Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

So what happens when they run out of water? Are there water sources that are just undrinkable that can be cleaned up; similar to fracking now being cheap enough to compete with OPEC is there no water or just no drinkable water? Can they just "ship" or "pipe" the water in from neighboring states or are they too on the edge of a draught. Is this country-wide, just Western states, or just California and can other states give up water without risking throwing them into a draught?

I know that's a bunch of questions but this article seems to raise more questions than it answers, at least for me.

View on HN

My understanding is that under most scenarios water for humans is fine, but agriculture will be totally dead in California.

Ahh, ok they hinted at that in the article but for some reason it didn't click in my head. I wonder if the farmers will just move to neighboring states (not that it's easy to pick up and move a farm....) losing farms in California would be a huge loss:

> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list [1] goes on and on). [0]

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/files/2agovstat10_web-1.pdf

Is this an issue of price? Charging more for water? Or is outright rationing without doing any price hikes the only viable option?

Yes it's an issue of price, but in a market that doesn't function very well. Water, ironically, is not very "liquid" in the economic sense.

Over time, people will have to pay more for their produce. Some farms will shut down and some crops will stop being grown. If the price of water goes high enough, then desalination or new pipelines from wetter areas will start to make sense.

I think so too. There's no reason we have to subsidize agriculture in CA. The one question is do the farmers have some legal claim or right to access the water at non-market rates?

It's not as though the drought just stops at the border of California, so that probably won't be practical.

While true, it's also surprisingly like that- basically, the Sierra Nevadas have been blocking the weather that gave the rest of the country severe flooding last year.

But the agriculturally impacted area is, essentially, the central valley, which is entirely in California.

There are areas of Oregon and Arizona impacted by the same general drought, but they are a drop in the bucket (pun partially intended).

> [...] losing farms in California would be a huge loss:

CA produce is not evenly geographically distributed. Production in the coastal ranges is less affected by the drought (compared to the Central Valley), but coastal production is skewed towards fruits and vegetables.

Central Valley production is skewed towards Alfalfa (most of which is exported to China) and Almonds. Both of those are extremely water-intensive to produce and contribute almost no calories to the average American diet (and even less to the poor).

So, cutting off water to Central Valley farmers will have a smaller effect than most predict.

Which in turn means US will have to do with about 50% less vegetable/crop to consume.

No, because the price would go up and some of the crop would get grown in other states. Hard to say what the exact percentage would stabilize at, though, and it certainly takes a long time to plant orchards, etc.

But what is the percentage of income taken by produce? Not very high, I'd guess. Probably affect the poor the most.

Some crops would take years to rebound, like nuts, which are both water intensive and take years to mature.

The US is a net food exporter by a large margin.

Which would still be absolutely catastrophic considering how much of US (and world, for that matter) supplies of produce come from CA.

Not really. If the US opened up its agricultural markets much more to the rest of the world, there will be no shortage of suppliers. Problem is that to sell crops to the US there is a maze of regulations and tariffs.

and the practise of subsidies to over produce then forcibly dump the product on other countries, decimating their local farming economies as they are not allowed to add import tariffs and subsidize their industries as that is anti-competitive

What's far more interesting is that that will result in massive numbers of unemployed non-citizen farm workers right after Obama grants them work permits by executive order.

And that's going to happen right before the 2016 presidential election.

Because humans don't eat, right?

This. What it really means is that we won't be able to grow crops in the desert which is the central valley region. And that means that prices for foods will go up, and we'll not be able to use the corn belt for just corn, or conversely growing something other than corn there will be more profitable.

It really is too bad we couldn't build a water pipeline of some scale to help folks like Boston out with their excess snow.

A lot of water in California goes to farming. They'll have to close farms, which will drive up prices of produce.

About HALF of produce consumed in US comes central part of California. Exact ratio depends on the type of crop though. And it takes a LOT of water for all the crop.

So it's not really the green lawns or swimming pools.

Until new farms capitalize on the opportunity to capture the market in places where there's an abundance of water.

Which could take years.

Get real. Where is there that has the same amount of arable land and infrastructure and semi-skilled labor to just ramp up to where California is now?

The entire Midwest and plains states. They would just need to switch from growing field corn to something that people can actually eat.

It's not that simple. Farm crops are what works well for the soil and climate of that region. You don't see fields of corn in California because it's not an attractive climate for corn. Likewise, you don't see fields of broccoli in Iowa, for the same reasons.

Midwest corn mostly goes to feed for cattle, hogs, and chickens. The corn may not be really great human food, but it gets made into great human food through an extra process step.

You don't see fields of corn in California because it's not an attractive climate for corn.

Why? I've seen corn grown in California. I think the lack of corn has more to do with the ability to grow more profitable crops than corn in California.

I can't see why corn wouldn't grow well here.

Oh, it would grow. It's just not optimum use of the land.

Meanwhile, nothing is worth growing in the midwest unless it can handle real thunderstorms and real winter. A lot of vegetables rely on a mild climate. Our CSA farm grows a wide variety of vegetables, but they regularly lose parts of their crop to hail, late freezes, and other situations that just don't happen in California.

The Eastern US is awash in water and has a ton of underutilized, fallow land that is already cleared. The workers can migrate as they already do. We can rebuild our greenhouse industry to get winter vegetables.

Migrant workers will move a lot more easily than a whole agricultual and peripheral industries. They aren't going to willingly abandon productive land in California so long as no one forces them to stop sucking water out of the ground. If water rights laws are abrogated toward the approximate reality that everyone owns that water, and only a fraction can properly be removed such that this maintaining the productivity of California agricultural land is non-competitive compared to other areas of the country, that'd be the free-market solution. But that implodes both the tax and voter based in California, so the incentive now is that the politics will dictate the continued legislated alternative to a market solution. Both the politicians favor this as does the agricultural business interests. Imagine some 35% of California farmland being made fallow, how does California replace that tax base? One of the reasons why it's such a rich state is because of its massive agriculture. Just in wine alone it'd be like saying, OK France can't grow grapes anymore. No matter whether you go with a market solution, a legislated solution, or a hybrid solution, it's all just plain icky. The technical solution is how to cheapen desalination such that it keeps California sufficiently competitive, i.e. things get more expensive but not untenably so.

Only on HackerNews are people silly enough to think you have the scalability of virtual infrastructure in the physical world. Farms measure lead times in years.

EDIT: I help my uncle manage a farm in Florida. The startup times are seriously ridiculous.

Not only in Hacker News, but otherwise agreed with you.

And is this drought not also taking years? It think it's reasonable to expect the farm markets to capitalistically take advantage of California's decline, even if it does take years.

The drought is going to start pinching farms in one year. This thread is about whether the California government should start rationing water now.

I don't see any indication that treehau5 thinks farm-related infrastructure is as easily scalable as tech-sector infrastructure nor did treehau5 suggest it would not take years.

Spoken like a true city dweller. Like other have alluded to, farmers think in terms of years. Ever hear the expression "the best time to plant a fruit tree was 5 years ago". I wonder where that came from.

"...and the second best time is today"

Grew up in a small town in NC. Agriculture and textiles were the biggest industries, outside of banking "in the city"

Ever heard the expression "assumptions make an ass out of you?"

There is plenty of drinking water, this is an agricultural issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com