1. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/30/how-growers... 2. http://gov.ca.gov/docs/4.1.15_Executive_Order.pdf
[0] http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article11355200...
[1] http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/in_focus/california_drought/...
They need to stop growing trees like that in a desert, which is what they're doing.
The wells they are digging are tapping into the underlying aquifers that are the last resort, so they are in fact getting _free_ water while complaining about the cost. In essence they are stealing the water that other californians pay for.
At the same time they are asking for subsidies, to support a business model built on the ridiculously stupid idea of growing high water use crops in a _desert_.
The solution is to actually treat this as a free market (as most HN commenters seem to believe is the solution to everything), everyone pays the same amount for water, including farmers. This would mean farmers would actually make sane use of their water - maybe they can't grow almonds for a profit anymore, and switch to something else. They will probably fairly quickly find some new food stuff that people really want to pay lots of money for, but uses less water.
That's how things work.
Many crops use much more water than Almonds [0], I guess they're just fun to pick on. It'd be interesting to see a calorie/water comparison of many foods.
Also, my family's farm spends more money on well water than the government supplied water due to the high cost of electricity for pumping.
I do agree that a real market for water might help. The root of the problem really is that we are farming in a desert and relying on water from other locations. However, the desert does otherwise provide a great climate for efficiently/consistently producing many crops.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gleason-almond-fa...
What we need in California is not necessarily crops that demand less water, because some years we have plenty of water, what we need is adaptability. Almond trees are terrible in that regard.
Cash crops shouldn't be more important than having cheap drinking water for people. Californias now have to cut their personal usage by 25% while these cash crops get a free pass? This is very wrong.
Watermelon......... 8.2 cal/gal
Almond............. 7.0
Head of broccoli... 5.9
Cantaloupe......... 3.7
Corn cob........... 1.5
Maybe CA needs well-informed grassroots picketing against farmer water rights gluttony in Sacramento?
That's not to say that farmers don't need to conserve more - the 80% alone means that's where we should be looking for efficiency wins (whatever portion of gdp), and letting them draw down shared aquifers without paying their neighbors is a clear tragedy of the commons situation.
I think incentives would help, yes. There is also a "use it or lose it" system builtin to many of the water rights contracts that are toxic. Much like big corporate budgets, farmers find a way to use the water just in case they need it the next year.
The reality is it is very expensive to change irrigation systems in established orchards. Incentives to do that would certainly be well received by the tree farmers I know.
Also in your opinion, are the high water usage due to primarily the irrigation methods or that the crops need lot of water? Like almonds for example?
The Almond Board of California has some info on this for Almonds. Obviously, take this as you will, given the source: http://www.almonds.com/pdfs/waterfactsheet315.pdf
There are limits on extraction going into effect [0], but it may be too late by the time they are supposed to happen.
[0] https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.19/californias-sweeping-new-gr...
If you want to compare by source in California, animal agriculture takes up 47% of California's water, far more than any crop or other source, http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft... (take a look at page 3 of the pdf).
Lets get our priorities straight here, lets stop talking about almonds (mentioned 24+ times in this thread) and start talking meat and dairy (mentioned twice in this thread...).
While the southern San Joaquin Valley does indeed get very little rainfall, the mountains that drain in to it normally get plenty of water.
Tulare Lake, once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, was right in the middle of the driest parts of Kern and Tulare counties.
The lake has even reappeared following a period of unusually high precipitation and as recent as 1997.
The California Aqueduct takes water from the Sierras and Central Valley and supplies southern cities like San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, LA and Palmdale.
I'm not really sure what you're referring to by "the government stepped in and diverted water" comment. Or by "all the lakes were drying up before they got here".
What are your sources?
The problem with your statement is that, in this case, we are that country lacking suitable environmental policy. If almonds weren't brought to California, they would potentially be more expensive, but they would also be grown in regions where they naturally occur and under laws that are more strict than our own.
The fact that California law allows unlimited water withdrawal until 2040 is literally a tragedy of the commons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_Project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Water_distr...
It's all about feeling good and conspicuously "doing our part" but has nothing to do with solving the problem.
I wonder what's next, maybe a ribbon or wristband campaign?
The real problem here is we tried to turn a desert in to our national bread basket.
or may be that our national bread basket is turning into a desert? One needs 3 components - soil, sun and water. We're loosing the 3rd component :
http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_27070897/california-dr...
"The last three years of drought were the most severe that California has experienced in at least 1,200 years"
Everybody can just only guess why...
Edit: to the "jff"'s response below - a "guess" by the Stanford http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/drought-climate...
NOAA says it isn't because of climate change, if that's what you're implying.
Should the word "anthropogenic" be in that sentence somewhere? Getting less water is indeed a change in the climate by the very definitions of climate and change.
Also, minor nit, "X year event" doesn't mean the event should happen every X years, but that over a span Y >> X, the event happens Y / X times.
The dividing line is simple; it's when the average changes. You can't objectively measure this, but you can get certainty bounds by using many data points. The smaller the change, the more data points you need.
A single huge drought in a place prone to droughts is not a very strong data point by itself. Unless it literally doesn't end, we'll need many more years of rain measurements to know if the baseline has changed.
If you go global it's a lot easier to take independent measurements and show climate change exists at all. But to ask whether the level of rain in California is from climate change simply can't be answered as quickly.
For example, a 100 year flood has a probability of occurring (or being exceeded) of 1% per year which is distinctly different from "a 100 year flood is expected once every 100 years".
The law of large numbers implies your statement but that isn't what the term X-year event means.
The water should just be auctioned off each year. Proceeds going to find new sources of water.
This is obnoxious and stupid. Given the severity of the drought and California's willingness to continue to supply all the water that agriculture wants at the expense of some of the smallest water consumers, California's looking like a pretty good place to be from.
I would argue that a mostly vegetarian diet is healthier also. One problem is that it takes some degree of skill to cook a delicious vegetarian meal, but is fairly easy to make a tasty meal out of meat.
We can water our lawns less, and take showers once a week. It will not make much of a difference until we eat less meat. Same goes for sea food too. We are literally eating some of the fish species to extinction - it is just sad.
If agriculture receives almost no restrictions on water use from the state while residential use is slashed, it puts the burden on the people with the least impact. Sure, go around and cite people for watering their lawns and washing their cars, but I'm paying through the nose for water that was imported across state lines and they're planning to implement toilet-to-tap while the corporate farmers are sucking up the groundwater and using it to grow cash crops for export.
Residential water restrictions seem to qualify maximizing those things.
It would be interesting to know the relative price in water of a small Niman ranch steak compared to a single serving of California-grown almonds.
Is the drought an argument against eating California-raised livestock since it isn't necessarily as location-dependent as certain agriculture?
"beef, about 145,000 gallons per ton"
"Changing one’s diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual’s food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian, a better option in many respects, reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent."
"State officials said the order would impose cutbacks on water use across the board — including homeowners, farmers, cemeteries and golf courses."
All the mandatory restrictions are on urban water users, agricultural water suppliers are required to submit paperwork.
We need food of some kind, yes. We do not need massively water-hungry high margin crops such as pistachios and almonds being grown in the middle of the desert during the worst drought in centuries.
It's just plain puzzling as to how Californians can use so much more residential water per person per day (a lot of it is probably the passion for really green lawns). If the complaint is that residential use is "only 20%" of total water usage, then reducing to Melbourne levels would mean you would save ~15% of that 20% - and a ~15% total reduction in water use by all sources is definitely worth doing.
[1]http://greencitiescalifornia.org/best-practices/water/sacram... [2]http://www.melbournewater.com.au/waterdata/wateruse/Pages/de...
Edit: This article has some more data points for residential use in different cities in California, ranging from a low of 46 gallons per day, up to 580 gallons per day(!!). 46 gpd is around the 160 litres for Melbourne above. 210gpd for Sacramento seems to be mid-range.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1105-californi...
California's big cities tend to come in closer to Melbourne, or, in some cases, lower. The water districts cited at the top of that L.A. Times article cover huge areas, not, in most cases, individual cities, and some of those numbers likely do include agricultural use (not to mention golf courses and other questionable uses), despite the way they are presented.
It's weird that you're using both higher and lower population density ('more agriculture') as arguments for legitimately using more water. Also, I'm not sure if you know that Melbourne also has plenty of agriculture within it's city limits, lots of market gardens, and some farms out east. As for golf courses, Melbourne is somewhat known for it's "sand belt", an area full of golf courses because land is crap for anything else[1].
But no matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only a couple of areas in California use as little water as Melbourne does, none use less, and plenty of it uses much, much more. Compton uses nearly 50% more water than the Melbourne average - where are it's agricultural industry and golf courses? Beverly Hills uses more than four times as much as Compton, and it has no agriculture or golf courses either (though it is next to one)
The point is that Melbourne is a perfectly workable city, and it gets by on a fraction of the per-capita residential use water that Californians do. Californian residents consume a phenomenal amount of water.
The most useless usages of water would naturally disappear if water were sufficiently expensive. A glass of water at $0.30, a washing cycle at $8... so what? Watering some lawn for $30 a day? Ok lawnlords would finally get it.
You could say that at this price, agriculture wouldn't be possible. And, ehm, that's quite an accurate picture of the reality constraints: Given your drought, it's foolish to do so much local agriculture. You may need to do it offshore and import it, probably by ocean cargo. There's a point where petrol is "cheaper" than water, but only the rise of the water market will make the optimal optimizations.
About the only things I could do to reduce my own water use at this point would be to drain the pool (or maybe build a structure around it to reduce evaporation), replace the hot water heater, and reduce personal hygiene to nearly-unacceptable levels. The best part, though, is that none of that would reduce my water bill by a significant amount for at least six months (because most of the bill is a calculated charge for sewage treatment based on the previous year's water use), and the city will probably still find a way to justify power-washing the trolley station every other week.
Even better, though, is that most of the agriculture in California is certainly not local in any sense of the word (other than the sense that it happens here). The majority of the agriculture is for export, either to the rest of the U.S. or the rest of the world, because you can't import climate, but you can import water (or force everyone else to do so while the corporate farms suck up the groundwater) and labor.
Once this is said, lawmakers can complain all they want about depleted water resources. It sounds like "let's take water from citizens and give it to farms"...
In my country:
- Left wing politics are about increasing taxes on the rich to redistribute to social systems,
- Right wing politics is about making things simpler for companies, including lower taxes,
- Capitalist ecologists (which I'm trying to find a better name for) are about transferring taxes onto rare/polluting resources to integrate the side effects of those resources. Example: If petrol provokes greenhouse gases, we should tax petrol enough so that people would use it in reasonable amounts only. Thanks to this new revenue stream for the government, we can lower the taxes on employment (which are above 50% here), because taxes on employment lower the demand for employment and that has been a stupid thing to do. Instead of taxing employment, let's get the same taxes from nasty resources like petrol.
It's all explained in detail in some books (in France, Jancovici is the leader for those), but I don't know whether there's an international name for that.
... Survive?
I mean that's the goal of it, it's to decrease the consumption of this resource if it's considered harmful to the biodiversity (in the case of petrol) or wasted (in the case of water). At no point is the goal is to make the govt richer, that's why I said income tax should be reduced thereasmuch.
Cutting down that 9% makes a difference.
However, I do agree with you. Ag and food corporations need to do their share as well under regulation.
Besides I feel that people are missing my main point, which is what's wrong with going after low hanging fruit? Reducing our water intake in the form of lawns and in the bathroom is neither a major inconvenience nor is it a financial burden. In fact, it saves people money.
That's the thing, it's not a huge inconvenience. I'm not handy and I was able to easily install devices to both the shower and toilet to reduce water usage. This law would also force home owner associations to cut down on water waste for lawns. I really don't see the inconvenience unless I'm missing something.
> We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.
I totally agree. I'm just saying that a step in the right direction is better than nothing at all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-long-s...
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-whos-...
"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry...
Looking at a source from the HuffPo article (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf), I can see 188 million gal/day used in livestock in California, while a staggering 23,100 million gal/day is used for irrigation.
So no, giving up meat would not really help with the Californian drought. It is true that meat consumes a bunch of water, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the agricultural use.
"By far, the largest component of beef’s water footprint is the huge volume of virtual water consumed by cattle through their feed, in this case both forage and grain."
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-80...
Water required to grow the feed for a Holstein Cow: Corn 30,208 L, Alfalfa 201,004 L