Hacker News Reader

Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

They're not going to grow it if they can't sell it, nor are they going to grow it if the water stops being free. We shouldn't be growing alfalfa, for export, in the desert, with free water, and subsidizing the farmers on top of it to encourage even more of it.

It's nothing more than purchasing votes with tax dollars and limited natural resources.

View on HN

Please reread my statement:

> the alfalfa is a soil restorer

So, yes, the agribusinesses WILL grow that alfalfa even if they can't sell it.

Now, you can factually dispute me since I am by no means a California agribusiness expert. However, it is my understanding that alfalfa is uniquely suited to the soil restoration required for the agribusinesses to cycle their fields more quickly.

It is also my understanding that part of the reason why alfalfa can be shipped so cheaply is because you need to return shipping containers back to origin to ship something else and those containers would be empty otherwise.

So, this is a perfect storm of alfalfa that would be grown anyway only to be plowed under being too expensive to ship except for the fact that the shipping is almost free due to the containers being returned to origin.

But the water. What about the water necessary to "restore the soil". The soil in question of course, was non-productive desert 50 years ago. We are doing input intensive farming in areas where the complex supply chain necessary to support is causing what some people call "externalities". Others, the tragedy of the commons. Well run societies try to use regulation to keep this from happening.

Those are two different and separate arguments.

"We shouldn't be growing anything out there." is an argument that the agribusinesses don't want to have.

"We shouldn't be growing alfalfa out there." is a nice distraction argument that the agribusinesses are happy to have because it concedes that we should be farming the area.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com