Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Just casually throwing in 'overpopulation' when in so many places, water for actual human needs like drinking, bathing and even washing clothes, is a tiny fraction compared to much more wasteful things like grass, America's largest crop.

I live in a dry bit of the American west and municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture is often not very efficient because of old water rules that give water to things like hobby farms when real farms downstream don't get what they need.

View on HN

100% this. or 95%. When you say "grass, America's largest crop" I assume you are referring to lawns, but actually I think your last point is the crucial one: "...municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture..."

California has plenty of water for it's people. If you add up ALL residential, commercial and industrial use, including all outdoor landscape watering, baseball fields, golf courses, etc - it all adds up to around 10-20% of the water used (depending on rainfall).

Where does the rest (80-90%) of California's water go? Agriculture. Half the produce of which is exported to other states and countries. Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert? And about half of that rice is exported, much to Asia (!!)

California is rather like Saudi Arabia, with the farmers pumping out all the water and selling it in the form of agricultural produce.

But take a shorter shower please! And you don't really NEED to flush that toilet.

I kind of understand this argument, but I kind of don't. Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?

> It supplies one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. California is the country’s biggest milk producer, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation’s milk. And of all crops grown in the U.S., 19 of them – including almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes – are grown only in California.

- https://www.perkins.com/en_GB/campaigns/powernews/features/c...

There's a lot of crops that are grown in CA that are not native to the area, and require a lot of water to be viable in that area. Trying to grow a crop native to monsoon areas in a dry area is just unsane.

And growing a human in that area? Would it not also be a drag on the area? At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?

(Not referring to your comment, I feel often people tend to handwave themselves out the equation).

A person can live in that environment on much less water than the crops. Just growing different crops would consume less water.

There is a reason 80%(?) of the world almond crop is grown in California. It has a great climate for almonds, a lot of land, and water to support the trees. We need to trade something for our IPhones besides the promise of future dollars (debt).

I don't think that's true unless they're living in extreme poverty.

> At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?

I don't think that's what people are saying. The question is why is the cost of growing such water intensive crops in such an arid land cheap enough to make financial sense.

The answer, I expect, is essentially that the costs involved in said water are subsidised in such a way as to socialise them? Would be interesting to understand.

From the survival of civilization scale, most of "almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes" are probably luxury items that we can ill afford.

Sure it's a balancing act between "save the planet!" and "save the economy!". Guess who's winning so far?

Strange because you are naming staples that are concentrated sources of nutrition and energy that can indeed ensure survival, and components of “trail mix” for this very reason.

Certainly if you wanna supplant them with other crops that support something other than European style cuisine, go for it, but if you propose to take away nuts, olives, and grapes then you may be a racist or bigot, and we’d sooner die than change in that regard.

Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.

I believe that a certain philosophical viewpoint was raised by some sci-fi authors, to the effect that wheat and other staple crops are the most intelligent sentience on Earth, because they successfully domesticated human beings, who give them all the best land, water, and doting TLC to become fruitful and multiply.

> Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.

This situation came with the territory. By contrast, California's agriculture is 100% dependent on massive hydroengineering projects.

We can afford them, it costs maybe 5% more to grow them other places. We just don't anymore because that is 5% someone can skim off the top because they don't have to pay for environmental destruction and other downstream effects.

Tax water for agricultural usage enough to fund desalination plants for their water use. The market participants should then adapt by switching to less water-intensive crops, or paying the tax and getting the desalination plants.

pretty sure there is no salt water in the central valley either.

> tax water for agricultural use

Yeah good luck with this one

> Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?

Yes. This scale of agriculture in CA is not historical, and is driven by hydro-engineering projects of huge scale throughout the American west that began in the 1940s. The Bureau of Reclamation's fever dreams were fueled by two decades near the turn of the 20th century that were some of the wettest in a thousand years, and this has led to a crazy situation that is not sustainable in the long term (perhaps not even in the medium term).

> California is rather like Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps the key insight required to explain the 20th century.

It has the force of truth: now that I see it put so simply, I struggle to understand why no one has been able to do so before.

It is a key insight, indirectly. The power of a falsehood to sway emotions on

Cadillac Desert posits this about most of the American West, it was sparsely populated prior to the widespread usage of pumps for water and dam program (to generate electricity to pump reservoir water) of Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. Those power plants and population growths might have fueled American productivity in WW2 but it also was a subsidized consolidation of farms under large corporations and rich individuals when it was meant to help smaller farmers. It's an older book with a 2017 update.

When talking about grass, they might be talking about alfalfa, which is grown in California for use as animal feed. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...

I'm being a bit tongue in cheek. But we really do dump a lot of resources into lawns https://legacy.geog.ucsb.edu/the-lawn-is-the-largest-irrigat...

That's fine if it's a place for, say, children to play, but most of them do not get used that way.

Californian water agencies have offered money to convert lawns to rock or low-water gardens for a while now.

The lawns get wrapped up in that residential water usage figure mentioned further up the chain, so it isn't a whole lot compared to Big Ag.

Yeah, xeriscaping helps. In terms of municipal uses though, watering is a significant chunk in the city I live in. Not much compared to ag or actual waste, but it's a number the city is happy to push down - and has been.

It gets better. Grown in California for export to China and Saudi Arabia, where they're used for cattle feed.

Also fun fact, a lot of farm managers in Saudi Arabia are either Scottish or Australian.

A big part of depletion of the Ogallala aquifer is due to domestic policy to include corn in just about anything - including fuel.

> Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert?

That's not really accurate. Much of California is Mediterranean climate, including all of Sacramento county. Yes, there's some desert in California, but most of the agriculture happens elsewhere; but it depends on what you mean by 'almost a desert', a lot of the central valley is classified as arid and that's where a lot of the agriculture happens. A lot of people also live in (different) arid parts of California though, maybe they should move to where fresh water is easier to access :P

Also, the terrain means it's relatively easy to move water from the north around the central valley, but difficult to move it from the north or central valley to the greater LA area. Elsewhere in the thread, people claim water is fungible, and it mostly is, but location is important, and moving water in Bakersfield to Los Angeles is non trivial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_California#/media/F...

GP’s statement you quoted is entirely inaccurate. The natural state of California’s Central Valley is a wetland, which is how settlers found it in the 1800s, full of swamps, fish, deer, and lakes. And then they set to the work of draining all of the swamps so they could grow things there. It’s an unnatural desertification, and if the dams and waterworks were removed, it would return to the marshland. Even now, the rice grown near Sacramento is grown in land that is periodically flooded by the river.

> Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert?

Rice benefits from flooding for weed control (because it is unusually flood resistant), but doesn't consume a lot of water (the water from flooding is available for downstream use.)

If you want to complain about water-intenaive crops in CA, the issue is almonds, not rice.

Also, while there are parts of CA that are desert or “almost desert” (desert or semi-arid climate), the area around Sacramento is hot-summer Mediterranean.

The issue is animal agriculture, not almonds.

For example cow milk uses more water in absolute terms, and more water per calorie, than almond milk.

I'm not so sure. A quick Google search came up with wildly varying amounts of water to produce a gallon of almond milk, from 23 gallons of water to ~1600:

https://milkyplant.com/en-us/blogs/the-latest/environmental-...

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...

These were just two of the several sources I found, at each extreme. There was similar variation for cow milk.

Considering that it takes roughly 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond, and that 23 almonds wouldn't fill even an 8oz cup, I'm guessing that the higher end of the spectrum is probably more accurate for almond milk.

It also looks like almond milk has half the calories per gallon of skim milk and 1/4 that of whole milk.

I think soy milk tastes better than almond milk

Were you raised on formula by chance?

Almond milk has always tasted terrible to me. And most western produced soy milk. Warm, freshly pressed soy milk is amazing, and the kind of minimally processed bottled stuff you get from chinese grocery stores is pretty good too.

Soy milk splits when mixed with coffee though, and doesn't really have a neutral enough taste, for that I find oat milk works great.

It's fun cause (sweetened) almond milk was considered a delicacy in Italy, and had been supplanted with shitty tasting almond milk in recent years, much like almond-tasting almonds have been replaced with tasteless ones.

I can't tell if it's a change in cultivar or transcontinental transport, but something bad happened with almonds in Europe.

Imported American almonds maybe?

I guess, but I'm not sure why California almonds shouldn't taste like almonds.

That 1611 liter figure looks like nonsense the second you dig into it, if the link even went anywhere. Random google result when you google the quote that responds to the source of the claim: https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/almond-milk-water-usage

A more reputable source would be https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks which lists almond milk as half the freshwater volume of dairy milk, and far better at every other metric (land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and eutrophication).

So you'd have to stretch things much farther than you did in your post for dairy milk to have an edge over almond milk. And even if you somehow did it, then dairy milk would have to then beat out soy milk which is even better than almond milk in all of these metrics, which it won't. If you care about environmental impact, dairy milk just isn't going to be in the cards. Let it take the L.

You're comparing whole oranges with orange slices. When comparing vegan food with animal protein, bother to take into account the entire package rather than one part. Animals are actually a much more energy intensive source of nutrition, and excellent for efficiency in terms of calories delivered. Our bodies process more nutrients from animal protein, while deriving nutrition from grains is a more recent evolution for us. You could easily feed entire villages with a couple of cows (as is done even today in many parts of the world). And this isn't including their value as milk producers and fertilizer generators.

On the other hand, almonds are a very niche crop, grown for a select few types of customers, but the sheer concentration of their agriculture in California - that too by a single farming billionaire family, the Resnicks - has caused the situation to become dire to such an extent never seen before in any other place.

<2% of input calories become beef calories. <4% of input protein becomes beef protein. Animal food products require an eye-watering amount more land than plant food products, even milk.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

It is always more efficient to grow and eat plant protein directly like tofu. And even if it were true that you absorb fewer nutrients from something like tofu, then aren't you lucky, you get to eat more food.

While you are correct, you also have to consider the fact that cows are fed alfalfa, which is a crop that requires no fertilizer or pesticides and actually produces excess nitrogen fertilizer, which otherwise must be produced from natural gas. It also takes very little physical labor to harvest and store grasses and alfalfa compared to human food sources.

The only downside to alfalfa and feeding cows with it is the water usage, but for large parts of the country that aren't California and get decent rainfall, growing alfalfa takes no irrigation. You could maybe also consider the land area needed for it, but US cropland utilization has been dropping for decade after decade and isn't really a concern.

I eat alfalfa too, and sell some in my shop. But neither me or the cows eat only that: we like to diversify our intake to stay healthy and (global or local) logistic bring us a variety of other food/nutrients.

Sure some cows eat more alfalfa than me but most of them never taste a bit of that and only knows corn, soy and friends.

Some other superplants in the soy/quinoa category to consider: buckwheat and lupinus. Yummy.

    > but doesn't consume a lot of water

If the area around Sacramento is "hot-summer Mediterranean", wouldn't there be a lot of natural evaporation of this water, so you need to constantly replenish it to keep the fields flooded?

I recall reading that rice field flooding in those parts is also helping with recharging the aquifers somewhat, the depletion of which has been a major problem in the CA central valley. The rice fields hold the water for longer than if it just drained into the delta, giving some of it time to percolate down.

Some responders have challenged my assertion that Sacramento is a desert. I concede the point - it's actually classified as Mediterranean.

That said, rice consumes a lot of irrigation water:

"In California, there is very little to no rainfall during the rice growing season, so this is not usually considered in water budgets. On average, about 5 acre feet/acre (AF/ac) of irrigation water is applied to a rice field during the growing"

https://ucanr.edu/sites/RiceTestSite/files/328501.pdf

Also, rice is not a particularly big water consumer compared to other crops - it's just one that came to mind. You could pick from dozens of others - Almonds, pistachios, etc.

California simply uses a LOT of water to produce a LOT of food, about half of it being exported.

Are you saying California shouldn’t export food? It’s one of the best food growing environments on the planet.

Well if you wish for California to become the next Sahelian desert, sure. California is already on track to become one adverse climate event away from turning into a complete clusterfuck.

CA's central valley is missing ~140 million acre feet of groundwater relative to historical norms, and is pumping an additional ~15 million acre feet a year. Ban that and desalinate 30 million acre feet of oceanwater at $2000 per acre-foot and you can have your cake and eat it too at a cost of 60 billion dollars a year, expand agriculture and develop a sustainable aquifer & watershed.

But central valley agriculture only makes $37 billion a year.

I think he is referring to Golf Courses:

"Golf courses in the US occupy roughly 2 million acres, which is larger than the state of Delaware but smaller than Connecticut."

"California almond growers use between 4.7 to 5.5 million acre-feet of water annually, representing roughly 14.4% to 16.75% of the state's agricultural water consumption"

WHAT THE H#$%?

That water grows 77% of all almonds, worldwide.

Is there some better use for roughly 15% of California's water consumption?

Are you sure?

Yes, leave it in the ground. It isn't a renewable resource on any relevant time scale.

If you want almonds, grow them elsewhere, or switch to desalination.

If "grow them elsewhere" were plausible, California wouldn't be growing 77% of them.

Why? Id truly be interested to know what makes Californian geography so massively advantages competitively that isn't infrastructure or economics of scale

Also exclude cheaper water prices for almond grows then residential.

Most California lowlands like the Central Valley sit on alluvial plains where water runoff from the mountains evaporated over millions of years, depositing nutrients dissolved from rock. It’s like the Nile river delta but over time instead of flooding every year. They were also once an ocean, so there’s a very deep layer of fossilized organisms that provide nutrients too.

There’s other reasons like California’s climate supporting a double growing season for many plants but the fertility is what really makes it so economically competitive. Farmers still have to use tons of NPK fertilizer like everyone else but most of the micronutrients are already in the ground so it’s a lot easier to get high yields with low risk and little micro optimization.

The Central Valley is an incomprehensibly vast area of incredibly fertile soil, due to its history as a seabed and collection basin of all the mineral runoff from the mountains. It also has California weather, which means one of the longest growing seasons on the planet. Crops grown there grow faster and easier than anywhere else to begin with, and then on top of that you get to grow them twice in one year. It's really kind of unfair when you compare to farmers trying to scratch out a crop anywhere else.

That said... it's not like California is the only place it's possible to grow almonds, or even to grow them profitably. It's just the most profitable place, especially if you're exporting to a US- or Western-centric market. And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.

How much should society value a change in the risk of The Big One happening in the next decade by, say, 1%? Or a similar increased risk of thousands dying of thirst in an increasingly hot summer? Or even just a extra few weeks of water rationing being in place every other year? Probably a lot more than what the almond farms are collectively paying for their water.

I do actually believe that markets can solve a lot of problems - but in order to do so, pricing needs to include the entirety of the transaction. Right now, water - especially bulk use of water - appears cheap, because our future selves or children are unknowingly kicking in part of what's being paid. Non-renewable resources like this need to be a lot more expensive in places where they're scarce, or else they're going to become extremely expensive at some point in the future.

[1] - https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/can-climate-af...

> And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.

Exactly. Capitalism is already a contestable proposition, but capitalism with infinite money cheats for some?

Without proper accounting of externalities, capitalism does not work even in theory. This means water and all natural resources, it means pollution, it means harmful products like tobacco or social media, it means big cars... So on so on

That's a bit silly.

Almonds are grown in California and not so much elsewhere, because with California's broken water policies you can grow them there for cheaper than elsewhere.

If California were to implement proper water pricing (eg via water trading), then the production costs of almonds in California would rise. And they might rise above the costs in other places, thus leading to a shift in production.

Have a look at water trading in Australia to see a good example of how that can shape agricultural practices. The Australian water trading system ain't perfect, but it's a lot better than the Californian mess. And it allowed agriculture to grow in dollar terms, despite severe limitations on the amount of available water.

No, almonds are grown in California because of a uniquely favorable climate. They're profligate with water because they're allowed to get away with it.

If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: https://wcngg.com/2018/08/02/subsurface-drip-irrigation-has-...

More to the point, if water had a market-clearing price, California would stop growing so much alfalfa. Alfalfa uses half, half, of California's water, and California has no unique advantages at all in growing alfalfa.

But to reiterate, your first paragraph is absurd and very silly indeed. Lots of places have super cheap water but California still grows four out of five almonds on Earth. It baffles me that you thought cheap water was a plausible explanation for this.

Underpriced water contributes to California's almond growing. I did not wish to imply that it's the sole cause of all of California's almond growing.

Obviously, there are plenty of places on earth that have essentially free water, and almost none of them grow almonds.

> If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: [...]

Yes, of course. But that investment costs more money compared to what they are getting away with today, so on the margin we would see less almonds grown in California.

Your suggestion that a reasonably priced water would drop alfalfa production in California a lot more than almond production seems reasonable.

(A slight complication: the fields currently growing alfalfa would presumably grow something else instead of lying fallow. As a second order effect that might lead to more almonds being grown. It would depend on a lot of factors.)

They can also grow almonds where it actually rains and requires little to no irrigation. Just because destructive exploitation of natural resources makes producing almonds 5% cheaper, that doesn't mean it is the only way or place to grow almonds.

Wait, the migrating birds need the wetlands that the rice pairs imitate. It's not as bad as you think. The whole central valley was wetlands, this is better than draining all of it for alfalfa or almonds.

California right now has an endorheic basin which is rapidly subsiding due to groundwater draws, and that doesn't really work for agriculture in the long term. We need to re-establish a gradient to the ocean, and a limited wetland system, to flush out the salts if nothing else.

The almond lobby is incredibly powerful in California, too.

Okay, it may seem strange to rob the homeland to feed the world, but think geopolitics.

Firstly, the water mostly doesn't leave california. If they're exporting dried rice and almonds and things like that, most of the irrigation water is staying right where it was used, correct? You say water is consumed, as if it goes away or vanishes? Evaporated water or underground water is also water.

Secondly, you're giving jobs and supporting the local economy. Farmers purchase supplies, capital goods, they pay property taxes, and first and foremost they employ people. They employ large workforces. All that revenue they received from selling wherever they sell is stimulating local economies.

Lastly, exporting food is great international relations. What country will attack you when they depend on you for food? What nation will not be grateful for receiving such basic sustenance from overseas? And if we would go to war, and if you want to shut down all this agriculture, what will we eat on the home front? If we can't import food, we'd better have infrastructure to support our own needs. Any nation [state, county, city] that produces excess food is more likely to withstand siege, blockade or attack.

Liquor and soda bottlers can pivot to producing and distributing hand sanitizer or bottled water. If beer or Coke is bad for you, keep drinking it anyway, because you never know when that industry will become indispensable.

I think your first paragraph misses the mark a bit. Yes, the export of almonds probably represents a tiny amount of water leaving the system. But this isn't about that, this is about water allocation. At the end of the day, if there isn't enough water being allocated for daily use ("don't flush your toilet") BUT there's enough to export so many almonds, something has gone wrong.

> something has gone wrong

Wrong for you individually, perhaps, but please note that "The Good of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few", and as citizens of the Western Empire, we are called to make sacrifice in order that justice be done in the world. My personal private toilet is insignificant and inconsequential compared to the almighty almond.

bah. Eventually, Poe comes for us all.

Grass is not America's largest crop, but it is by far the most wasteful.

Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive. There are optimizations you can make with regards to which kind of agriculture is done where.

If the only way you can grow almonds is by mining water out of an aquifer that will deplete in a decade, maybe we should go without almonds. The juice is not worth the squeeze.

> The juice is not worth the squeeze.

Water pricing via water trading would help move these considerations of trade-offs to the private sector.

> Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive.

Just as a silly nitpick: you can make food without agriculture. And it's not just via wild fishing, but also by directly producing edible substances from minerals, like producing margarine from coal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter

In general, you are obviously right, though.

The "real farms" (Ie beef, dairy, grains, corns) you mentioned are absorbing on the order of 80 percent of the water, not commercial and private lawns/grass.

Hobby farms with several cows and a shop that sells maple syrup consum eabout 1/10000th a percent of water as for example con-agra suppliers, nestle etc.

There is the constantly rotating story of "this one small family farm in colorado uses more of california's water than LA county". That is a LARGE conglomerate farm which is part of the corporate farm problem, not mom and pop farms.

I assure you;In the USA specifically, your families ability to eat and provide food for the things we eat WILL be more important in the long run than bathing or washing clothes, until we decide that beef proteins aren't the msot sustainable.

While that's true it has very little to do with Mexico City's specific issues. It's at 7300 feet elevation surrounded by a ring of mountains that keep out a lot of the rain and moisture, and there's already not that much agriculture going on given the limited space.

I don't know anything about water allocation and provisioning in Mexico City, but the article itself doesn't limit itself to Mexico city either:

"It exemplifies a future that cities worldwide could face if global warming and overpopulation continue."

The city where I live is, I'm sure, very different from Mexico City, but we have reduced our water usage while the population has grown, thanks to things like xeriscaping. I imagine things are more difficult in Mexico City because there is less money, and orders of magnitude more people.

> we have reduced our water usage while the population has grown

I don't know where you live, but if it is a city like most others, you've likely reduced your per-capita water use, but not total water use. This is certainly true of most cities in the American west. They have made impressive (above 30%) reductions in per-capita water use, but they have (in many cases) grown by more than that.

I hate when they promote the use of low-flow toilets which save 1-2 gallons when compared to irrigation of farm land measured in acre-inches of water. A acre-inch of water is 27,000 gallons. Corn needs 12 acre-inches to grow to maturity, or over 325,000 per acre.

that sounds a lot like where i live (bend, or)

That's where I am

https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug... is really informative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com