
(In this and the past few hundred posts related to this topic that made it to the front page.)
https://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2019/03/19/western-droughts-c...
It's bad enough that not only is a huge share of river water used, but that the actual ground is sinking in the Central Valley from depletion of groundwater resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence
That's not the case in the lower Colorado basin. If it was, there would not be a problem.
My guess is that most of what sinks into the ground from agriculture makes its way to a saline aquifer. Some of it may end up in the Salton Sea, which itself is very saline and also shrinking.
However that number is not zero in the Lower Colorado River basin. I work in groundwater modeling for various clients in the desert southwest, the number we assume for agricultural return flow recharge varies based on crop type and other factors. 90% is an overestimate, 0% is an underestimate
This is beside the point.
The issue is the reservoirs. If the reservoirs and sources are being depleted faster than they replenish then their levels go down.
The water crises are about the reservoirs and sources going down. We don’t care how much farmers use in absolute numbers as long as it’s not overwhelming the capacity of the systems to replenish themselves.
I’m an environmentalist myself, but repeating statistics without asking yourself if they are relevant is useless.
In this case though, the farms are using up water that doesn’t get replenished. You don’t need any statistics to show that this is not sustainable.
> In 2021, Netherlands imported $1.77B in Bovine Meat, becoming the 5th largest importer of Bovine Meat in the world.
Maybe they're talking about the global impact?
We have a harbor, everything that goes to Europe is counted as import and export. What does that mean for these numbers? Nobody knows.
And the beef that is imported is probably from Ireland and the UK. Do they have deserts there? So even that number is useless.
You’re just another example of someone repeating statistics that only lead to irrelevant discussions.
If I have two babies, but murder one person, the net increase isn't really what folks will focus on. Environmental concerns with the beef industry are global because, as those import/export numbers show, it's a global industry. The Netherlands may be a good place to raise cattle water-wise, but unless you're gonna grow them all there, it doesn't really remove their impact elsewhere.
"But it's wet here!" really misses their point.
- it runs off or trickles away - probably negligible here
- it evaporates before it's absorbed by the plant - mostly due to wasteful irrigation practices. Unless you're doing drip-irrigation or similar, this is where most of your water will end up
- it's absorbed by the plant and used in photosynthesis to make sugar and eventually other molecules - this is what's on the truck, but by mass it's negligible
- it's absorbed by the plant and used for nutrient transfer - this is what happens to most water plants consume. In simplified terms, capillary action drives water up the plant, bringing nutrients with it; evaporation removes water at the leaf so that new water comes in
According to Wikipedia the last effect (Transpiration) accounts for 97–99.5% of water actually used by the plant [1]
My usual statement is that the first (approved) microgram costs a billion dollars, the rest of the doses are basically free. Commence pricing games to sort that out.
When that 5 gallons of fuel is used to produce 1 gallon of soybean oil the fuel is consumed. It undergoes a chemical transformation that results in it becoming non-fuel.
When 1 gallon of water is used to grow 1 almond, only a very tiny amount of the water undergoes a chemical transformation into non-water. The rest (over 99.9% of it) remains as water at the almond farm.
It is no longer in easily accessible pipes or storage tanks, instead becoming water vapor in the air or moisture in the soil, but it is still water. It is going to end up eventually in someplace where it will be usable.
The problem is 100% of the original water is no longer where you need it, not that some percentage gets into the plant or not.
The cost of water is all about moving it and/or filtering it. The analogy that it's a water export oversees applies when you think that they'd have to move that water from somewhere else otherwise to grow that alfalfa. Not that the alfalfa "has" the water.
Also, moving insane amounts of water to the desert for an incredibly water hungry plant, because desert land is cheap, and the moving of that water is underpriced... is kind of insane.
https://www.agrivi.com/blog/modern-management-of-centennial-....
And then you have to imagine that these places are hitting 110+ degrees recently, so they lose even more water.
If you deplete the reservoirs and sources faster then the cycle replenishes them, you eventually have a problem when they get too low.
Abnormally hot or dry years become disasters if you’ve depleted your reservoirs too much.
That is the problem.
If the water went into the alfalfa and 100% of it evaporated, leaving bone-dry hay going to the middle east, then the hay is still the only remaining symbol of $13,000 worth of water you used to have, and sold for $1000.
Where the exact losses are within the industry is entirely unimportant.
You get roughly 10x the energy capture through photovoltaics.
75% of US corn production goes to ethanol and animal feed: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...
If you want modern engines, you need that octane, and ethanol is a great, cheap, safe way to do it. If you want to stop putting Ethanol into gasoline, you have to find a new octane booster that is dirt cheap, doesn't kill anyone, and won't require anyone change their engines.
Or just wait for BEVs to take over.
efficient, too. why would anyone want to ship the supplies half way around the world when you can just ship the product? especially when the supplies are sold to you at a discount compared to the locals?
It's much more difficult to turn no water into potable water.
However it’s hard to see unlike units and be ok with that. Maybe my physics teachers were too mean to me, or my work in quantitative fields has twisted me, but reading otherwise well reasoned stuff that makes unfair comparisons hurts the entire line of reasoning in my mind.
So my question still stands out there - but I would note whatever savings over municipal water they have or don’t have, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Just because you pay a fair price to destroy something of incalculable value doesn’t mean the price reflects the costs.
Although I would note the California case still makes me wonder, as it’s not apples to apples, even if it’s a stupid waste regardless of the actual metric.
to grow alfalfa.
to feed animals.
"An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert"
> Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-arizona-farmer-on-h...
"Understanding the Real Fight Over Water in Arizona"
> Arizona recently announced new constraints on housing development in the areas around Phoenix. At issue is water rights and scarcity, which have been a challenge for the US Southwest for as long as people have been living there. That being said, the region is currently in the midst of a 25-year megadrought and when you combine that with booming growth, difficult choices may have to be made. But how do water rights get divided? Who holds them? How much is water worth to the housing developers, farmers and semiconductor manufacturers that have flocked to the state? To learn more, we speak with Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. We discuss both current and past water management practices in the state.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-the-real...
(Episode available on most of the major platforms (including YT?), Apple just came up first in the search.)
I'd bet that it's not that different in California and even if not, there would be alternatives to the wasteful alfalfa for export
I don't think this was written as a parody. I think the author really thinks like this.
They seem to ignore some pretty obvious things. I will assume they are fairly intelligent and educated, so the ignorance is suspicious. For example, they seem shocked that treated potable water delivered via an expensive network of sanitary pipelines would be more expensive than untreated water delivered via a ditch. They gloss over the "10 or even 12" crops of alfalfa a year, but don't seem to realize that 10 or 12 cuttings a year is phenomenal and a big part of why Imperial County is special. Other places struggle to get four cuttings per year.
I think the author almost hits the right target even though they are aiming at the wrong target. We don't need to stop growing alfalfa. We need to have a rational pricing system for water. If somebody can buy water for $1/unit right out of a well, then spend $3/unit to treat that water and $1/unit to transport that water to market, and can sell it for $6/unit to the public, they might get outbid by somebody who can buy the same water for $2/unit out of the well, spend $0/unit to treat the water, spend $0.5/unit to transport the water to market and be able to sell it for $3.50/unit. In any efficient economy, this is a no-brainer.
It could be more rational to argue that we need to stop growing humans on our most productive agricultural real estate. We can grow humans by the bushel in Montana. We can't get 12 cuttings of alfalfa per year in Montana.
If the argument is that the world is running out of water (which does seem to be the author's argument) then we have bigger problems than alfalfa. Eliminating farm land so we can fit more humans will not solve the water shortage. It will compound it.
I am not proposing that we cut back on humans on the planet. I think there are plenty of resources for both. The author is right that we have to balance the demands we put on those resources. But I think we should be more thoughtful about it than the author proposes.
You're just trading problems here. If you push everyone into Montana, now you have a resource moving problem. And the assumption "We can grow humans by the bushel in Montana" seems especially suspect. Have you been to Montana? It's the least populated state for a reason. Many of them actually.
You seem to think your thoughts are obviously right, but you ignored massive complexity. Not to mention, I don't think anyone is actually arguing to "eliminate farm land so that we can fit more humans on it." The problem is the water usage, not trying to change farmland into apartment buildings.
If we take up the author's call to action in the title and introduction to "stop growing alfalfa" (presumably by outlawing it), then the corporations that grew alfalfa would obviously just find some other crop/product through which to effectively export water, albeit less efficiently, in which case the preexisting problems still exist but are even worse.
The real question is why these farmers/corporations are using their water to grow crops in the first place, when they could presumably be selling their water to consumers at much higher retail rates.
An immediately obvious answer would be that the costs of transporting/distributing this water from the source to the consumer is greater than the profit margin, in which case there isn't even a problem to begin with.
If the issue is regulation restricting corporations from selling/distributing their water to consumers, then it should be an obvious win for the politicians to fix: their corporate lobbyists get more money selling water at higher rates, while their voters get to buy water at cheaper rates. Either way, the article doesn't even mention any regulations at issue.
Very odd comment at the end considering that the only reason the Salton Sea exists today was due to a different “ecological disaster” in 1905.
The alfalfa situation would correct itself if the water being used was fairly priced and not heavily subsidized.
A huge portion of our nation's food supply is grown in CA. It would/could drastically raise the prices of food worldwide because some tax hungry politician wants a larger tax base.
You can't waive away actual physical constraints as being due to "big government" or whatever.
So crazy, sure, but WHY do we have this kind of crazy?
Yes, agri-business lobbyists are more concentrated than consumer (i.e. have lower coordination costs and higher stakes), but that's not the main reason.
Democracies that geographically distribute representation are subject to hostaging, so e.g., every district has defense spending, midwestern states get ethanol mandates and California's central valley gets decades of bullet train investment, and water allocation is majorly messed up.
That's essentially the picture of politics in the US today, and it has less to do with capitalism than with how we agreed to agree (though none of us actually agreed to that).
The only thing moderating that tendency is when national political party discipline overrides local -- in war (before, during, and after), or in periods of ideological fervor. Not a solution.
So the real question is: why can we make exponential progress in teraflop systems, but not moderately rational governance?
Just do it somewhere else is not an answer. How about just don't live in a dry desert climate at all?