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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

When agriculture uses 70+% of all water in the Colorado River system and California’s Imperial Irrigation District is the largest consumer [0], we should probably start there.

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...

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> Ripping up use-it-or-lose-it and grandfathered water rights (with compensation and phase-out times) should be on the table.

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.

> That is a battle that will be tied up in the courts for 15+ years.

What makes you say this? Is it already being fought in courts? Or is this just educated speculation?

There's plenty of evidence water rights cases/disputes take a long time.

https://www.justice.gov/enrd/arizona-v-california has been running since 1952.

Cases get caught up in court because for the most part government agencies try to rip up contracts without paying and they often lose. Most Farmers have a price that they willingly pay to give up their Perpetual water rights.

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

> In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.

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?"

I don't like civil asset forfeiture either, but it is the exception not the rule.

We should work to get rid of asset forfeiture, not work to normalize arbitrary seizure

No, you're right, CAF is the exception, the rule is that poor people are too poor to own perpetual exclusive property rights so they have to pay the rich people who do own those rights whatever they can get away with asking.

And your solution is CAF for all people and all assets?

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?

A system where land can’t be owned by an individual but instead pay an annual rent based on the unimporoved value of that land, acknowledging they commons is owned evenly by every citizen

this is a complete non-sequitur, But even in a gerogist land-value tax system doesnt solve the problem of government seizure.

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).

Said around bong rips in the dorm. This will never happen unless you’re willing to die for it.

Perhaps you're not yet familiar with the Urban "renewal" effects on ethnic families and the destruction of generational wealth transfer on those same families. Emminent Domain>Apropriate compensation doesn't work as you imply. Tl;dr They were kicked out of the gentry by having to accept below market compensation for the homes they rightfully bought and owned which consigned them to renting thereafter.

[1]https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-residents-discuss-lasting-in...

[lots more]https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=urban+renewal+eminent+domai...

It happened, but primarily in the 1950s-1980s. Thankfully, racist use of eminent domain has drastically decreased since.

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.

Imposing a protective tariff on goods that are against our interest to sell isn't at all comparable to a 200% property tax

It depends on the interest.

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

>willingly pay to give up their Perpetual water rights.

Why would any farmer in California, making bank because they have basically free water, give that up, for ANY single payment?

Why would any farmer in California ever sell their land (to which the water rights are linked) for ANY single payment? Or, really, why would any landowner anywhere, getting money from rent, would give that up for ANY single payment? Of course, there is a price for that.

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.

Because you can offer more money than expected future value.

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.

> In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.

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.

Nothing is being taken away from Mike_D, we are just closing the loophole where he had a house. We're not targeting Mike D the specifically, just the behavior of living at his address.

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

> What we need to do right now is add a 200% export tax on high water items (alfalfa, almonds, etc) leaving the country.

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.

Maybe China could do us a solid and file a WTO case?

> That is a battle that will be tied up in the courts for 15+ years.

All the more reason to get started ASAP.

Wouldn't a 200% export tax on high water items incentivize the same foreign investors to purchase more cattle operations in the US, ship their alfalfa to those ranches, then ship the meat abroad?

Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints?

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

Food production should move to where there's sufficient water to grow things economically.

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).

I agree with all of this, but

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?

the margin naturally sharpens to fit a razor. Do you think that if we slightly taxed alfalfa more that nobody would grow anything on that land?

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

It's a great point, because farmers are literally tied to their land in ways most of us aren't.

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?

I forgot to add that every time we put farmers out of business their land gets snatched up by the likes of Bill Gates or Blackrock. This also needs to stop.

They are the same use, but it seems on the agriculture side there is little incentive to use water efficiently based on rights that were granted 100 or more years ago.

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 find your idea attractive, but centrally planning agriculture has a hideous track record. Market forces have made a mess too, but in the form of destroying public resources like aquifers, soil, and the climate. Both lead to famine, just on different timelines. "We can do better" makes me think of the weight loss new years resolutions people make. We won't do better, because we haven't changed. The failure isn't a lack of knowledge, but human nature.

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?

I think allergies should also be addressed at the root of the problem rather than trying to side-step it for everyone that has allergies. Rather I would like to see functional medicine focus on finding all the root causes of a persons ailment and cure the root causes not just allergies. There is already a lot of progress being made in this area in big part by understanding the gut, gut health and gut bacteria both beneficial and detrimental. While I am not a fan of fecal transplants as that seems very unscientific to me, I have personally had great success by by-passing the stomach for advanced cultures of probiotics with with MCT oil, several trillion CFU per dose.

I think money will get put into autoimmune research due to long covid, which might help with allergies too, and yeah, gut biome will almost certainly be part of that. We should acknowledge too that different genotypes need different diets.

A nuclear power plant + desalination plant would fix this situation almost completely. California has the resources (money), and knowhow (tons of engineers) to make this happen if they want.

Israel gets 55% of their water this way and California can too.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

That’s really interesting, I didn’t know desalinization was so far along. I’m sure there are downsides, but if we’re going to insist on turning deserts into cities, this seems like a no-brainer.

Seems easy to fix:

* 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

> Do we prioritize agriculture or human use?

All this water is used by humans. Farmers, and the people who eat the food they make, are all humans.

First it’s not all farmers we’re talking about, changing things would be beneficial for far more farmers than get harmed.

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.

> Not quite, the problem is water isn’t being used efficiently. Agriculture wastes a great deal of water to evaporation because it’s cheaper not because it’s required.

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.

I am not specifically talking about crop choice here.

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.

> Corn wastes many times more water per acre than alfalfa, but is rarely mentioned in such HN threads.

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.

California produces 11 million tons of corn a year [0] and only 7 million tons of alfalfa [1].

[0]: http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/california-corn.html [1]: https://apps1.cdfa.ca.gov/FertilizerResearch/docs/Alfalfa_Pr...

There’s several kinds of corn, but if we’re comparing silage it’s 26 tons / acre vs 7 tons / acre for alfalfa. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv... Corn yields are normally measured in terms of grain, but it’s worth remembering the rest of the plant still has value when considering efficiency.

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.

> At some point, people need to vote in their own interests.

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).

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