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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

    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?

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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.

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.

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.

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)

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