Clearly, better methods for the use of water for agricultural purposes
need to be deployed, although Big Ag will not support this. Looking at
the second chart, the biggest sector of the California official economy
is Finance, etc., and Finance will not allow Big Ag to increase the cost
of production and not substantially increase the cost of the produced
goods to maintain ROI for exploitation and extreme wealth/real-income
inequality (real income is not "taxable" income and thus not "income" --
else how could Bezos qualify for a child-allowance income tax credit?).
I for one would prefer agriculture to finance and the other avaricial
fields. Another solution -- the rain water that is excessive in other
parts of the USA could be collected and diverted to California. Note
that the run-off would need to be cleaned of various industrial and
still legal agricultural chemical pollutants (from mining waste,
manufacturing of all sorts, and various toxic and polluting chemicals
used in Big Ag). The possibility of restoring the Central Valley to the
pre-agricultural ecosystem is the same as that for the Great Plains --
in practice, nil, except for limited area restorations with massive
intervention to undo what has already been done. (Herds of bison
"thundering across the plain" over the area that the bison and the
indigenous hunter/gathers had will not return, particularly if the human
population of the planet needs to be fed, including vegans and ovo-lacto
vegetarians.) However, the same financial sector that is the single
largest portion of the economy of California greatly will object to such
water transfers unless there is vast ROI (profiteering) to be made --
rather than infrastructure in the general (not ultra-wealthy profiteers
and exploitationist) public interest.
As it stands, due to human population beyond the median EU standard of
living carrying capacity of the biosphere, and the resulting global
warming and environmental degradation, California and the rest of the
semi-arid Southwest will be over-using existing potable as well as
irrigation water sources.
On 9/9/21 08:28, raccoon (bigraccoon1) wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/opinion/californias-drought-farms.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqohkQVUbCybSRdkhrxqAwvPGxL0ygWX4LSGODDpYyPkaA5TF9U7XYLElZ8c2237TYu59B4IVZa44yP5DbQsqQhO0o5CAldNefHVt847uVSZshJ_BGO0xqGGvZzDjJaInm7HhtBjfaWLoX63PwDZ2clYe1JhgfFyt3nUJxr6UUbImn4kjgopyQ8xyVjwCZyGVvvn3ChUYONmObRjU6wReSPgOEHiI3obas-RcBV0UXVHWT3p_4XI-4MdcOr4UOKX_Lh0ifanukD4TS6rwAYWX84xOnVHa4fQ&smid=url-share <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/opinion/californias-drought-farms.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqohkQVUbCybSRdkhrxqAwvPGxL0ygWX4LSGODDpYyPkaA5TF9U7XYLElZ8c2237TYu59B4IVZa44yP5DbQsqQhO0o5CAldNefHVt847uVSZshJ_BGO0xqGGvZzDjJaInm7HhtBjfaWLoX63PwDZ2clYe1JhgfFyt3nUJxr6UUbImn4kjgopyQ8xyVjwCZyGVvvn3ChUYONmObRjU6wReSPgOEHiI3obas-RcBV0UXVHWT3p_4XI-4MdcOr4UOKX_Lh0ifanukD4TS6rwAYWX84xOnVHa4fQ&smid=url-share>
California’s Farms Face a Reckoning
Sept. 8, 2021
Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin, The New York Times; Photographs via Getty
The advantage of growing crops in an arid climate is that you rarely have to worry about too much rain. You can precisely control the moisture your crops get through irrigation. At the same time, the sunny days promote rapid plant growth. You can produce far more bounteous harvests in, say, California’s Imperial Valley, which gets about three inches of rain a year, than somewhere back east that’s cloudy and sometimes too rainy.
That helps explain why dry California has become the No. 1 agricultural state in the U.S. Thanks to extensive irrigation, it produces <https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/> a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts, and ranks first in dairy and wine, among other products.
But now that the abundant processed water that made this cornucopia possible is no longer so abundant, will some of California’s agriculture need to shift to wetter states? It’s a painful question that Californians can no longer avoid.
The good news is that California’s farms use so much water that fallowing even a relatively small portion of the fields would free up enough water to make plenty available for all the other things water goes for: fish, wild rivers, chip-making, household use.
And trimming back on farming in California, while wrenching to the farmers, could be done without serious harm to the state’s economy.
This chart and table tell the story. The chart shows that irrigated agriculture used 51 percent of the state’s water in the drought year of 2015, the most recent year cited in the California Water Plan <https://water.ca.gov/-/media/DWR-Website/Web-Pages/Programs/California-Water-Plan/Docs/Update2018/Final/California-Water-Plan-Update-2018.pdf>. Irrigation accounted for better than 80 percent of the water used by humans — excluding the portion left in streams, wetlands and deltas.
This table shows farms as a share of California’s economy. They’re down near the bottom at 0.8 percent.
This isn’t to throw shade on California’s farmers, who deserve gratitude for feeding the nation and the world. But it does seem as though current production patterns are a relic of a wetter time. California and much of the rest of the West have suffered through one drought after another. Mountain snowpacks that serve as natural reservoirs of water are getting smaller because of climate change. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is the shallowest it’s been since it began filling behind the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.
There are things that can be done, and are being done, short of taking fields permanently out of production. Switching from flooding fields to spray or drip irrigation saves water. Another smart solution is to drench fallow fields in winter and early spring to recharge the underground aquifers beneath them. Salmon can be protected in streams where they spawn by pulsing water down them just when it’s needed, reducing flow at other times.
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The California Farm Bureau Federation argues that shrinking the farm sector isn’t necessary because capturing water and using it more efficiently will solve the problem. Danny Merkley, the federation’s director of water resources, says: “There is enough water. We’re managing it poorly.”
But increasing efficiency may not be enough given the changing climate, which is making the western U.S. drier. “Some acreage is going to have come out of production,” says Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, a think tank specializing in water. He puts the number in California at half a million to one million acres out of eight million under cultivation. “Honestly,” he says, “I don’t know how it’s going to happen.”
The economists’ way of reducing acreage would be to fallow the crops that deliver the least bang for the drop — the lowest dollar value of production per acre-foot of irrigated water. That would be the likes of corn and alfalfa, which mostly go for feeding dairy cows.
But it’s not that simple. For one thing, farmers who have access to abundant cheap water because of longstanding water rights can make money growing low-value crops. For another, high-value vineyards and orchards, whose owners can afford to pay more for water, are problematic in a different way. The expensive vines and trees die if they aren’t continually watered, so they’re more of a problem in a drought than annual field crops like tomatoes, which can easily be taken out of production when water is scarce.
Farm workers who lose their jobs because of fallowing deserve help, including training for other work. The good news is that many of the low-value crops that use a lot of water such as alfalfa are harvested by machine, whereas crops such as vegetables that might replace them are harvested by hand, so the amount of labor that’s required could actually increase <http://lib.ncfh.org/pdfs/6500.pdf>. Irrigation districts that sell water to thirsty municipalities for a profit can direct some of the money they make to helping farmers and farmworkers.
However it happens, whether by market forces, farmers’ choices, laws or regulation, it seems likely that California and other Western states will surrender some of their agricultural production to wetter parts of the country, where it used to be. Production of some water-intensive crops such as cotton and alfalfa has already fallen. The dairy sector has also shrunk.
Like it or not, the water is simply no longer available in the volumes it once was. And that’s true across the West, parts of which are even drier than California. In Nevada, John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, puts it bluntly in a video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05_2dbN5U_U> posted recently on YouTube: “We live in a desert. Time to act like it.”
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