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You simply don't understand the scale of the water we use.

> At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year.

Urban direct water usage (ie., showers, watering lawns, flushing the toilet, etc) only accounts for 4% of the State water budget. FOUR PERCENT. [0] Cutting your shower from 15 mins to 5 is utterly meaningless compared to agricultural use.

[0] PDF warning: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft...

My objection is not with the goal towards conservation, but rather the tone, the method and the lack of leadership from gov't. The way its framed is unfortunate. It seems political rather than practical.

Parent's point is simply that in the home you can drastically cut water usage without it affecting your life much, but in farming the consequences are large.

Of course they're large, because they use a lot of water. That's the whole point.

Cutting residential usage is comparatively easy because we don't actually use that much water at home. See the study I linked above if you don't believe me.

Which is cut against by the affect that cutting urban water usage just doesn't matter.

You could cut it to zero. We would run out of water in the same amount of time.

And respondent's post is that drastically cutting home usage amounts to precisely dick in the scheme of things.

The point isn't about whether cutting home use would make a meaningful difference, just that it's much easier for a household to reduce water use than for a farm.

Yes, we need water efficient farms (or, perhaps, farms in places that aren't so hostile to agriculture). But it's very hard to make a farm water efficient.

> But it's very hard to make a farm water efficient.

Kind of a sweeping statement. Here's an inexpensive product that reduces water usage by 90%, aimed to farmers and especially good for citrus: http://treetpee.com/ttp-u/

That makes a lot more sense for orchards (which are widespread in California) than for grapes, tomatoes, lettuce, etc. (which are also widespread in California).

For the record, I've lived in several places with water shortages since I was a teenager. I believe every one placed restrictions on certain activities (no washing car at home, water lawns only on designated days, no water for ornamental ponds, etc.) instead of simply raising the price of water.

I believe California could fix its problem with a lot less trouble by letting the price of water reflect its supply and demand.

> letting the price of water reflect its supply and demand.

Which would force a significant reduction in agricultural water use.

Yes, exactly. Partly by running unprofitable farms out of business (well,out of agriculture); partly by encouraging farmers to grow crops that don't need as much water; partly by encouraging farms to watch their water use.

But the people making the decision would be people who know how much water their crops need, what the alternatives are, how profitable their crops will be in six months, etc. I simply don't have much faith in across the board cuts.

That is, I agree that water needs to be conserved. But I think there's a better approach; namely, letting the market work.

If you cannot make a farm water efficient, then perhaps the answer is don't farm there.

There are other places in the world to farm that are not currently suffering droughts.

It doesn't matter if it's hard. Going to the moon is hard, and we still did that.

The biggest problem is many farmer's do not have an economic incentive to be more efficient. They have open drilling rights . They pay a fee pump, but it's not tied to how much they use.

Further, if there's a national interest in sustaining CA agriculture it's time for the rest of the nation to devise a plan to get CA agriculture the water it needs. The state can produce plenty of produce for local consumption while using much, much less water.

Driving away the urban centered industries would be disastrous for the state and for the nation on a much larger scale.

When you try to optimize your programs for performance, do you focus on the code snippet that is responsible for 4% of runtime, or the snippet responsible for 80% of runtime?

Even if water demands in farming are relatively inelastic, cutting statewide water use by 25% is literally impossible without cuts to farming use, and at the end of the day the rainfall doesn't care how much water you think you need to farm.

True but the state well knew this was coming _some day_ but did not institute policies allowing farmers to slowly adapt to a new reality. That's bad leadership.

I suspect the reality goes more like, farmers defended their water rights with absolutely rabid ferocity, and it was utter political suicide until now to make any cuts or regulation at all.

The agrilobby is incredibly powerful, and lobbies are famously uncompromising even to the point of working against their own best interests.

Hell, it might still wind up ruining several political careers.

> True but the state well knew this was coming _some day_ but did not institute policies allowing farmers to slowly adapt to a new reality.

Farmers don't need state policy to be able to slowly adapt. Farmers (and other senior rights holders) can choose to invest to prepare themselves, or they can choose to take the risk that someday the water that they have a right to, subject to more senior rights being filled first, simply doesn't exist any more after those more senior rights are filled, and they stop getting it suddenly.

Water rights are a classic tragedy of the commons - its exceedingly rare industries or their regulatory bodies solve these sorts of problems before the resource is destroyed.

The farmers are adults, and are fully capable of adapting to things like this on their own. They knew just as well that this was coming.

> Without water, locavores will have to become televores.

Eating local has always meant moving where the conditions support the food you want to eat. The idea that you can be a "locavore" without being sensitive to shifts in water availability and other things that directly affect the viability of food production in the local area is silly.

> Calif produces food for the whole nation.

California exports food for the rest of the world, not just the nation. But it also competes with lots of other places to do so, and the opportunity cost of delivering water to farmers may far exceed the benefit from continuing to do that.

> The Japanese expend enormous resources on keeping their rice farmers viable in the face of cheaper alternatives

And, still, much of the rice eaten in Japan is grown in California.

> Without your farmers you starve.

Without sufficient farmers somewhere willing to take your money in exchange for food, you starve. There's no reason they have to be in your immediate area, though, as California's agriculture -- which is largely for export -- demonstrates.

> Yes, farmers should try to use water more efficiently and the gov should encourage that adoption via stick and carrot, but vilifying farmers is not the way to go.

This isn't about vilifying farmers (and, in fact, the presentation of this action as being about farmers is inaccurate -- its about senior water rights holders, some of which are farmers, some of which are not.)

> And, still, much of the rice eaten in Japan is grown in California.

This is quite an extraordinary statement, very likely to be false. Can you source it? The first article I found says: "Japan allows imports of 770,000 metric tons of rice, about 9% of annual consumption. California farmers account for the lion's share of that amount"

From the LA times. So no more than 9%

What crops we grow can change drastically. Alfalfa for China is one example of using a significant portion of agricultural water use (in the solid single digits) that doesn't provide much benefit locally.

Calif produces food for the whole nation.

Yes, but it's not like the rest of the nation can't pick up the slack, just that we export a lot of food from California. For example, there are lots of places in America where cattle are farmed, and cattle farming if water-intensive, so do we really need to be rasing cattle in California? I am OK with paying a bit more to get beef from other states.

California has a huge comparative advantage in the production of some crops like wine grapes and almonds, there is some economic value in preserving a comaparative advantage where one already exists. But we could probably shut down quite a bit of our agricultural production without creating any national drop in food security, it would just make California a bit more expensive of a place to live.

> Without water, locavores will have to become televores.

And if the price of California-exported food goes up, televores in the other 49 states will become locavores.

The fact that California is a huge net exporter of food suggests that the latter effect will dominate the former.

> Of course farmers need to devise more efficient ways to water their crops, but I think it's strange urban dwellers don't understand the inelasticity of water for farming. At home one can cut showers from 15 mins down to 5 or two. On the farm it means not planting x acres that year.

Isn't that the opposite of the truth? I've seen statistics about the water efficiency of agriculture, and it seems to be that relatively modest investments can drastically increase the efficiency. Of course, when water is cheap, there's no incentive to increase efficiency.

Home use is dwarfed entirely by ag use. Sure, I can cut my shower down to 5 minutes. It is going to be a rounding error in the amount of water used.

> Without your farmers you starve

From what I understand most of California's agricultural throughput goes to exports. Japan may have their rice farmers, however in terms of area the US is 24 times bigger than Japan, with only 2.5 times the population. So that's comparing apples and oranges.

On the other hand, food you can import so your assertion is wrong. However if water goes out, then you will either move or die of thirst ;-)

> The Japanese expend enormous resources on keeping their rice farmers viable in the face of cheaper alternatives, but, in some ways they have a point. Without your farmers you starve.

Not quite. Without farmers you starve. Japan doesn't need the rice farmers to be theirs.

With less water, we could become herbivores. A higher price for water could be reflected in the amount of meat that we eat. And truth be told, a lot of us, myself included, could live quite well on less food overall.