This is basically classic arbitrage. Water in the American West is badly mispriced, so ranchers in China, Japan and Saudi Arabia are essentially buying this water for a very low price because their own water price is very high.
I'm hoping there is eventually enough outrage in these areas to change policy. Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns and trying to guilt folks into feeling horrible if they take a shower a minute too long, meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem.
It drives me absolutely bonkers when I see someone complain about some new apartments "because water". I live in a city in the west where there's a pretty severe housing shortage, and water is also a concern.
But when you dig into the water issue... it's all agriculture, and even there they have so much leeway to eliminate waste. I saw an exhibit at the airport of a "pipe" they dug up less than 5 years ago that was made of wood squeezed together with bailing wire.
The "Total Water Use" chart here is pretty similar throughout much of the West:
It's frustrating that there is no political way to prices water at real cost rather than use archaic water rights. I can't even see a reform to water rights major conflicts in those communities given the very real impact on people's lives and the common "don't tread on me"-attitude.
It's because it would effectively kill farming in a lot of these places because the only reason it makes sense there is because land and water was cheap and the water prices haven't updated to match the ever increasing usage.
Yes, but if doing so substantially adversely impacts the value of existing property, they should at least expect litigation against it as a regulatory taking if they aren't compensating for the calie of that impact.
No, it’s not. The surplus created by cheap water is captured by the hedge funds buying up artificially cheap water rights then selling foods at market rates for a large profit. Growing alfalfa in California for cows in China or Saudi Arabia does not impact the price of California beef in a measurable way.
Sadly, not that simple, few major issues here, we are exporting extremely low value, high water, crops overseas, like alfalfa. We are also growing these low value, high water crops to feed to animals (which also consume a lot of water). We don't need to subsidize these activities, particularly not the former.
Alfalfa is "extremely low value" by what metric? It is a rich food source for livestock. Alfalfa is also one of the most water efficient crops there is due to its deep roots, high yield and perennial nature. [1]
A lot of "studies" on water efficiency of crops ignore yield, which is kind of the whole point of agriculture.
And regarding your export claim:
> Based on USDA data for 2022, only 4% of all U.S. dry hay produced and 6.5% of all harvested alfalfa hay entered the export market.
> In the seven Western states of Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, hay exports play a much larger role in impacting both markets and prices. Based on USDA export and hay production data for those states, 19% of their alfalfa production was exported in 2022 and 26% of the grass production found its way into shipping containers. As such, hay prices in the Western states play a large role in setting market prices.
There might be other ways of measuring water efficiency of crops, but from a quick google search, most sources seem to consider alfalfa to not be very water efficient. For example:
>...According to an analysis by the conservation non-profit Pacific Institute, alfalfa production in California uses around 5 feet an acre (6167.4 cubic metres) of water, making it one of the most water-intensive crops alongside the likes of almonds, pistachios and rice. Crops such as sugar beets use roughly 3 feet an acre (3,700 cubic metres), and dry beans as little as 1.5 feet each acre (1,850 cubic metres).
>>...Based on USDA data for 2022, only 4% of all U.S. dry hay produced and 6.5% of all harvested alfalfa hay entered the export market.
It is misleading to just talk about the entire US production of alfalfa since in many places water is not nearly as limited as it is in California.
>...Government figures compiled by Putnam and fellow researchers William Matthews and Daniel Sumner show about 15 percent of alfalfa and more than 44 percent of other types of hay produced in the West have been exported in recent years.
>The share exported from Southern California farms is significantly higher than the regional average, the researchers said, because the closeness of the port makes trucking costs relatively inexpensive.
That percentage is from an article in 2017 - it sounds like the percentage today is at least that high or higher.
Sure, but perhaps there need to be more regulations on who gets that cheap water.
I'm fine with American taxpayers subsidizing water so that American food is cheaper for Americans.
I'm less fine with American taxpayers subsidizing Saudi Arabian food.
Perhaps any water used to grow something that is exported could be priced at market value, while water pricing for products consumed domestically can remain the same.
The problem is more where. Water should be expensive where it is scarce, and cheap (or even subsidized) where it is plentiful. Even in different regions inside the same country.
This also works as a signal to help water-thirsty industries to locate or relocate themselves.
There are good reasons to do things like farming in the desert via irrigation. If water is not an issue, then crops are significantly more productive per acre due to the increased sunlight. Places where water is plentiful tend to be less productive for agriculture due to the increase in cloud cover; a rainy day is a day when the plants get less energy.
There's a balance to be struck between using an unsustainable amount of desert water, and using none of it.
I don't think that the energy cost of irrigating in the desert will ever be sustainable.
If you have a counter-example, I'm interested.
But I do see the possibility of solving the problem by using photovoltaic energy (though maybe not optimally, because not having to move the water would allow to use the electricity for other usages).
Bear in mind that the alternative is to grow crops in countries where it is raining most of the time.
Plants fare really really well in rainy countries, they don't mind at all that the sun is less present.
The only real drawback is the shortened growing period, if the country is too far north or too far south.
Why do you think this water is not priced at market value?
If a farmer could take their water and sell it for more money to somebody who would then treat it, transport it, and resell it to the public, the farmer would do that. It might be counterintuitive to a lot of people, but if you want to stop farmers from using their water to grow crops, raise the price of potable water.
The farmer understands markets very well. They buy and use water based on market values. What you're hearing is a lot of complaining from people who do not understand markets and think that they can dictate market prices just by word alone. Markets don't usually work that way.
> Why do you think this water is not priced at market value?
Because farmers can't take their water and sell it for more money to someone else, and they have no incentive to economize on water usage. Water prices are not set by supply and demand, they are set by government regulation. The "market" that farmers buy water in is not a free market.
The market for water that you describe does not exist, because that's not how water rights work in the American West, where this is an issue.
> If a farmer could take their water and sell it for more money to somebody who would then treat it, transport it, and resell it to the public, the farmer would do that.
They can't do that. It's not a market issue, it's a water rights issue. The farmer is "entitled" to a quantity of water each year by virtue of owning the land they are on. If they do not spray that quantity of water onto that land, then they lose the right to get any water in future years.
> What you're hearing is a lot of complaining from people who do not understand markets
Thus, it is not markets, but water rights, that are not understood by the people that I hear complaining.
First, let me say that water rights are not usually a use it or lose it right. That might be true in some part of the American West that you are familiar with, but not in the part of the American West where I use water.
Secondly, where there exist rights there is usually a market for those rights. For instance, people buy and sell publishing rights or the right to first refusal. So it is with water rights. If I need more water than I have the right to use, I talk to my neighbor to see if I can buy her rights. If she won't sell them, maybe she'll let them. I can tell you exactly what the market price is for a share of water (a water right) where I live in the American West. I can tell you what it was last year and what it was 20 years ago. And there is a very active market to buy or lease water. My local municipal water company can require somebody wanting a new meter to sign over an irrigation water share to the company. The company pumps water from a well, processes the water and delivers it to the meter for a fee.
Where I live (Central Oregon) the irrigation districts literally fly planes over the fields of people with water rights and send them warning letters if their fields are insufficiently green. If you're wondering how that affects people who try to use water-saving methods such as hoop houses or greenhouses, they also get these warning letters.
It sounds like where you are, the irrigation water and the municipal supply is also co-mingled in pipes? Where I am the systems are entirely separate, there's the potable municipal supply, and separately a series of surface canals operated by irrigation districts that bring water directly from the Deschutes river to fields.
For this reason (canals delivering irrigation water from source to destination via gravity), irrigation rights are fully tied to the land as they require adjacency to these canals. Properties may not sell their rights, even to other users of the same canal. Either they use it themselves, or they lose it and the rights revert back to the management of the irrigation district who may sell those acre-feet to a different user of the same canal.
It's not a great system, but unfortunately as the irrigation districts here are privately owned rather than public, the people required to change this are those currently benefiting from the status quo.
Where I live, irrigation and municipal supply are two completely different systems managed by completely different entities. But the municipal provider can still say, "We don't have any more water than we are currently providing. If you want us to provide you with water, you have to sign over your water rights. Then we can use those rights to provide you with water."
That's exactly right. The farmer is savvy. He knows that the legal mechanism for selling the water is to first spend it on plants and then export the plants.
It's a legal arbitrage. The valuable thing is the water because it can be used to make relatively expensive plants. The only permitted delivery mechanism is plants. So he follows the incentives.
ELI5 Where I can buy me some water rights. Imagine I represent a consortium of commercial salmon fishers and we want (need) to buy the water to keep salmon healthy. We'll pay fair market value. Who do we pay? How much?
The salmon require a guaranteed amount of water flow during critical times. For a typical dam, this means an additional 500cms for 2 weeks. This amount will vary with location and season.
How am I supposed to secure this additional unconstrained water flow the entire width and breath of the Columbia Basin water shed by buying water retail in Spokane? If I buy a cubic hectare of water in Spokane, what's to guarantee it'll reach the ocean, vs slurped up by farms along the way?
Apologies for being thick, but this doesn't much seem like buying eggs.
You know the rest of the world subsides pretty much everything except food for Americans via cheap manufacturing labor, right? Why shouldn't the rest of the world get its due?
I'm saying I don't give a damn if or whether they're "selling their labor at full market value." If that "full market value" is $2/hour or something, then, yes, they absolutely are subsidizing the product they're making.
And you know there's a huge power imbalance between employer and employee that's at work here as well. Magnify that times a bunch when that employer is a rich, overseas company that can offer what would be starvation wages at home, but princely wages for the folks in Asia, South America, or Africa.
Around Bend, where I live, there isn't a ton of 'serious' agriculture. Lots of hobby farms and some alfalfa operations, but the climate isn't really conducive to growing a lot. We're just a bit too high up to reliably grow many things commercially.
Further down the Deschutes river, in Jefferson county, there are a lot of real farms that produce much more important crops ("Approximately 55% of the US domestic market carrot variety seed production is grown in Jefferson County").
I like the carrot honey from the carrot seed producers. Pretty unique to eastern Oregon as most places have cross-pollination with varieties to grow carrots for seed and the places that grow carrots for carrots don't get flowers so they don't produce honey.
Here in Bend also! There is also a lot of water that gets used up out on the East side of Bend on Old Deschutes Highway for ya, pretty much hobby farms for Horses.
Our water in Central Oregon does help to grow things though. One of our biggest water sources is snow melt, which get transported down a canal to farms in southern Oregon. So even though water locally may be used for any serious farming locally, it does get used for serious farming water down stream.
Be careful what you wish for. The existence of places like Los Angeles, itself, effectively exist because of these same water rights.
Why do you think LA is allowed to just pump an entire major river all the way from near Mammoth Lakes to the coast? Out of the goodness of the folks on the Owen's River's hearts? Fuck no. Los Angeles lied, cheated, and stole to get those water rights, and if you think Los Angeles isn't going to have to pay through the nose if we reset water rights, you're sorely mistaken.
You look at the history of water in the American West, and you'll see that everyone has done everything wrong since the 1920's, when water rights were designed to prevent migration west. Then you'll understand why this mess is much, much bigger than we can imagine.
I'm sorry but the 10M people of Los Angeles County with 3.5% of the GDP of the United States which if a country would put it between Poland and Switzerland would, on an open market for water, absolutely crush the ~100x fewer people who live around Mammoth Lakes, Owen's River, etc. We import ~800k (in 2018 it as ~750k, latest number I found) acre-feet of water a year to LA County via MWD, or 0.08 per person per year, or ~100m^3 per person. That's used to generate ~$72k of economic activity.
Alfalfa for instance uses ~0.4acre-feet per ton. Alfalfa prices haven't ever been higher than $300/ton. That means that if water cost more than $750/acre-foot, they'd be out of business on water cost alone. At that price, the average Angeleno would have to pay a shockingly high... $5/mo for all their water. Oh wait, no, that's less than 0.1% of GDP per capita in Los Angeles County.
The fact is urban dwellers don't use much water, and are enormously economically productive, much moreso than rural areas, and so in any kind of open market for water, the urbanites will win handily every time. The city will get it's water, no matter what, and the fairly economically unproductive areas will have to adapt. It's only through political interventions like silly "water rights" designed for the benefit of farmers that a city has to resort to more expensive sources.
I agree with you when we’re talking about alfalfa, but what you’re suggesting would probably destroy entire regions that wouldn’t be able to compete for water on economic terms.
It’s exactly what happened in the Owen’s valley last century.
Why is that the only solution here? If the problem is exactly one crop (or hell, even 2 or 3), can't we just stack a gigantic export tax on it? It wouldn't even have to affect domestic use.
There's a simple political way that's been successful several times. The political decision is made to buy the water light rates and then the state owns it.
Water infrastructure in the west is highly fragmented and locally rate limited -- you can't just reroute water from large swaths of the state like you can with electricity. Additionally, the water consumed by agriculture is often different than the 'treated water' needed to serve residential communities.
So yes, water is major a bottleneck for residential development out west. But to solve this you need new means of transport (pipes / channels), storage (reservoirs), and treatment (plans)... infrastructure that doesn't currently exist, is hard to get approved, and would likely need to be paid for by increasing the cost of living for existing residents.
Agree that we should be smarter about how water is allocated / used out West, but 'taking from ag' isn't going to make it any cheaper for you to buy a home.
As someone who also lives in Central Oregon (and was born and raised here), I will say this: this article is profoundly misleading.
They state that the Upper Deschutes CFS goes from ~1200->~65, and state that is from irrigation. But they don't actually prove that. Much of that CFS decline could be observed out of irrigation season, because that section of the Deschutes dumps a ton of water into lava tubes/back into the ground. You'd have to measure the CFS at the end of that section prior to irrigation getting turned on, then after, and then the difference is what is going to irrigation. And CO Land Watch doesn't do that. Hell, they don't even state where their data is coming from.
That is for the year 2021, when that article was written. You can see the drop in April, which is when irrigation starts. It's about 500CFS,or ~half the river at that point. That is NOT 95% of the river, as CO Land Watch would have you believe. (Side note: CO Land Watch has a bit of a reputation around here. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like they would gladly end all farming in Central Oregon to save a few salmon.)
The chart I care about is the 'city vs everything else' one, TBH, and that one is broadly accurate.
There's a lot of room to provide more water for both fish and farmers by 1. eliminating waste and 2. fixing some of the weird water rights stuff where people are really just wasting it.
The other issue is that California is taking away jobs of farm workers south of the border and uprooting their lives and causing the influx of migrants to exacerbate. Farm owners here are wealthy and have the politicians in their pockets and it will be very difficult to change the status quo.
I don't know anything more about it. My guess is that it's pretty old. The book pictured next to it says 1914, and that broad time frame feels about right.
When agriculture uses 70+% of all water in the Colorado River system and California’s Imperial Irrigation District is the largest consumer [0], we should probably start there.
At some point, people need to vote in their own interests.
Farming is important, but it isn't the only thing that's important. Ripping up use-it-or-lose-it and grandfathered water rights (with compensation and phase-out times) should be on the table. It's a vestige of a different world and isn't appropriate for today.
Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints?
Shifting policy to promote less water-consumptive agriculture and penalize high-consumption agriculture seems like a reasonable bargain.
> Ripping up use-it-or-lose-it and grandfathered water rights (with compensation and phase-out times) should be on the table.
That is a battle that will be tied up in the courts for 15+ years. What we need to do right now is add a 200% export tax on high water items (alfalfa, almonds, etc) leaving the country. Incentivize farmers to divert water usage to feeding domestic animals or growing crops that feed people domestically.
Cases get caught up in court because for the most part government agencies try to rip up contracts without paying and they often lose. Most Farmers have a price that they willingly pay to give up their Perpetual water rights.
In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.
Similarly, it looks unfavorably on taxing someone out of business to avoid buying their property. This is because it's essentially a workaround for the former. If the state want's mike_d's house, They cant impose a 200% property tax on to force him to sell
No, you're right, CAF is the exception, the rule is that poor people are too poor to own perpetual exclusive property rights so they have to pay the rich people who do own those rights whatever they can get away with asking.
A system where land can’t be owned by an individual but instead pay an annual rent based on the unimporoved value of that land, acknowledging they commons is owned evenly by every citizen
this is a complete non-sequitur, But even in a gerogist land-value tax system doesnt solve the problem of government seizure.
Somone can be paying the full rent unimproved value of their land, and the government might decide to void their lease and turn over all of their land, improvements, and work to someone else.
The only thing that stops this is if governments respect the contracts they enter into, be they established property rights (in our system), or land lease contracts (in a Georgist system).
Perhaps you're not yet familiar with the Urban "renewal" effects on ethnic families and the destruction of generational wealth transfer on those same families. Emminent Domain>Apropriate compensation doesn't work as you imply.
Tl;dr They were kicked out of the gentry by having to accept below market compensation for the homes they rightfully bought and owned which consigned them to renting thereafter.
It happened, but primarily in the 1950s-1980s. Thankfully, racist use of eminent domain has drastically decreased since.
Now you have more garden-variety free market development corruption, where "We buy ugly houses" companies transfer ownership en mass to enable gentrification or capture value from unannounced city infrastructure improvements.
Unfortunately, the obvious solution (strengthening property rights) effects its own drag on city improvement by empowering one-asshole-with-the-last-necessary-parcel.
Why would any farmer in California ever sell their land (to which the water rights are linked) for ANY single payment? Or, really, why would any landowner anywhere, getting money from rent, would give that up for ANY single payment? Of course, there is a price for that.
Even a truly perpetual guaranteed income stream is worth a certain finite single payment, that's how rates of return work given the standard assumption that future money is worth less than cash in hand now.
Because you can offer more money than expected future value.
Say a farmer with free water can make $1m a year from his farm, working hard on it.
So offer him more than $1m a year. Buy it outright for $100m and they'll start to jump on it. Index funds on that would return more than $1m a year with no digging.
Nothing is being taken away from Mike_D, we are just closing the loophole where he had a house. We're not targeting Mike D the specifically, just the behavior of living at his address.
/s
More generally, these aren't loopholes. They're often clear and explicit laws that specify exactly who has the right to water. They are often explicit contracts signed by the government. Some are as explicit as you have purchased the right to use 100% of the water from this River for all of time, or you are guaranteed x amount of water at y cost for a hundred years.
Sellers remorse is not the same as a loophole.
At some point in the history of Mike D's hypothetical property, the government acknowledge the private land grant. The law has written and interpreted acknowledges the transfer of property from owner to owner overtime. Changing the law to unwind property rights is an example of ex-post recontracting.
The same is true with water rights codified and law and case law
If the interest is "we want their water so that we can use it instead" then it very much similar. This is very different than if the purpose of the alfalfa tarrif was somehow National military security, and cities getting more water was simply an unintended a side effect, not the primary purpose
Wouldn't a 200% export tax on high water items incentivize the same foreign investors to purchase more cattle operations in the US, ship their alfalfa to those ranches, then ship the meat abroad?
Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints?
Aren't those basically the same things just at different stages? Where should the food production move to? I ask because there is a strong movement to re-shore everything so moving it off-shore probably won't get much traction.
It's probably a different topic all together but I would agree that most things we produce are not required for healthy well nourished people but there would probably be a diverse range of opinions on what foods those might be. My personal preference would be to nix anything that is not Paleolithic, i.e. get rid of anything that is not meat or vegetable or does not contribute to that chain so we keep the things that feed livestock and stop producing the rest
There is no incentive for farmers that already operate on razor thin margins to make less money. They will produce whatever makes them the most money. How do we incentivize changing behavior without putting farmers out of business? Or I guess another way to put it is, how do we correct the system that got us here without punishing the farmers? AFAIK they are not the bad guys, rather they are the ones feeding us and are subject to operating in the system that was created before they were born. Changing water rights does not feel like it addresses the problem in a way that does not harm innocent people. Maybe that should happen long term when water demands are lower but it feels like the demand should shift first through some incentives.
How do we change incentives without harming people so that we can later change the water rights without as much push-back?
the margin naturally sharpens to fit a razor. Do you think that if we slightly taxed alfalfa more that nobody would grow anything on that land?
No, prices of whatever they switched to would adjust, and farmers would be back to razor thin margins just like anybody else. Thats how a market do. Except this time there would hopefully be a bit less of a massive externality
I forgot to add that every time we put farmers out of business their land gets snatched up by the likes of Bill Gates or Blackrock. This also needs to stop.
I find your idea attractive, but centrally planning agriculture has a hideous track record. Market forces have made a mess too, but in the form of destroying public resources like aquifers, soil, and the climate. Both lead to famine, just on different timelines. "We can do better" makes me think of the weight loss new years resolutions people make. We won't do better, because we haven't changed. The failure isn't a lack of knowledge, but human nature.
I agree that if we are to centrally plan it, we'd want to have things like roots, leaves, and the most sustainable animal proteins we can find. Eggs are great, but allergies are relatively common. Milk is the same. Farmed fish can be done well, but that also has allergies among those who also have shellfish allergies. Plant proteins work well for people who don't have legume allergies, but they aren't that sustainable for rice or soy. Pea is ok... maybe just egg chickens and the old hens go to those allergic to eggs?
I think allergies should also be addressed at the root of the problem rather than trying to side-step it for everyone that has allergies. Rather I would like to see functional medicine focus on finding all the root causes of a persons ailment and cure the root causes not just allergies. There is already a lot of progress being made in this area in big part by understanding the gut, gut health and gut bacteria both beneficial and detrimental. While I am not a fan of fecal transplants as that seems very unscientific to me, I have personally had great success by by-passing the stomach for advanced cultures of probiotics with with MCT oil, several trillion CFU per dose.
I think money will get put into autoimmune research due to long covid, which might help with allergies too, and yeah, gut biome will almost certainly be part of that. We should acknowledge too that different genotypes need different diets.
They are the same use, but it seems on the agriculture side there is little incentive to use water efficiently based on rights that were granted 100 or more years ago.
Off and on I’ve been trying to find a video I saw on YouTube several years ago where an ag-ed group had found (and I’m going to get this way wrong) growing lichens along with crops trapped a lot of moisture near crop root systems providing a significant reduction in irrigation requirements. But if water is cheap, why would a farming operation introduce risk or complicate their operation.
I’d personally like to see AZ get some of its water rights to the Colorado river back. Our state government is talking about building and operating desalination plants in Mexico to meet future while CA sits on hundreds of miles of coast, takes about 60% of allocated CO river water, and already operates a desalination plant. For the ongoing cost of a plant and operations, no one is willing to give up an equivalent portion of existing water rights?
A nuclear power plant + desalination plant would fix this situation almost completely. California has the resources (money), and knowhow (tons of engineers) to make this happen if they want.
Israel gets 55% of their water this way and California can too.
That’s really interesting, I didn’t know desalinization was so far along. I’m sure there are downsides, but if we’re going to insist on turning deserts into cities, this seems like a no-brainer.
First it’s not all farmers we’re talking about, changing things would be beneficial for far more farmers than get harmed.
Anyway, for farmers in CA and you get different results than optimizing for say everyone in the CA or even better everyone in the US. Cheap land + old water rights is profitable for individuals but extremely wasteful or water and results in massive and unneeded infrastructure to move water around. The amount of water wasted due to evaporation is a direct result of subsidizing wasteful use.
Such inefficiency is bad for humanity but profitable for a few individuals.
> Not quite, the problem is water isn’t being used efficiently. Agriculture wastes a great deal of water to evaporation because it’s cheaper not because it’s required.
The water evaporates because of the sun. Have you solved the growing crops without a sun problem?
Everyone wants to make one of the most efficient crops (alfalfa) the enemy. But alfalfa growers are not subsidized by the government at all.
Do you know which crop is? Corn. Corn wastes many times more water per acre than alfalfa, but is rarely mentioned in such HN threads. Gotta keep that "clean" ethanol flowing.
I am not specifically talking about crop choice here.
Center pivot irrigation requires very little infrastructure for a farmer, but spraying a light mist is a great way to evaporate water before it even reaches any plants.
Similarly, water pooling on the surface evaporates faster than water sitting just an inch below the soil. Alpha doesn’t directly care about this difference, but one is far cheaper than the other if and only if you price that water at close to 0$.
Of course if farmers needed to price in water then things like crop choice would change, but that’s simply the market reacting to price signals. Aka the vary basis of our economy.
> Corn wastes many times more water per acre than alfalfa, but is rarely mentioned in such HN threads.
Because nobody gives a fuck about wasting water in Kansas, because most of the places where significant amount of crops are grown don't have water problems like california
The issue at stake is wasting water in california and your attempted pivot to pretend this has anything to do with "crop water efficiency" outside of that context is nonsense.
There’s several kinds of corn, but if we’re comparing silage it’s 26 tons / acre vs 7 tons / acre for alfalfa. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv... Corn yields are normally measured in terms of grain, but it’s worth remembering the rest of the plant still has value when considering efficiency.
But, the reality is completely eliminating California’s water problems is easy on a legal and technical level but not a political one. There is little incentive to let water flow into the ocean so CA is always going to sit right on the edge of a significant issue.
> At some point, people need to vote in their own interests.
By not eating? Because starvation is what is going to happen when the price of food increases by 10X or 50X. Visit your local food bank and see how many people can't afford food now.
You might say, "well, the U.S. will just have to import more food". One problem with that: the U.S. is the largest producer of food by a wide margin. What country is going to pick up the slack?
> Do we prioritize agriculture or human use, given modern water constraints?
These are one and the same. Almost all agriculture is either directly or indirectly for human use (food).
As I remember it from the California water crises some years back, a LOT of California water rights are owned by the original farms that first started using the water, and they pay very close to zero for using it.
Thus we have rice farms in the desert and other such madness.
This would actually be fine if "better" water users could buy those water rights from the rice farmer. The farmer would make a lot more money than growing rice could yield, and (say) LA could ease up on the lawn shaming.
But for some ungodly reason, such trades are not legally possible, and the madness will continue.
Because in this scenario selling the water rights to someone else would bring more money than not selling and using those water rights themselves for e.g. farming rice on that land.
> I'm hoping there is eventually enough outrage in these areas to change policy. Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns and trying to guilt folks into feeling horrible if they take a shower a minute too long, meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem.
A classic.
1. Problem is too obvious to ignore
2. Get in front of people finding the root causes by blaming individual citizen/consumer choices
3. Less of a need to actively run propaganda on behalf of the actual entities that are making the problems (e.g. apparently alfalfa agriculture in this case)
Yeah, this also reminded me of plastic recycling: Convince people that recycling is actually a good solution for dealing with waste, to the point of shaming people who only have a single garbage can. Then have plastic companies claim their products are recyclable, to the point of putting those 3-arrow-triangle symbols on their packaging, so people will dutifully sort out their waste into different bins. And then promptly take all those bins and dump them into the landfill anyway[1]. When the real problem is that there is too much single-use plastic created in the first place.
1. To clarify, some recycling definitely is a great idea and makes sense, like recycling of aluminum cans. But it rarely makes sense when there is not a positive economic outcome to do so.
It's even worse with electricity in California. No I am not going to save energy or install solar+batteries to help cover for PG&E's negligence. We live in a calm climate where there should be no problem transporting energy and no need to subsidize inefficient home power plants. Don't let them shove their problems onto us.
This largely comes down to "land" ownership. Water rights are real property like owning a piece of land, and just as with a vacant lot in a city in the midst of a severe housing shortage, the land owner pays no cost for hoarding a very valuable resource that many other people could make far far better use of.
Natural resources, when "owned" in this way, should also have very high taxes associated with them so that they are not squandered and instead used much more efficiently.
At least the farmers have to pay something. At least one company gets all the water it can for free in California.[0] Not a bad deal for a bottled water company!
It's mispriced in a lot of places I think; more and more countries and regions will face water shortages soon, but the prices towards industry isn't going up yet. If anything will make the large consumers finally reduce, it's going to be increasing the cost.
But the government doesn't want that, because they would just add it to the price of the agricultural produce. And governments want to keep that value low, so that one the one side, people can afford to eat, but on the other side because else the local markets will be out-competed by importing it from places that don't do as much water management.
It's protectionism at the cost of the water supply. In my neck of the wood (west Europe) we've already had instances of water pressure being reduced so that the reservoirs have a chance to refill overnight; in other places, tap water has already become unavailable.
From what I'm reading, the problem appears to be growing water hungry crops and then shipping them overseas. I think we can accomplish keeping the price of US produce down by granting lower water prices for farmers to grow crops intended for domestic use while not doing the same for farmers shipping alfalfa to China?
Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns
Lowkey though…it’s high time for the cult of lawnship to pass. I don’t want to stop people from having lawns if they really want them but we’re to the point where people have lawns just because everyone else does or their HOA forces them into one regardless of whether it makes aesthetic sense or sense with their weather patterns.
It's because they own "water rights", but instead of buying it out, why can we not tax it? Of I barter eggs for cheese, I'm legally supposed to pay tax, so why can't we just tax water use period? Just conveniently make it high enough to make water rights net-zero value, then buy then for nothing.
They do get taxed. It is called property tax. Land with water rights is worth a lot more than land without water rights in the same area. In my area water righted land is worth ~10x what land without water rights is worth for the same acreage.
It is the farmer's version of beachfront property.
I went to the Nea York Farm Show this winter and there were representatives of a group in Ontario that sells hay internationally that had brochures printed in Chinese and Arabic. At least in Ontario they have water.
Meanwhile, a drive down I5 will show many farms with political signs complaining about how water is too expensive and advocating for conservative viewpoints while they shamelessly employ underpaid illegal immigrants while enjoying the spoils of corporate welfare.
It's illegal to grow alfalfa in Saudi Arabia. That's why Fondomonte Arizona was created by the Saudis to grow alfalfa in the unregulated and easily paid off state of Arizona.[0]
As noted in the linked article, people in urban areas are paying many times the price for water that farmers are. If farmers had to pay municipal water prices, it's much less clear whether their farming would be profitable.
> Urban metropolises shouldn't be built where profitable farming can make better use of the water.
You have it exactly backwards: planting crops that are only profitable (and MUCH less profitable than comparable urban uses would be), and which make a horrible use of water, due to outdated legal ownership theories of water.
Same in the west slope of Colorado. So much water is used to grow alfalfa, in part because there is a “use it or lose it” water rights policy:
> Failure to apply a water right to beneficial use when water was available for a period of ten or more years results in a rebuttable presumption of abandonment.
This leads to huge amounts of wasted water and alfalfa growing.
Man this fact just points so heavily to a natural part of human nature. If we're given more than we need, but are threatened to lose some or all of it if we don't use it, we'll find ways to use it whether we need it or not. Seems like it's also human nature to make those threats.
I'm not disagreeing with the author- water is being sold at a discount to agribusiness and with an extra price for normal consumers. And something must be done about it.
But, it's never just that simple.
Is that $800/foot-acre just the cost of the water? Or does the bill for the consumer household water use also include the incredibly expensive infrastructure to pipe water to each little suburban house across California? Low density housing (pervasive because NIMBYism) also means high infrastructure costs. Someone has to pay for all the work to build and maintain those water lines down each street. (And yet, people living in a condo where one pipe serves hundreds pay the same rates!)
Agricultural use often requires just dropping a hose into the river, and they business will handle those costs themselves.
In short, the water problem in California is more than just "blame China for stealing our water". It is that too, yes, but there isn't just one problem.
... Or I'm completely off base and that $800 figure is just the water and includes none of the other costs...
I don't disagree with you: there is an issue with "we don't have enough water here".
But when we criticize a problem, it's important that we are very accurate in the size and scale of the issues. Over-stating the costs to consumers by ignoring other components of the price tag runs the risk that those who are on the other side of this issue will use your oversight as a defence. "Oh clearly you aren't being honest, as you're hiding this other fact".
What if the agri-business now publish a report that shows that in actuality, when you factor in infrastructure costs, they are actually paying more for water? (I doubt it, but it's entirely possible).
This is definitely as corrupt and not as nuanced as you might think. I recommend the book Cadillac Desert whenever this discussion comes up.
The history of water management and delivery in the American west has been one of corporate greed, regulatory capture, and massive environmental damage in the interest of profits.
The author details all of this dating back to the Dam boom and the Army Corps of Engineers being in cahoots with agro-giants early in the 20th century and damming rivers all over the west with the primary (but not admitted) purpose being cheaper water for corporate farmers.
I believe that number is for the water alone. My water bill includes all sorts of fees for the infrastructure, in addition to the $40k I paid for a 3 foot pipe to be installed to hook up to service a few years ago.
This is true and unfortunately more complicated. I've long been saying "just price it at real market value and the issue will be solved", similar to what you are saying. The problem is that farmers don't get the water from the faucet, but through archaic water rights to rivers, lakes, wells, etc. We'd need to reform those water rights and I bet no politician has enough interest to fight a dirty media battle with "the people who provide your food" who I also would expect to likely get physically violent at some point.
> The problem is that farmers don't get the water from the faucet, but through archaic water rights to rivers, lakes, wells, etc.
By "archaic" do you mean they got there first? Because farming has been around in (e.g.) Arizona for >100 years, and there weren't any problems back then when there was mostly a whole lot of nothin' in the region.
Though it's not like having large civilizations living in a desert is unique to the American (South-)West: see Mesopotamia and Egypt. They're just usually huddle around rivers.
There's massive population in the desert now, but that's not where the water is going. The vast majority of water is used by agriculture, which has also expanded massively in the same time frame. It's a red herring that natives and early settlers farmed in the same areas - the water they used is nothing compared to modern agriculture.
Efficient water usage (e.g. drip irrigation) and not growing comically unsuitable crops like alfalfa would solve this problem, even in the face of climate change.
That's simply not true. The retirement communities simply aren't why the water shortage is happening. It's agriculture, not residential use. The water usage numbers are well known. You're just assuming that population growth must have caused the water shortage, while ignoring the much greater increases in agricultural usage over the same timeframe.
The reason for the complaining is the population not the farmers. Why do you think they built the retirement communities in the desert? That's right! The land was gobsmackingly cheap! Why? Because the land was reeeeeeally shitty because the water sources were so poor! Would you be so defensive of the residents if this was Florida coast?
This is really quite simple: farmers use the vast majority of the water. Residential use is small in comparison. We're talking about water. Land use is only indirectly related. It's illogical on its face to say that the main problem is residential use when farming uses vastly more.
I imagine the amount of agriculture going on >100 years ago is but a fraction of the amount of agriculture happening today. Or are you also arguing that the amount of agriculture in the region stayed constant over the last >100 years?
Its pretty disingenuous to argue the impacts of agriculture today is the same as >100 years ago and act like all the expansion has been the cities.
Probably both expanded, but the difference is the farmers secured water rights first and the cities didn't. I don't see a way to take away water rights; there just needs to be a way for cities to purchase the water.
Maybe there's a market-based solution that works well for them too. Let them keep the water rights, but also let them resell the water. It's probably worth more to someone else. I'm sure there's some obstacle to that too.
Not comparing agriculture to slavery. But people made this private property rights for slavery too. Sometimes wrong is just wrong. Fuck your rights. Wasting scarce water in a desert to grow unsuitable plants because your grandfather bought some cheap water rights is just wrong.
If the plants are so unsuitable, then it'll be more profitable to sell the water than it is to grow the plants. And idk what any of this has to do with slavery, especially in CA, but fortunately the law does uphold private property rights.
This seems like a great solution. The only issue I could see is that this doesn't solve nature conservation issues were rivers and creeks will run entirely dry and all wildlife dies. Maybe we can solve this by buying a portion of the water to keep it running in the stream.
Water rights in california are so entrenched that taking them away from farmers would certainly lead to massive court battles and probably many billions in takings clause payments. There's just no political will for that when combined with the pr/media battle the farmers will put up.
We do the same thing with bottled water. Keep protesting, maybe someday they’ll listen :/
“However, Nestlé paid only $524 a year under a 1978 permit that expired but which the company continued to use. The U.S. Forest Service issued a new permit in 2018 for $2,000 despite local protests”
> So, next time you see a truckload of hay going west on the freeway give it a wave!
> Wave goodbye to $13,000 worth of scarce water that was sold to agribusiness for just $1,000 and is now headed overseas on that truck
Actually there is only about $0.65 worth of water headed overseas on that truck because while it takes 5 or 6 acre feet of water to grow an acre of alfalfa only 0.005% of that water actually ends up in the part of the plant that is harvested and ends up on that truck.
Where does the other 99.995% end up? I have no idea because every single article I've seen about water use in agriculture fails to cover what happens to that water.
All I've been able to find is that almost all of it goes into the air around the farms via evapotranspiration. But what happens after that?
As far as I can tell, there are four things that can happen to the water:
- it runs off or trickles away - probably negligible here
- it evaporates before it's absorbed by the plant - mostly due to wasteful irrigation practices. Unless you're doing drip-irrigation or similar, this is where most of your water will end up
- it's absorbed by the plant and used in photosynthesis to make sugar and eventually other molecules - this is what's on the truck, but by mass it's negligible
- it's absorbed by the plant and used for nutrient transfer - this is what happens to most water plants consume. In simplified terms, capillary action drives water up the plant, bringing nutrients with it; evaporation removes water at the leaf so that new water comes in
According to Wikipedia the last effect (Transpiration) accounts for 97–99.5% of water actually used by the plant [1]
> Actually there is only about $0.65 worth of water headed overseas on that truck because while it takes 5 or 6 acre feet of water to grow an acre of alfalfa only 0.005% of that water actually ends up in the part of the plant that is harvested and ends up on that truck.
Apple doesn't give me a discount on my Macbook to account for the material they burned/trashed during its manufacture.
Well, water isn't really "used". It eventually always evaporates and falls back down to earth. It's only used if some chemical process alters the molecule in some reaction.
The problem is 100% of the original water is no longer where you need it, not that some percentage gets into the plant or not.
The cost of water is all about moving it and/or filtering it. The analogy that it's a water export oversees applies when you think that they'd have to move that water from somewhere else otherwise to grow that alfalfa. Not that the alfalfa "has" the water.
Also, moving insane amounts of water to the desert for an incredibly water hungry plant, because desert land is cheap, and the moving of that water is underpriced... is kind of insane.
If the water went into the alfalfa and 100% of it evaporated, leaving bone-dry hay going to the middle east, then the hay is still the only remaining symbol of $13,000 worth of water you used to have, and sold for $1000.
Where the exact losses are within the industry is entirely unimportant.
If I use 74 tons of 24 karat gold to create one plant - I don't care much about how much gold is in the plant. I care about how much less gold I have now.
It depends a lot on where the farm is, how much they irrigate, and when they irrigate. But often something like >90% of the water goes back into the ground, where it will eventually make its way back into the aquifers and rivers.
It's why often farm water usage is not nearly as bad as it superficially seems, and why farm water usage of a river can be multiples of the actual river flow
> It's why often farm water usage is not nearly as bad as it superficially seems, and why farm water usage of a river can be multiples of the actual river flow
It's bad enough that not only is a huge share of river water used, but that the actual ground is sinking in the Central Valley from depletion of groundwater resources:
> It's why often farm water usage is not nearly as bad as it superficially seems, and why farm water usage of a river can be multiples of the actual river flow
This is beside the point.
The issue is the reservoirs. If the reservoirs and sources are being depleted faster than they replenish then their levels go down.
The water crises are about the reservoirs and sources going down. We don’t care how much farmers use in absolute numbers as long as it’s not overwhelming the capacity of the systems to replenish themselves.
Sure, 90% is an overestimate of the portion of water applied for irrigation that returns as recharge to the groundwater system.
However that number is not zero in the Lower Colorado River basin. I work in groundwater modeling for various clients in the desert southwest, the number we assume for agricultural return flow recharge varies based on crop type and other factors. 90% is an overestimate, 0% is an underestimate
I'm not familiar with that area, but considering it's not coastal it seems hard to believe the water is simply wasted once it goes into the ground in the lower Colorado basin.
Imperial county is not actually that far from the mouth of the Colorado... Except that, for practical purposes, it does not have a mouth any more, on account of all the water being taken from it.
My guess is that most of what sinks into the ground from agriculture makes its way to a saline aquifer. Some of it may end up in the Salton Sea, which itself is very saline and also shrinking.
Clearly not the case in the San Joaquin valley, there is massive subsidence and the Kern river and Tulare lake disappeared (notably exception is this year due to exceptional snowfall).
Because this defense doesn't solve the issue that the water is being used faster than it's being replenished. The biggest issue with this is on wells which are sucking so much water out of the ground it's collapsing the ground itself, in ways that are likely permanently lowering the water capacity of the ground. Even if it doesn't the run-off water isn't going back into those deep aquafers.
Eventually making it back into aquifers could mean that in 500 years it mostly ends up in an aquifer near somewhere 500 miles down river/wind or something similarly unhelpful to the region in the short term.
Perhaps it's the same reason that in the Yudkowsky vs Hotz podcast yesterday, Hotz didn't know what a gelding was despite being incredibly smart -- zero farm experience.
To be fair, geldings aren't really a part of modern farm life. Steers and barrows are still common if you're in livestock, maybe wethers, but horses are more a hobby and only coincidentally associated with farms.
I mean, farms come in a lot of varieties. Entirely possible for one to be successful at cranberry farming but know little about many/most/all animals (that don’t attack their crops).
When we pay $1,000+ per pill for our newest cancer drug we are not paying $1,000 for the few micrograms of active ingredients. Same in agriculture, when we say, "It takes 5 gallons of fuel to produce 1 gallon of soybean oil" we don't mean of course that there is ANY fuel IN the soybean oil (WE HOPE!). Same with water, we say it takes about 1 gallon of water to grow 1 almond, again, there is not actually 1 gallon of H20 in each almond.
When that 5 gallons of fuel is used to produce 1 gallon of soybean oil the fuel is consumed. It undergoes a chemical transformation that results in it becoming non-fuel.
When 1 gallon of water is used to grow 1 almond, only a very tiny amount of the water undergoes a chemical transformation into non-water. The rest (over 99.9% of it) remains as water at the almond farm.
It is no longer in easily accessible pipes or storage tanks, instead becoming water vapor in the air or moisture in the soil, but it is still water. It is going to end up eventually in someplace where it will be usable.
> When we pay $1,000+ per pill for our newest cancer drug we are not paying $1,000 for the few micrograms of active ingredients.
My usual statement is that the first (approved) microgram costs a billion dollars, the rest of the doses are basically free. Commence pricing games to sort that out.
In Imperial County, a lot of it ends up in the Salton Sea, where the nutrients it carries from the farms eutrophicate the water, the resulting algal blooms kill most of the fish, leaving rotting carcasses all over the shoreline, and also downstream killing a bunch of migratory birds that normally stop there to eat and now have no food.
They use flood irrigation. How Efficient is Flood Irrigation? Flood irrigation is 50 to 60% water efficient, meaning 50 to 40% of water released in a flood irrigation system is lost either to runoff or rapid soil infiltration. Flood irrigation is the least water-efficient irrigation system.
I have the same kind of issue with people arguing that beef production uses to much water. In The Netherlands. One of the wettest deltas on earth. Where it rains almost daily and cattle mostly drinks surface water that normally gets drained to the sea.
I’m an environmentalist myself, but repeating statistics without asking yourself if they are relevant is useless.
In this case though, the farms are using up water that doesn’t get replenished. You don’t need any statistics to show that this is not sustainable.
> And we exported $2.56B according to that source.
If I have two babies, but murder one person, the net increase isn't really what folks will focus on. Environmental concerns with the beef industry are global because, as those import/export numbers show, it's a global industry. The Netherlands may be a good place to raise cattle water-wise, but unless you're gonna grow them all there, it doesn't really remove their impact elsewhere.
It's the same argument throughout; that "people arguing that beef production uses to much water" in the Netherlands aren't necessarily scoping their discussion to just the Netherlands, but the global beef industry and its impacts.
Politicians here used it as a real argument during discussions about Dutch beef production. And sadly it went unchallenged. It’s still often repeated by people who are overly fanatic.
Growing large amount of edible plants, feeding those to animals for months or years, and then eating the resulting meat is in itself pretty inefficient. A lot of water, energy, and, in extension, carbon emissions could be saved by just not eating (so much) meat. Humans are perfectly capable of living from an entirely vegan or at least vegetarian diet and it is much better for the environment and the climate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/20/vegan-di...
Despite the marketing, the main reason we continue to use ethanol is because it's a great octane booster, especially compared to TEL (leaded gasoline) and MTBE which was poisoning everyone around gas stations.
If you want modern engines, you need that octane, and ethanol is a great, cheap, safe way to do it. If you want to stop putting Ethanol into gasoline, you have to find a new octane booster that is dirt cheap, doesn't kill anyone, and won't require anyone change their engines.
> In fact, alfalfa has become an instrument for exporting subsidized water.
efficient, too. why would anyone want to ship the supplies half way around the world when you can just ship the product? especially when the supplies are sold to you at a discount compared to the locals?
Ship the product (alfalfa) instead of the supply (water), is the point of the comment. You need water to grow alfalfa, but not much water is contained inside it.
I do wonder how much or that discount is due to it being non potable water with no treatment or complex distribution network. Not saying it’s a good idea but comparing canal water for irrigation with fluorinated chlorinated potable water piped directly to your house doesn’t seem reasonable.
It's worse than what you propose. In Arizona at least, the existing water rights allow agriculture to pump fresh, clean, ancient ground water as a less expensive alternative to surface water transported via canal. Because agriculture won't use it, the canal water has to be made potable and distributed in the municipal water supply.
Although I would note the California case still makes me wonder, as it’s not apples to apples, even if it’s a stupid waste regardless of the actual metric.
No debate there. It’s a stupid waste regardless. But that’s not my point.
However it’s hard to see unlike units and be ok with that. Maybe my physics teachers were too mean to me, or my work in quantitative fields has twisted me, but reading otherwise well reasoned stuff that makes unfair comparisons hurts the entire line of reasoning in my mind.
So my question still stands out there - but I would note whatever savings over municipal water they have or don’t have, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Just because you pay a fair price to destroy something of incalculable value doesn’t mean the price reflects the costs.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast recently had two episodes on the topic:
"An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert"
> Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa.
"Understanding the Real Fight Over Water in Arizona"
> Arizona recently announced new constraints on housing development in the areas around Phoenix. At issue is water rights and scarcity, which have been a challenge for the US Southwest for as long as people have been living there. That being said, the region is currently in the midst of a 25-year megadrought and when you combine that with booming growth, difficult choices may have to be made. But how do water rights get divided? Who holds them? How much is water worth to the housing developers, farmers and semiconductor manufacturers that have flocked to the state? To learn more, we speak with Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. We discuss both current and past water management practices in the state.
But how else would my Mom raise her miniature donkeys and sell them to rich people for $3,000 a piece? I wish I was kidding. There is just entirely too much money floating around and it is being spent in absurd ways.
If she makes that much money from the donkeys, she'd likely be able to pay the real price off the water. This article someone posted higher up, shows that at least in Oregon an entire county loses $25 million on agriculture while wasting tons of water. All to keep water rights: https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug...
I'd bet that it's not that different in California and even if not, there would be alternatives to the wasteful alfalfa for export
She needs to get into raising Swans. My wife’s uncle bought a pair for about the same price. The couple who raises them said they sell about $750,000 in swans a year.
The alfalfa growers and the industries they support, such as the beef industry, have successfully convinced Californians that their water issues are entirely due to growing almonds. There have been so many news stories about growing almonds in the California desert, but almost none about alfalfa.
"We can do one simple thing and our water supply crisis will be over."
I don't think this was written as a parody. I think the author really thinks like this.
They seem to ignore some pretty obvious things. I will assume they are fairly intelligent and educated, so the ignorance is suspicious. For example, they seem shocked that treated potable water delivered via an expensive network of sanitary pipelines would be more expensive than untreated water delivered via a ditch. They gloss over the "10 or even 12" crops of alfalfa a year, but don't seem to realize that 10 or 12 cuttings a year is phenomenal and a big part of why Imperial County is special. Other places struggle to get four cuttings per year.
I think the author almost hits the right target even though they are aiming at the wrong target. We don't need to stop growing alfalfa. We need to have a rational pricing system for water. If somebody can buy water for $1/unit right out of a well, then spend $3/unit to treat that water and $1/unit to transport that water to market, and can sell it for $6/unit to the public, they might get outbid by somebody who can buy the same water for $2/unit out of the well, spend $0/unit to treat the water, spend $0.5/unit to transport the water to market and be able to sell it for $3.50/unit. In any efficient economy, this is a no-brainer.
It could be more rational to argue that we need to stop growing humans on our most productive agricultural real estate. We can grow humans by the bushel in Montana. We can't get 12 cuttings of alfalfa per year in Montana.
If the argument is that the world is running out of water (which does seem to be the author's argument) then we have bigger problems than alfalfa. Eliminating farm land so we can fit more humans will not solve the water shortage. It will compound it.
I am not proposing that we cut back on humans on the planet. I think there are plenty of resources for both. The author is right that we have to balance the demands we put on those resources. But I think we should be more thoughtful about it than the author proposes.
> It could be more rational to argue that we need to stop growing humans on our most productive agricultural real estate. We can grow humans by the bushel in Montana. We can't get 12 cuttings of alfalfa per year in Montana.
You're just trading problems here. If you push everyone into Montana, now you have a resource moving problem. And the assumption "We can grow humans by the bushel in Montana" seems especially suspect. Have you been to Montana? It's the least populated state for a reason. Many of them actually.
You seem to think your thoughts are obviously right, but you ignored massive complexity. Not to mention, I don't think anyone is actually arguing to "eliminate farm land so that we can fit more humans on it." The problem is the water usage, not trying to change farmland into apartment buildings.
If we 1) Eliminate "use it or lose it" restrictions on water rights, and 2) allow farmers to sell or lease their water rights, would they really complain about these two options being added to how they manage their assets? If they choose to stop growing alfalpha because they can lease their water rights to a municipal water supply for more money, or because they aren't going to lose those water rights if they don't use them, that seems to solve the problem, and everyone wins. So why aren't we doing that?
I don't think this article raises an actual issue (if it even exists).
If we take up the author's call to action in the title and introduction to "stop growing alfalfa" (presumably by outlawing it), then the corporations that grew alfalfa would obviously just find some other crop/product through which to effectively export water, albeit less efficiently, in which case the preexisting problems still exist but are even worse.
The real question is why these farmers/corporations are using their water to grow crops in the first place, when they could presumably be selling their water to consumers at much higher retail rates.
An immediately obvious answer would be that the costs of transporting/distributing this water from the source to the consumer is greater than the profit margin, in which case there isn't even a problem to begin with.
If the issue is regulation restricting corporations from selling/distributing their water to consumers, then it should be an obvious win for the politicians to fix: their corporate lobbyists get more money selling water at higher rates, while their voters get to buy water at cheaper rates. Either way, the article doesn't even mention any regulations at issue.
Finally people start paying attention to the politics of water subsidies. That has been going on for years and was one of (many) weird things in California that everybody is talking about water crisis and nobody is talking about alfalfa.
There's a lot that's wrong with farming and water use in California - alfalfa is just one of the many things. California also uses flood irrigation to grow rice, and open ditch irrigation is widespread. There are more efficient water delivery systems California could be using.
We need to find an alternative system to using water rights... Perhaps some sort of geo based mass market? Maybe a more geo based version of how we price electricity?
Nearly 85% of ALL water used in Utah is for Agriculture, with 45% specifically used for Alfalfa farming...less than 1% of the state's GDP comes from Agriculture.
Or just charge a fair rate for all water resources in the state, one that is representative of its scarcity and cost, without massively subsidizing inefficient agricultural use in the process.
The alfalfa situation would correct itself if the water being used was fairly priced and not heavily subsidized.
You still have issues of “use it or lose it” water rights in many places so even if it is expensive there’s a massive incentive to still use all of it somehow.
This also ignores that the water contracts in question are often federal and the state of California isn’t necessarily in a position to abrogate their water rights.
Well yes, that would be a great solution, but it's difficult legally. Those farmers have those water rights fair and square. It pretty much would have to be eminent domain the water rights to make things sane, and the farmers can afford great lawyers with all the money they haven't spent on water.
You can't just charge the farmer based on a particular crop because they can easily change that from year to year. Alfalfa usually last 4-5 years before they replant. So they would have to basically raise the prices of water for all farmers.
A huge portion of our nation's food supply is grown in CA. It would/could drastically raise the prices of food worldwide because some tax hungry politician wants a larger tax base.
This article is very short sighted. This is CA. You know once they ban one crop or start charging more for that crop, then they will start charging more for everything else. CA likes to suck companies dry through regulation and taxation. Once they go down this slippery slope, it won't end and prices on all foods will increase as a result.
The water is being subsidized. Other people are paying for it. Alfalfa is a low-value crop. It's a stupid and economically inefficient crop to grow in a desert.
You can't waive away actual physical constraints as being due to "big government" or whatever.
It's hard to imagine that shipping alfalfa across the Pacific makes economic sense -- perhaps only to fill otherwise empty container ships? Subsidizing water for this is crazy, but it's also driven by the desire of China to avoid depending on the U.S. for food.
So crazy, sure, but WHY do we have this kind of crazy?
Yes, agri-business lobbyists are more concentrated than consumer (i.e. have lower coordination costs and higher stakes), but that's not the main reason.
Democracies that geographically distribute representation are subject to hostaging, so e.g., every district has defense spending, midwestern states get ethanol mandates and California's central valley gets decades of bullet train investment, and water allocation is majorly messed up.
That's essentially the picture of politics in the US today, and it has less to do with capitalism than with how we agreed to agree (though none of us actually agreed to that).
The only thing moderating that tendency is when national political party discipline overrides local -- in war (before, during, and after), or in periods of ideological fervor. Not a solution.
So the real question is: why can we make exponential progress in teraflop systems, but not moderately rational governance?
We don't need Alfalfa? Is the claim here that this agriculture is unnecessary. If so, then why is it happening. It seems to me that they'd go out of business if that's true at all.
Just do it somewhere else is not an answer. How about just don't live in a dry desert climate at all?
no not really. If it were then the cost of water would be driven by market forces. Here it isn't, it's driven by old water rights. The price of water for agriculture is staying constant but demand has greatly increased. If things were working as they should be the higher demand (and constant or decreasing supply) would result in increasing price. Increasing price would drive agriculture to make more efficient use of the water but price isn't rising so there's no incentive to be more efficient.
I'm hoping there is eventually enough outrage in these areas to change policy. Especially in California, where they are forcing people to rip up their lawns and trying to guilt folks into feeling horrible if they take a shower a minute too long, meanwhile they're doing nothing about what is actually the biggest cause of the problem.