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Comment by rjett | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I have no clue if what I'm proposing is realistic or not, but:

Perhaps the federal government should step in and gradually step down the level of subsidies given to farmers in California and gradually increase subsidies given to NEW farmers in other, more water rich parts of the country. This would have the effect of moving farms to more sustainable locations in the country. Sure, the types of crops produced would change and consumer demands would have to shift with that, but that isn't the worst thing in the world.

Another solution is to allow utilities to drastically increase water prices for communities that import most of their water anyways.

All in all, both solutions are geared towards population displacement in unsustainable locations. Just as New Orleans is probably destined for another Katrina, SoCal is probably destined to be a desert despite the demands we've put on the land in the last century.

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My understanding is that California is so ideal for agriculture because of its climate (with the water scarcity being the big liability, the can we've been kicking down the road for decades). Other states, either individually or collectively, do not have the year-round, Mediterranean, relatively predictable climate to take on the load that California would drop. This includes not only total square acreage of arable, mild farmland, but also a bevy of specific crops that cannot be grown reliably in other states. (There are certainly wetter states, but they have seasonal extremes that make X, Y, Z crops very challenging.)

When it comes to agriculture, California is in the rare position of being a jack of all trades and master of most. That is, until the water runs out. Then it starts to look more like the mild, but semiarid desert it was before we engineered it to run on various, unsustainable water sources.

That being said, the subsidies have certainly placed us in a predicament -- a wildly unstable dependency -- that will be extremely tough to unwind. Something has got to change on that front, and quickly.

There are other places in the world where these crops can be grown. People in those countries will be more than happy to trade us almonds, rice, bananas and the like in exchange for things we are great at producing like software and music.

It's a win-win.

I like to remind you that we, as mere lowly humans, require food grown on a farm to survive a lot more so than we need software or music. If we collapse our agricultural backbone and just willy-nilly decide to depend upon a foreign nation for food, then be prepared to fight a lot more "oil wars" (except for human fuel and not just car fuel).

Furthermore, we'd be putting our trust into the governments and politicians of foreign nations. And, quite honestly, despite all the shit we see about our politicians being corrupt, cheating on their wives, embezzling thousands of dollars a year, letting the rich get away with billions in tax loopholes, being stupid in congress, being radical not-born-in-murica communists, etc., at least keep in mind we at least see them in all their human imperfections (and sometimes less-than-human vices), whereas we have absolutely no idea what the hell goes on behind the closed doors and smokescreens at a foreign government. Politics and power is inherently a very difficult game of balancing flexible compromises and hardline stoicism, not a place for cults of personalities and naive idealism.

As for me, I'd much rather trust the politician who is getting publicly crucified for having told a racist joke 10 years ago, flirted a little too much with some girl not his wife, is a closest homosexual, tweeted something dumb like "#killasians lolwat", or committed some other sensationalist-media-breaking-news-but-realistically-inconsequential-to-his-character "sin" than the perfect politician who has never commit any sin and who no one dares to speak ill against (e.g. today's chairman Xi).

You wrote some jingoist 19th-century bullshit. You're ready to fight in World War 1.

The idea that we need to protect strategic resources is outdated. We continue to do so, at our own detriment. Our sugar costs something like 5x what it costs in the rest of the world, because we place tariffs to keep it from coming in from the Caribbean. We are DESTROYING WEALTH CREATION with this market engineering. It is a tax that we see no benefit from and that is paid to no one.

Increased trade between countries increases stability. Some of my college classmates thought that we were due for a war with China just b/c they're the other huge power. What horseshit--- our mutual trade requires our politicians to play nice and not take any Crassian steps towards war.

If the US actually needed to make sure that we produced all of our strategic resources by ourselves then our economy would be tanked because we wouldn't be taking advantage of factories in BRIC. Do you think we make all the hard drives we would need to sustain a war against the rest of the world?

Loosing control over rare earth metals played out very well. For China.

Not being able to produce enough wood tanked Soviet Union.

I'm not familiar with the wood theory of the downfall of the Soviet Union. Link? I figured it was their centrally planned economy.

Yeah, so China has most rare earth metals. Are you advocating imperialism and occupation? Do we have evidence that they are managing their resource in an abusive way? (After a bit of reading, it appears that China does have large export restrictions. That market inefficiency is being solved by smuggling. :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China#Hi... )

Of course there are multiple factors for collapse of SU but from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_goods_in_the_Soviet_Un...

> By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of 1991, > nearly every kind of food was rationed. > Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually > disappeared from state owned stores.

Do you think that people were happy about this kind of situation?

China was not the only producer of rare earth metals but they used dumping and by that made production of rare earth metals unprofitable elsewhere. After other producers closed their plants, they started to heavily increase the rare earth metal prices.

The problem here is that you expect history to indicate future performance. You expect each country to act morally instead of what's in their best (monetary) interest. How are wars fought these days? Sanctions, it has happened in recent history. Now what is a nation to do when a sanction against them on food imports? One thing is for sure, it'll help solve a population problem.

The Midwest grows enough crops to feed the whole country if some major disaster or famine happened.

The Midwest is rapidly depleting its own water supply as well.

"About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies the aquifer, which yields about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and 2009 alone. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

The core Midwest doesn't depend on that. The great plains do, but Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, etc. don't. You would probably get bored as fuck with corn and soy beans. But it would v feed tons of people if we didn't feed it to cows or gas tanks.

1. "Software or music" doesn't require water... most of them anyways.

2. Software / data and more modern approaches to agriculture can potentially optimize water usage.

3. startup / company opportunity here, if the policy makers can incentivize the agriculture industry to innovate instead of keeping the old inefficient ways.

"Ricardo's Difficult Idea" is an essay that provides a good online education in economics and why trade makes everyone richer, as demonstrated not just by history but also by mathematics.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

Food security is the reason governments stick their noses in an otherwise free market.

Even if we accept that argument, which I think is a little far-fetched given the countries that would need to get on board for a hypothetical food embargo against the US to be effective, there's no national security implications to almonds and there are good substitutes for rice and cotton.

In a real pinch the agricultural production dedicated to ethanol can be redirected to food, and perhaps most importantly even a small shift in the meat/plant balance towards plants creates a huge calorie surplus.

In short, food security looks more like a post hoc rationalization than a good justification for our terrible policy landscape when it comes to agriculture.

> and there are good substitutes for rice

American culture can replace it with wheat, yes, but if you ever want a case study on government fiddling with a crop for national security reasons, rice is it. Not in the US, but Asia? It's probably on par with oil.

I think it has more to do with straightforward nationalism. Yes, we could all be sweetening our products with cane sugar and equatorial sugar farmers could be making a great deal of money. But instead we have high tarriffs on sugar cane and subsidies for corn farmers. Why? Because the corn farmers are Americans, and the equatorial farmers are not.

Could it possibly have anything to do with 85% of corn being produced coming from Monsanto seeds?

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/can-we-feed-our-world-without-mon...

They do spend millions of dollars lobbying the government every year.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000005...

Soy seems to be in a similar situation to corn.

Which can also be phrased as "unemployed Americans farmers are burdens on American systems, unemployed equatorial farmers are not."

Not that I don't think the sugar subsidies specifically are nonsense, the structural reasons that food subsidies exist is sound.

Although I would not consider myself an expert, I know it is far more complicated than you appear to think it is. It is not just the climate, as previously mentioned, or the access to fresh water sources, it is also the fertility and durability of the topsoil. There are significant tradeoffs regarding the productivity and soil durability that lead to depletion or pollution because our demand is far beyond sustainable supply.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the human population is far too large and puts far too many demands and strains on nature for anything like sustainability.

So, someone may bring up large scale hydroponics, especially of genetically modified produce, but that is really just another can being kicked down the road, because no matter how many tricks you come up with and how hard you push the pendulum, it will eventually come swinging back with a vengeance, especially the farther it is pushed out of its range.

> I know it is far more complicated than you appear to think it is

Agreed, definitely a thorny issue, and there probably isn't a simple fix. And even if the fix were as simple as "cut off subsidies for water-intensive crops", that would itself be hard in today's political climate.

> no matter how many tricks you come up with and how hard you push the pendulum, it will eventually come swinging back with a vengeance, especially the farther it is pushed out of its range.

Source? Human population is supposed to top out around 10-12B, last I checked, and then level out or even drop off a little bit. In a pinch, modern agriculture could probably feed that many, just with today's methods, but that would mean less in the way of meat and resource-intensive foods like almonds.

There are resource scarcities (e.g. oil, fresh water), but food is not really one of them.

"...it is far more complicated than you appear to think it is..."

I apologize if I appeared to be simplifying the issue. That was not my intent and is not the limit of my understanding (though I am certainly no expert, either). But climate is a major limiting factor for other states, even before we get into the nittier grittier details of soil composition and fertility, topography, preexisting transportation infrastructure, and so forth. Totally agree with you that there are a lot more complications and issues involved than just climate, and again, very sorry if I gave the impression otherwise.

So what's your suggestion? Unless you're suggesting we just start killing people off I don't see how anyone's supposed to act on the idea that there are too many people.

The overpopulation myth will be the next political distraction just like the climate change reality.

The fact is even in developing countries -- when women are educated and have access to contraception -- most families have 2 children. This is now becoming a reality, even in developing countries like Bangladesh the fertility rate is something like 2.2. Only Africa has higher fertility rates.

The real problems are with resources, like water, food and energy. When the developing countries become developed, and everyone has a washing machine and fridge, that's when the fun starts.

It's also often promulgated as a "we should just let people in the third world die" kind of thing, even though, objectively, first worlders are consuming way more resources. That makes it pretty distasteful to me.

Yes... Destroying an entire industry in a country is a win win...

It seems that we have the choice of either:

1. Destroying the farming industry 2. Destroying the land entirely, and then destroying the farming industry.

The current situation is proof that the current level of agriculture is unsubstainable.

As a reference, a few quick searches[1] show that it takes:

5.4 gallons of water to grow a single head of broccoli

4.9 gallons of water to grow a single walnut

1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo...

I'm a biased vegan but...

802.7 gallons of water for one pound of beef

187.969 gallons of water for one pound of vegetables

Agriculture consumes 2/3rds of California's water, most of which goes to growing and feeding farmed animals.

Source: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=cal/WaterFootprintCalcul... (Used United States for country)

As a biased omnivore, it would probably be a bit more useful to compare the calorie content of 1 lb of beef vs 1 lb of vegetables. I understand the point you're getting at but the bias might be a little bit too strong there.

Definitely a fair point.

http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/Animal-products

shows 10.19 litres/calorie beef vs 1.34 liters/calorie vegetables. Which is an even greater distance than the gallons per pound I mentioned. This obvioulsy can't be right. I will argue that theory wise it makes sense that a plant based diet would use less than a diet consisting of eating animals that ate the plant based diet. The animals are expending energy! You could argue that we can feed animals lower water usage plants than we can feed humans, but does that really make a healthy animal for human consumption?

That said, there are other negatives associated with beef production and consumption :).

Also - not all calories are created equal.

As a meat-loving animal, this made me feeling a bit worse...

What if meat is imported from areas/states/countries where there is no water problem.

And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?

> What if meat is imported from areas/states/countries where there is no water problem.

It often is.

> And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?

California imports fruits and vegetables from other states and countries already.

Some completely arbitrary choices for comparison that may or may not be representative:

90% Lean Beef: 798 calories per pound

80% Lean Beef: 1152 calories per pound

Carrots: 186 calories per pound

Potatoes: 354 calories per pound

Using GP's numbers for gallons/pound:

90% Lean Beef: .994 calories per gallon

80% Lean Beef: 1.435 calories per gallon

Carrots: .990 calories per gallon

Potatoes: 1.883 calories per gallon

Much closer than I was expecting. I was also not expecting numbers on the order of magnitude of one calorie per gallon...

"Vegetables" are the wrong thing too look at.

Soybeans have about 2000 calories / lb, based on the number Google gives me of 446 calories / 100g. A random website claims soybeans take 200 gallons of water to produce 1 lb, which comes out to about 10 calories / gallon.

That said, you can make huge gains just by switching from beef to pork or chicken. Pork uses about half the resources of beef, per pound, and chicken about a third. Eat your beefs for special occasions, eat chicken and pork if you want every-day meats.

Not sure I believe the animals are getting most of it in California but either way that's something that can be easily moved out of state. Almonds can't.

Correct. There are only a few areas in the world almonds can be commercially grown. California is one.

Cattle can be grown lots of places.

Growing water intensive crops like rice in California, which it grows a good deal of, is just stupid. That is an industry which needs to die. I'd argue the same for almonds, which are basically a water intensive cash crop.

Almonds use 10% of the state's water supply. The irony is that almonds and apricots have been grown in the Santa Clara valley and surrounding areas without irrigration until tech booms led to orchards being pulled out and replaced with office complexes.

That is an interesting and ironic thing to consider. And I think it's probably inevitable that California shifts its crop mix away from things like almonds, even if at one point they had been grown sustainably (and certainly rice, which is patently unsustainable, but easier to draw down from). Olives, for instance, grow very well in California and are a lot less water intensive than almonds and other trees in the stonefruit family. The downside is that trees take a long time to grow to productive maturity, and phasing one species out for another cannot be done overnight. I have no idea if a phase-out of one in favor of the other is already underway, and I would hazard a guess that if it is, it's proceeding glacially. But some sort of phase-out seems essential.

California's water reserves can't sustain the ridiculously wasteful agriculture that Californian farmers have been growing for decades, and a huge amount of California's water use is going towards agriculture to grow almonds, rice, and grapes in the desert.

Those crops are going to have to come from somewhere else pretty soon regardless.

Except when it's inconsistent with its environment in the first place. All the government subsidies in the world can't make water be where it isn't.

There are many politically active people who would starve the American public to death if necessary to prevent the exportation of riches from the US to foreign nationals.

The same mega corporations that run agriculture in the U.S. also run most agriculture throughout the world.

I just read a story the other day how Iranian almond farmers were lamenting the trade sanctions sitting on tons of them while US exporters grabbed their market

You can pirate software and music, but you can't pirate almonds and rice.

We don't want to have to rely on other nations for our food supply.

There seems to be a significant distinction between staples and "food supply" and the high-value specialty fruits/vegetables grown in the central valley.

The US will never need to rely on other nations for their corn, rice, wheat, apples, barley, etc. But if the choice is between destroying our own land and infrastructure or relying on other countries for our kiwis, artichokes, avocados and almonds, then I might actually be okay with eating Mexican avocados (and I think the Mexican farmers might appreciate that too).

We can still grow crops in California without water subsidies. In places where water is more expensive, like Israel, farmers invest more in water-saving technology in their farms. And probably grow less water-intensive crops like rice.

With the fun side effect of taking away Palestinian land and water. Everyone wins.

> (There are certainly wetter states, but they have seasonal extremes that make X, Y, Z crops very challenging.)

Then perhaps we as a culture should stop eating X, Y and Z so much.

I think simply phasing out water subsidies would be a huge win. I've read a fair number of reports suggesting that, while not great, the situation would be considerably improved if farmers had an incentive to invest in more efficient irrigation techniques or switch to more drought-tolerant crops. The catch is that it costs money and that's risky if you're the first one in the industry doing it – if the government announced that, say, the current subsidies would be reduced 10% a year starting in couple years that'd send a message to everyone that it's safe to take out loans because all of your competitors are going to have to do the same thing.

There's a related issue of perennial, tree, and more orchard-like agriculture rather than seasonal crops. These farmers cannot reduce their water consumption without suffering massive losses - they're price insensitive on water to a large extent, and their choices are irrigate or go bankrupt.

IIRC, avocado trees are a big culprit for California's future commitment to consuming water for agricultural purposes.

Avocados are produced much more efficiently in Michoacán. Now that 85% of avocados sold in USA are imported, the conversion of these orchards to more sustainable agriculture would be less of a blow to the consumer.

The underlying problem here is that there isn't enough water to go around. There three outcomes:

1. Farmers stop growing more wasteful crops which are very water intensive and peak consumption drops below the crisis level 2. Avocado farmers raise prices based on increased costs 3. Some avocado farmers can no longer compete with avocado farmers in wetter areas of the US or Mexico

I'm certain we'd see some combination of all three and that any of those outcomes would be preferable to what we're doing now where the combination of a severely distorted market and a patchwork quilt of existing water rights & management districts ensures that market forces are applied very inconsistently if at all.

" Some avocado farmers can no longer compete with avocado farmers in wetter areas of the US or Mexico"

And therein lies a thorny political issue. Generally speaking, when this sort of shift starts happening, farmers and agribusiness lobby the government (state and/or federal) for tariffs and subsidies, in order to protect their price competitiveness against foreign or out-of-state producers. This is a vicious cycle, and we need to find the political will to stop it when it comes. Which leads to further issues: can a governor of California get elected who is seen as hostile to Californian agriculture? Possibly, but oh man, would he or she be in for a fierce battle. Central CA is a very powerful voting bloc, and farm lobbies are very powerful at the state level and in D.C.

You're right - any trees or vines are an issue when it comes to drought management. When you lose a tree or vine, it can take multiple years to get back to productive levels. It's very different when you're planting seasonal crops and can choose to skip a season.

Judging by the number of protest signs (Water = Jobs, etc) I see every time I go through the Central Valley, and the increasing acreage that seems to be returning to desert conditions, this seems to have been happening for a while.

What would happen if the gov't did nothing?

1. Water would become more scarce in California. Not everyone would get what they need.

2. Price of produce would go up, since there is a smaller supply.

3. We'd start to import more produce (either from outside the country or other states) because the price is the same or lower than the new, higher CA price.

4. Other farmers, who don't grow what CA grows, would start to because it's more profitable as prices rise.

The gov't doesn't really have to do anything. That's the beauty of the free market.

I'm puzzled at the down votes you're receiving. I think you have a valid point and I generally have a similar perspective, but, in this case, it overlooks a significant externality: the destruction of the environment as rivers are pumped dry and (albeit, artificial) reservoirs run dry. Further, your solution could make the additional extraction of water quite profitable, which would further the destruction.

The straightforward solution is to internalize the externality via a progressive tax on water usage. Then, as you said, the free market can regulate itself.

Note: I'm not a fan of taxation, but it can be a good solution to managing externalities.

Or, do what we've done for roadways and electricity in this country (and to a lesser extent oil and water), and expand a "water grid" from the southwest to the midwest, and southeast... transporting water from water-rich locations to more drought-prone locations.

it overlooks a significant externality: the destruction of the environment as rivers are pumped dry and (albeit, artificial) reservoirs run dry

Not sure I understand. The rivers would run dry because of no rain, not because we're taking water from them. Remember all this water we're using for irrigation was just ending up in the ocean anyways.

Is the California produce you buy bone-dry? Probably not. It's full of that precious water. A lot may wind up in the ocean as runoff, but a lot gets exported from CA too. It eventually winds up back in the ecosystem, but the point is that it will take eons to get back into the acquifers.

The government is not an independent entity. Farmers (by which I include agribusiness corporations) vote and donate heavily to political causes. Further, the government is not a monolithic entity; you have the governor, various other elected officials, and then all the legislators in the assembly and state senate, plus all the people that California sends to Congress Washington DC. There are a lot of people who live in inland California whose economic well-being depends directly or indirectly on agriculture. As long as they participate in the political process, government is going to serve some of their interests because they keep electing people to vote for that.

This is the big trouble with libertarians right here. You keep being politically marginalized because you don't seem to appreciate that government is not some alien thing imposed from without, but the distillation of multiple (and often competing) collective interests. Just as 'war is a continuation of politics by other means,' politics is is a continuation of business by other means. Your 'free market' solution is only going to function if you exclude a bunch of people from the political process because their continued participation has become a major inconvenience for everyone else. As someone with technocratic inclinations I sometimes wish we could do that, because I think the farming lobby frequently epitomizes greed and stupidity. But shutting farmers out of politics would be a huge violation of our constitutional design, not to mention political suicide.

but government is doing something, they are pricing water too low currently artificially incentivizing farming and over use of water

But farmers aren't the only consumers of water, so is everyone that lives in CA. The issue as I see it is the drought combined with agriculture combine to drive the price of water up and it's unlikely the corrective (forcing farmers to migrate out of state to water rich locations) will happen before critical levels are hit for servicing residential populations and their needs.

Farmers are not the only consumers of water, but they consume approximately 80% of it. We are nowhere near running out of drinking water.

Water is allocated via water rights. Not sure the specifics, but I would guess the gov't has water priorities and wouldn't let SF go dry just to keep the farms going.

Let me see if I get this right: if the government doesn't do anything, the beautiful free market will automatically redistribute a scarce resource evenly between all the interested parts. Got it!

In any case, 2), 3), 4) doesn't seem to produce any beautiful fix for 1) in your list, apart from maybe stabilizing produce prices.

    other, more water rich parts of the country

My main question is: What are these other water rich part of the country that aren't already fully exploited for agriculture? Are there maps published somewhere that tell people where they can move to to establish farms elsewhere?

The US has lots of young forests that grew after people abandoned the area that used to be farmed.

If you ever go for a walk in the woods and wonder why the trees are all so (relatively) small, that's why.

There is plenty of room for more farmland. You will have to cut some trees, but that's always been the case.

I'm curious which places these are and why such areas were abandoned for farmland in the first place.

I can't speak for most places, but New Hampshire is almost all new-growth forest. If you roam the woods you'll find miles of ancient stone walls demarking the edges of long-gone farms. Of course, there's not much LAND in New Hampshire so it definitely can't take on California's role (even disregarding all the other problems), but I wanted to give an example of abandoned farmland.

How competitive is NH with a region like California weather-wise? I would imagine that the growing season is much shorter in NH, making it way less attractive. Farming in New England is either specific to the climate or exists mainly because that's where many Europeans first colonized America. Just because farming made economic sense there 50-100 years ago, doesn't mean that it makes economic sense there today.

You plant on memorial day, and harvest by labor day[1]. It is not going to make a dent in CA's food production.

[1] source: my family's garden when I was growing up.

My understanding is that the Northeast was primarily deforested for sheep farming. The stone walls delineate old paddocks for rotated grazing.

Most of the ground is really quite marginal; thin soil, rocky as sin, etc etc. It's possible it'd would be economically viable as pasture-land; it wouldn't surprise me if the only The West won as pasture land was that it was all essentially free out there. Maybe if the gov't charged competitive rates for grazing on public land (and was actually able to collect) you'd see a resurgence of Eastern pasture-land.

I have to say I'm a little tickled by the suggestion that we should deforest big tracts of land to address an environmental crisis.

All perfect solutions have already been implemented.

Everything else is a tradeoff.

the small trees are also a sign that that area was clear cut for lumber and replanted.

Where? I'm talking about more than a plot of land. Farmers also need all the institutional support features in agricultural regions that help moving their crops from farm to table.

Michigan (lower peninsula)? Seems to have a lot of undeveloped (forested) land. But I haven't done any actual research so may be badly wrong.

Also if CA agriculture becomes less productive & more expensive then many other parts of the country now become more competitive for agriculture (not cheaper - just worth putting into production)

This reminds me of a conversation I had a while back with some other folks like me who had grown up in Ohio. We were talking about what sort of program would help turn around Ohio's brain drain to the states of the South and West, which has been going on in various degrees since the collapse of the industrial Rust Belt.

My thought was that, in a few decades, you won't need a program to make living in Ohio attractive; all you'll have to do is say "Ohio is a place where free water falls from the sky" and people will come running.

Access to enormous amounts of fresh water in the form of the Great Lakes may very well be the Rust Belt's ace in the hole in the coming decades...

If the rest of the country could grow the same crops as "America's Salad Bowl" we would. California is ideal for those crops and without the large population would be fine.

It is probably past time to actually push desalination plants or convince a lot of people to move somewhere else.

The people consume only a fraction of the water and it's dishonest in the extreme to say that things would be "fine" without them. Each ton of alfalfa in California consumes more water than a family uses in a year and yet sells for $200. There were 13 million tons sold last year. If we got rid of the low-value forage crops, the people (who would pay a hell of a lot more than $200 a year) would have more than enough water.

So, as an intellectual exercise, if the Los Angeles and San Francisco metroplexes simply vanished, would there be enough water?

Agriculture is responsible for around 80% of California's water usage, so even if every person in the state vanished and the farming was done entirely by robots things wouldn't change much.

I don't know. Let's see.

LATimes has an article from last year on high and low residential per capita water usage (http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-californi...). Using that, let's estimate a .5kgal/person/day usage for San Diego and Orange counties, and a .05kgal/person/day usage for the San Francisco region. (The difference in those numbers was surprising.)

The most recent census numbers estimated the Orange County population to be ~3.1 million people, Los Angeles county to be ~10 million people, and San Diego county to be ~3.2 million. San Francisco county is about .8 million. Let's add in Contra Costa, San Mateo, Marin, Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties at roughly the same per capita usage, with populations of ~1.1 million, ~.8 million, ~.3 million, ~1.6 million, ~.8 million, and ~1.9 million people respectively. At this point, we've accounted for ~23.6 million of California's ~38.3 million residents.

Crunching the numbers, this works out to ~8.2Mgal/day for the southern California region's residential water usage, and ~.4Mgal/day for the Bay Area region's residential water usage. (Check my math, but I don't think I screwed it up.)

According to an article from Slate (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...), almond farming alone in California uses roughly 3Ggal (that's three giga-gallons, or three billion gallons) of water per day.

Or, to put it yet another way, if we decided instead that about 23.6 million people were worth some almond farms, we could balance their entire water usage by reducing California's almond farms by less than 1 percent.

So, no, there would not be enough water if those metroplexes simply vanished.

It is hard to tell if you are trolling, a California farmer, or just being plain obtuse.

tl;dr - NO. It would not make a difference.

Google your question. The answer is below for you.

Source: KCET article. February 10, 2014.

California's water budget is skewed heavily toward agriculture. The conventional estimate is that 80 percent of the water used in California flows into the state's multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector.

No, I'm actually asking the question since Wikipedia's quote is "In an average year, about 40% of California's water is used for agricultural purposes". Which makes me wonder about how far down California is that it is now 80%?

The figures used in the Wikipedia article include "environmental" water use (water that flows to the sea in streams, etc. most other sources do not include this in their figures. Environmental "use" accounts for 50% of total water use in the state and why Wikipedia's 40% for Ag is everyone else's 80%.

It depends on how you count, due to overlap, such as rice paddies that are flooded with water releases that eventually head downstream. That could be counted under environmental or ag. If you take out the environmental water, ag is 80%.

No.

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/where-we-...

> The drought has changed all that. Now, management plans are being looked at with care as California nears a 2020 deadline to cut the state's overall water use by 20 percent. [which would move us close to sustainability]

> About 14 percent is poured into bathtubs, toilets, and washing machines or sprayed over residential lawns.

We'd need a residential population of -30% of California's current population.

Many of the water-greedy crops being grown in California with their water subsidies are hardly important for the country. Almonds are not a staple crop; they are not necessary for our society and should not be valued highly enough to justify the Californian water used to grow them.

If it is a matter of farmers needing almonds to remain profitable enough to grow more important foods, then we would be better served by giving them free money, rather than cheap water for almonds.

Why not just buy the more important foods?

Subsides for more important crops could probably work. However from what I understand, much of the popularity of almonds has to do with them being a reliable crop that are fairly easy to count on. You don't need to replant them every year, so they are less risky than other crops.

Subsidies for more important crops would probably have to match the profitability of almonds and offset the additional risk. Still, it should be possible.

I wasn't suggesting subsidies; I was suggesting doing nothing, letting farmers absorb the risk, and presumably pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Well, given that their problem is an excess of sunshine, solar powered desalination plants strike me as excellent insurance against these conditions.

Please not WA. We have enough Californians moving here and driving up prices already.

Please stop. They've been saying that for decades, always using the latest industry as an excuse (Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon). Incidentally, now that I (and many friends and my parents) have moved from WA to CA, I've noticed everyone in CA complains about all of the outsiders moving here and driving up prices.

It's tired and trite.

PS: When do I get my kudos for moving the eff out of WA?

The problem is, this turns places that already have severe unemployment issues into 2008-era catastrophy. The entire central valley is based off of farming.

Farms work on thin margins, so jacking the price on them might not be the first step to take.

A few things we can do:

Increase rates to households.

Fix the delivery system to residences so that we don't lose approx 30% to leakage

Invest in desalination and make it a viable alternative

Incentivize drip irrigation where applicable (ie. almonds, but not rice)

Of course increased water conservation.

Too goddamn bad, maybe it's time some more farmers went bankrupt. Reducing household water usage is not going to be enough to offset the hugely wasteful consumption by agriculture. My water bill is not too high, but I have to say that I am not too enthused about watching it go up this years after we cut my household usage by around 30% over the last year. I didn't see a corresponding drop in the bill because most of the sum is fixed charges for delivery and sewage treatment, and my actual metered usage is the smallest part of the bill. So despite putting a lot of effort into conservation I'm being asked to further subsidize the most wasteful users of water in the state.

If farming in Calif went bust, a few things would happen:

Foodstuff would get more expensive.

We'd import more food, meaning fewer 'local' products. Localvores would have to become 'televores'.

Much of the no-education, low education jobs would disappear for people who have little other than their physical ability to offer the job marketplace.

You'd also see a special election to recall the Governor, I think - Central California trends heavily Republican and people there have convinced themselves that it's all the fault of the coastal cities for not building desalination plants. They're not sympathetic to the environmental arguments.

Gray Davis was recalled for less back in the early 2000s, although Arnold Schwarzenegger turned out to be a lot more moderate and forward-thinking than the Republican voters anticipated. Gov/ Brown is already in bad odor with the farming lobby, although the successful passage of the water infrastructure bond ballot proposal has given him more of a mandate than he might otherwise have had.

The Midwest would make a good alternative place to grow. It won't be as prone to droughts and will have a longer growing season due to climate change.

Either that or giving farmers a subsidy for growing crops that require less water. Our huge Almond industry is a giant water-guzzler.

Almond Trees at maturity seem to be small enough to be movable to new locations (12-33 ft high, 12 in trunk)

You can move a tree. Moving a tree successfully is completely different. If you are in a race to grow a 20', you are generally better off starting with a seedling than a 10' tree because they handle the move so poorly.

You can't move almond trees to other areas. They wouldn't thrive there. You might as well suggest moving a Banana plantation from Honduras to Montana to save on shipping costs.

Much of the Midwest draws from the Ogallala Aquifer which is also under severe strain and has been overdrawn for nearly a century, many describe the water as 'fossil' water because the aquifer took many hundreds of thousands of years to grow to the size it has become and it's replenishment rate is significantly lower than our current demands.

The Colorado river is also running dry, sometimes it does not even make it to the ocean, which is a basic sign of environmental health -- when rivers run dry significant changes occur rapidly. The Rockies which feed this river has had lower annual snow pack than expected for many years running now.

New agricultural land in the US will be coming from the north as the climate continues to become dryer and warmer, already Canadian farmers have experienced a renewed vigor and development. Unfortunately there will likely be some land and water use competition between fracking as well as the Canadian Boreal forest, one of the largest and most pristine wildernesses in the north american continent.

I'm not sure how you're imagining this would work. Are you suggesting the feds build giant canals across the Sierra Nevada and then across hundreds of miles of Nevada desert? To where?

GP is suggesting that farming move to where the water is. By cutting subsidies, farmers or farm operators have less incentive to operate in regions suffering from droughts and more incentive to operate in a fiscally and ecologically sound manner.

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