Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmajunkie | Hacker News Reader

is anybody actually accusing vegans of being behind the drought?

No, but the news coverage seems entirely aimed at plant farming, especially almonds for some reason, and rarely mentions animals even though they're more of a problem. Apparently the linked Times articles didn't talk about animals at all, which is odd.

10 Percent of California’s Water Goes to Almond Farming. That’s Nuts.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

Animals are a huge deal, but I think the shock factor behind almonds is higher. "The entire animal industry in California uses a total of 30 percent, ok... wait, just almonds uses 10 percent?"

Perhaps especially because almonds are perceived as more of a luxury food than, say, ground beef or omelets.

But you can see why vegans would feel unfairly targeted.

I think both livestock and almonds need attention, and I think both are getting attention. Ten percent is not the single largest slice of the pie, but that doesn't mean we ignore it while we work on the livestock slice of the pie.

At least in my social media feeds, a lot more than half the discussion regarding this issue is focused on almonds, while meat consumption is getting closer to 10%.

Do vegans eat notably more almonds than the average person?

I honestly don't see why they would feel targeted.

Once you add the context that California grows all of the US's and most of the world's almonds it doesn't seem so ridiculous.

Well, it explains how it came to be that way. But then you wonder, "why". California is not water-rich. It's fundamentally incongruous. Should it be that way?

You should think about why California is growing almonds for the rest of the world.

Almond growers are acting against the best interests of their community for personal profit. Using fresh water that California cannot afford to use to grow their own bank accounts, with negligible benefit to Californians. Californians shouldn't tolerate this.

"But they pay tax on that profit, that means they are giving back!" you might object.

That is little more than a bribe to shut people up. What is California going to do, use that tax money to import fresh water? From where? From everywhere that they are shipping almonds to? Using that money to fund desalination plants might be a decent idea, but Californians seem fairly dead-set against desalination and I doubt the almond tax money would cover it anyway.

Bee colony collapse and other bee death has been getting attention. Bees are shipped in to the almond groves in California. There's some suspicion that almond farmers use nicotinoids which harm bees; and that transporting bees leaves them more vulnerable to parasite.

So, that's one reason why almond farming is seeing more scrutiny recently.

Part of it is that almonds are a large, lucrative export market, while beef is not. While estimates vary, the best I could find is that California has 2% or less (600k) of the country's beef-cattle herd (30M-72M)and 12% of the country's human population. California eats the beef that California produces and much more, while the insidious almond robber-barons direct California's water into their international money-printing export machine for their own profit, depriving the rest of California of a large chunk of their lowland biosphere, destroying the land with subsidence and generally being extractive rather than productive, without benefit to the population. Or so the narrative goes.

Additionally, other crops can be and sometimes have been fallowed, while almond trees will apparently start to die without water, and take a decade to regrow.

No, but the article is written by someone who identifies as a vicious vegan; not an understanding-vegan, a compromising-vegan, or even a strongly-opinionated-but-reasonable vegan. But instead, it's by a vicious vegan who, judging by the sarcastic and defensive tone, is taking the nytime's report of our almond trees and drought as a personal attack.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com