We learned yesterday that 80% of water consumption in California is by agriculture[1]. Yet this executive order does nothing to reduce agriculture's use of water[2]. It only refers to use of urban water, lawns, landscaping, and cemeteries. Agricultural users just need to submit vague "plans."
Many farmers are getting no [0] water this year and are relying on ground water to keep trees alive or not planting seasonal crops. Others get a very small fraction of their typical allotment [1]. California water rights are complicated...
The trees they're trying to keep alive have ridiculously high water consumption, almonds for instance consume 10s of litres of water for each _individual_ almond.
They need to stop growing trees like that in a desert, which is what they're doing.
The wells they are digging are tapping into the underlying aquifers that are the last resort, so they are in fact getting _free_ water while complaining about the cost. In essence they are stealing the water that other californians pay for.
At the same time they are asking for subsidies, to support a business model built on the ridiculously stupid idea of growing high water use crops in a _desert_.
The solution is to actually treat this as a free market (as most HN commenters seem to believe is the solution to everything), everyone pays the same amount for water, including farmers. This would mean farmers would actually make sane use of their water - maybe they can't grow almonds for a profit anymore, and switch to something else. They will probably fairly quickly find some new food stuff that people really want to pay lots of money for, but uses less water.
I know this is all straw man, but interesting stuff...
Many crops use much more water than Almonds [0], I guess they're just fun to pick on. It'd be interesting to see a calorie/water comparison of many foods.
Also, my family's farm spends more money on well water than the government supplied water due to the high cost of electricity for pumping.
I do agree that a real market for water might help. The root of the problem really is that we are farming in a desert and relying on water from other locations. However, the desert does otherwise provide a great climate for efficiently/consistently producing many crops.
Yes, many crops use more water than Almonds, but the main problems with almond trees is that they're slow to grow and you need to water them at all times, even in a severe drought. With seasonal crops, you have the option to switch to maybe less profitable but less demanding crops, or to lie fields fallow.
What we need in California is not necessarily crops that demand less water, because some years we have plenty of water, what we need is adaptability. Almond trees are terrible in that regard.
We aren't picking on almonds arbitrarily. 10% of the state's water goes towards almonds alone. That's a significant amount of water! Yeah, sure watermelon is worse, but they don't use 10%. California produces 80% of the world's almonds. That makes no sense.
Cash crops shouldn't be more important than having cheap drinking water for people. Californias now have to cut their personal usage by 25% while these cash crops get a free pass? This is very wrong.
Do you think if the state gave incentives to use more efficient water usage methods would help. The reality is agriculture is 80% of water consumption while 2% of the state GDP. It would be more efficient for farmers to conserve water and everyone else pitching in to subsidize it.
The water restriction measures are mostly bikeshedding (yes, removing public lawns is probably a good thing) on low consumption behaviors on those consitutents viewed to be most accepting and least threatening to the political establishment. It's akin to allowing Diesel trucks older than 1998 in CA to continue spewing particulates into the air because regulation would be "too expensive," and instead highly regulate passenger vehicles. Both are needed, as holistic solutions to diffuse problems tend to be the best, but asking one group to shoulder a collective burden is horse baloney. Yet, the action of the governor is a signal of an ongoing issue but it's token as it doesn't start to address the quagmire of where legacy water rights meets gamification and usage with sensible limitations. If CA doesn't work on the larger structural water allocation issues, water will become more scarce and expensive because a few large, influential farmers will continue to make themselves rich at everyone else's expense. (Carbon emissions need to go down too.)
Maybe CA needs well-informed grassroots picketing against farmer water rights gluttony in Sacramento?
I frequently see water consumption compared to %gdp, but I don't think this is actually very meaningful. Shifting 10% of the water from agriculture to software isn't going to improve software one iota. The water should be where it's going to be doing the most good.
That's not to say that farmers don't need to conserve more - the 80% alone means that's where we should be looking for efficiency wins (whatever portion of gdp), and letting them draw down shared aquifers without paying their neighbors is a clear tragedy of the commons situation.
% of GDP is one lens to look through when thinking about water rights. Having access to affordable/local/healthy food is another.
I think incentives would help, yes. There is also a "use it or lose it" system builtin to many of the water rights contracts that are toxic. Much like big corporate budgets, farmers find a way to use the water just in case they need it the next year.
The reality is it is very expensive to change irrigation systems in established orchards. Incentives to do that would certainly be well received by the tree farmers I know.
Of course you fail to mention how much water in the form of crops (especially alfalfa) are being exported. That wouldn't fit in with the friendly local farmer providing nutritious food narrative, now would it?
My point about the GDP is that it is such a small part of the overall economy that it is feasible to share the burden to improving the irrigation systems across the full population. And perhaps the "use it or lose it" penalties could be put on hold during a prolonged drought situation till hopefully things improve.
Also in your opinion, are the high water usage due to primarily the irrigation methods or that the crops need lot of water? Like almonds for example?
Of course, even if they're taking from their own well they're draining the groundwater just as effectively. It's hard to see how a market based solution wouldn't turn into a tragedy of the commons without enforcing limits on the extraction.
Yes, California's historical (lack of) ground water regulation and tracking was/is disturbing. Nobody has any idea how much is there or how much we are actually using.
There are limits on extraction going into effect [0], but it may be too late by the time they are supposed to happen.
A reality-denying, industry shill politician espouses: "Sinkholes arising from rapidly plummeting aquifers will boost the economy as tourist attractions. Water will be affordably trucked in and desalination is getting cheaper all the time. Problem solved."
I live near many strawberry farms. They all use spray irrigation. Additionally they tend to run the sprinklers during the hottest parts of the day (mid-afternoon). I've been told this is intentional because if they did it when cooler then water wouldn't evaporate and parts of the plant/fruit would degrade potentially even rotting. Many locals joke that we export our water in the form of strawberries.
What does "many crops are badder" have to do with anything? California produces and incredible number of almonds, and almonds are incredibly water intensive. That's why they are being "picked on".
The figures I found put it more at 1 gallon per almond. They aren't even the largest culprit, yet they get talked about so much. No one seems to want to mention the biggest spenders in terms of water, meat and dairy. This handy article, http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/from-lettuce-to-beef-wh... puts into comparison water taken up by each food source. Meat and dairy are way up there.
Lets get our priorities straight here, lets stop talking about almonds (mentioned 24+ times in this thread) and start talking meat and dairy (mentioned twice in this thread...).
The thing is, the plant agriculture, besides its main products also has byproducts. Let's say you grow corn. Besides the grains there is the rest of the plant that although consumes water to grow, does not have much use in the end but as fodder. You may protest about the meat and dairy when water is consumed on specialized fodder products, but otherwise that meat and dairy can simply contribute to increasing the efficiency of water use.
The Central Valley has never been a fully arid desert as long as there were not farmers there diverting the water. When they created a desert (in the 1800s), the federal government stepped in and diverted water from even further north and east. Of course, the farmers didn't do it all on their own, as lakes were drying up in California before they got here.
This isn't true. There is a natural rain shadow in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
The California Aqueduct takes water from the Sierras and Central Valley and supplies southern cities like San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, LA and Palmdale.
I'm not really sure what you're referring to by "the government stepped in and diverted water" comment. Or by "all the lakes were drying up before they got here".
Maybe those agricultural business won't be able to grow anything anymore and go out of business. Not to worry, we can always import almonds from other countries which lack any kind of environmental policy. But at least we will be able to continue Building Great Apps (TM).
Almonds originally came out of countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. All of which are members of the EU, which in most cases has stricter environmental policies than just about anywhere else in the world.
The problem with your statement is that, in this case, we are that country lacking suitable environmental policy. If almonds weren't brought to California, they would potentially be more expensive, but they would also be grown in regions where they naturally occur and under laws that are more strict than our own.
The farmers are getting no "Federal" water. I don't know what exactly this means -- presumably the state too supplies water to it's farmers via various water-works projects (your 2nd link indicates that farmers relying on state supplied water will get 20% of their usual quota this year) and farmer's also possibly have other sources of water like wells, bore-wells, etc.
There are two different water systems in California. The Central Valley Project [1] is run by the the federal government, the California State Water Project [2] by the state.
It's much more convoluted than that, unfortunately. There are many layers of rights to water. Farmers will get anywhere from 100% to 0% of water from government sources. For instance, my family's farm is getting 0, so they are forced to rely on well water.
Yeah it seems pretty crazy that they are targeting the smallest sliver of water use for restrictions. I'd think we would want to limit the restrictions on everyday citizens and focus on the farmers who are fewer in number and, I would assume, easier to control as a whole than every citizen in CA...
Residential users are a dispersed interest group. Industrial users are (mostly) concentrated interest groups. These results are exactly what you should expect.
In political chess it would make sense to put the squeeze on the masses in an effort get popular support behind putting the squeeze on corporations. Everyone needs to contribute.
NOAA says it isn't because of climate change, if that's what you're implying.
Should the word "anthropogenic" be in that sentence somewhere? Getting less water is indeed a change in the climate by the very definitions of climate and change.
The dividing line is simple; it's when the average changes. You can't objectively measure this, but you can get certainty bounds by using many data points. The smaller the change, the more data points you need.
A single huge drought in a place prone to droughts is not a very strong data point by itself. Unless it literally doesn't end, we'll need many more years of rain measurements to know if the baseline has changed.
If you go global it's a lot easier to take independent measurements and show climate change exists at all. But to ask whether the level of rain in California is from climate change simply can't be answered as quickly.
Actually, an X-year event means that an event of equal or greater size has a 1 out of X chance of occurring per year which is distinctly different from for Y >> X => Y/X occurrences.
For example, a 100 year flood has a probability of occurring (or being exceeded) of 1% per year which is distinctly different from "a 100 year flood is expected once every 100 years".
The law of large numbers implies your statement but that isn't what the term X-year event means.
Unnecessary and inefficient foods are farmed in California. There is a huge margin for improvement in land and water use before we come close to food shortage.
I believe that if there were a way to measure agricultural productivity besides profits, arguing in favor of less environmentally damaging agriculture would be much easier. I had to endure Atrazine polluted tap water (Panama) for my birthday last year for the first time, (officially) due to negligence of a sugarcane producing corporation. Suddenly we are faced with the difficult dilemma of having less gin and sugar or polluting the drinking water of 5% of the country.
You are right. Just read through the XO and agricultural water suppliers are only required to come up with "plans" detailing the amount of water they need.
This is obnoxious and stupid. Given the severity of the drought and California's willingness to continue to supply all the water that agriculture wants at the expense of some of the smallest water consumers, California's looking like a pretty good place to be from.
Sad part is, a huge portion of agriculture is to feed animals which then become our meat. It is just not sustainable. The best way to conserve water is to eat less meat. This book has lots of interesting numbers - http://www.amazon.com/Meatonomics-Rigged-Economics-Consume-S...
+1 you are exactly right on this. It takes about 10 times the water and 10 times the energy to eat mostly meat.
I would argue that a mostly vegetarian diet is healthier also. One problem is that it takes some degree of skill to cook a delicious vegetarian meal, but is fairly easy to make a tasty meal out of meat.
Meat consumption is a hugely unpopular topic. Take just this HN thread for example. There is way more discussion on crops like almond, than on meat and dairy industries. Meat and dairy consume way more resources than any crop/food grown for human consumption.
We can water our lawns less, and take showers once a week. It will not make much of a difference until we eat less meat. Same goes for sea food too. We are literally eating some of the fish species to extinction - it is just sad.
Seriously, the article was about almonds. That's why the discussion is more focused on almonds than meat and dairy, or even some of the crops people are more aware of in California's agriculture, like strawberries, grapes, or avocados.
If agriculture receives almost no restrictions on water use from the state while residential use is slashed, it puts the burden on the people with the least impact. Sure, go around and cite people for watering their lawns and washing their cars, but I'm paying through the nose for water that was imported across state lines and they're planning to implement toilet-to-tap while the corporate farmers are sucking up the groundwater and using it to grow cash crops for export.
Just more theater by a corrupt system and it's inhabitants desperately trying to maintain the lucrative (for them) status quo, everything else be damned.
For bureaucrats it is very important that they are perceived as being proactive and doing something, preferable make it as visible as possible by as many people as possible. Someone out there will get a pat on the back for "taking initiative", "being proactive" or "making an impact".
Residential water restrictions seem to qualify maximizing those things.
"Changing one’s diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual’s food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian, a better option in many respects, reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent."
Yes those of us who did not already know this long-standing fact learned it yesterday. What many of us seem to have failed to absorb is that water supplies are compartmentalized in such a way that saving in one area does not necessarily improve the situation in another area. One city can run out of water while another has plenty. Many cities have dedicated water supplies that are in no way connected to nor shared with agriculture, so saving even 100% of agricultural water provides no benefit for the municipal supplies.
We need food. We don't need wasteful, water hungry lawns and we can make inefficient toilets and showers a little more water efficient with some cheap mods.
Lawns and toilets are such a tiny part of water usage in California that even if you got rid of all lawns and toilets altogether, it would not make any material difference to the water shortage. All residential usage of all types in CA amounts to ~9% of water usage. Talking about lawns and toilets is a purely theatrical feelgood measure designed to make people think they're pitching in and helping.
We need food of some kind, yes. We do not need massively water-hungry high margin crops such as pistachios and almonds being grown in the middle of the desert during the worst drought in centuries.
Landscaping typically accounts for half of all residential water use. To some the value of a lawn is close to zero. Saving 5% of all water use by eliminating something with close to zero value is a huge gain.
Residential water use in California is ridiculously high, even ignoring agriculture. Compare Sacramento's water usage per capita of 210 gallons per day[1]. In comparison, Melbourne's usage is 160 litres per day[2]. Even if you increase the number in that second link by 60% to add all the industrial use in Melbourne, it's still Sacramento at 800ish litres (~210 gallons) to Melbourne at 250ish litres. Humans are the same size in the two places, wear similar amounts of clothes, eat the same number of meals, and produce similar amounts of exceta.
It's just plain puzzling as to how Californians can use so much more residential water per person per day (a lot of it is probably the passion for really green lawns). If the complaint is that residential use is "only 20%" of total water usage, then reducing to Melbourne levels would mean you would save ~15% of that 20% - and a ~15% total reduction in water use by all sources is definitely worth doing.
Edit: This article has some more data points for residential use in different cities in California, ranging from a low of 46 gallons per day, up to 580 gallons per day(!!). 46 gpd is around the 160 litres for Melbourne above. 210gpd for Sacramento seems to be mid-range.
California's big cities tend to come in closer to Melbourne, or, in some cases, lower. The water districts cited at the top of that L.A. Times article cover huge areas, not, in most cases, individual cities, and some of those numbers likely do include agricultural use (not to mention golf courses and other questionable uses), despite the way they are presented.
Which makes even less sense - why would four times the population density use three times as much water per person?
It's weird that you're using both higher and lower population density ('more agriculture') as arguments for legitimately using more water. Also, I'm not sure if you know that Melbourne also has plenty of agriculture within it's city limits, lots of market gardens, and some farms out east. As for golf courses, Melbourne is somewhat known for it's "sand belt", an area full of golf courses because land is crap for anything else[1].
But no matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only a couple of areas in California use as little water as Melbourne does, none use less, and plenty of it uses much, much more. Compton uses nearly 50% more water than the Melbourne average - where are it's agricultural industry and golf courses? Beverly Hills uses more than four times as much as Compton, and it has no agriculture or golf courses either (though it is next to one)
The point is that Melbourne is a perfectly workable city, and it gets by on a fraction of the per-capita residential use water that Californians do. Californian residents consume a phenomenal amount of water.
Why do you add restrictions on water usage by discretionnary laws and never just put higher taxes on it?
The most useless usages of water would naturally disappear if water were sufficiently expensive. A glass of water at $0.30, a washing cycle at $8... so what? Watering some lawn for $30 a day? Ok lawnlords would finally get it.
You could say that at this price, agriculture wouldn't be possible. And, ehm, that's quite an accurate picture of the reality constraints: Given your drought, it's foolish to do so much local agriculture. You may need to do it offshore and import it, probably by ocean cargo. There's a point where petrol is "cheaper" than water, but only the rise of the water market will make the optimal optimizations.
The cost of water for residential use in California is already pretty ridiculous in many areas. As already mentioned many, many times, the problem is basically that there are multiple systems in place which subsidize water use in agriculture and it is, more or less, going to be a disaster for everyone else in the state.
About the only things I could do to reduce my own water use at this point would be to drain the pool (or maybe build a structure around it to reduce evaporation), replace the hot water heater, and reduce personal hygiene to nearly-unacceptable levels. The best part, though, is that none of that would reduce my water bill by a significant amount for at least six months (because most of the bill is a calculated charge for sewage treatment based on the previous year's water use), and the city will probably still find a way to justify power-washing the trolley station every other week.
Even better, though, is that most of the agriculture in California is certainly not local in any sense of the word (other than the sense that it happens here). The majority of the agriculture is for export, either to the rest of the U.S. or the rest of the world, because you can't import climate, but you can import water (or force everyone else to do so while the corporate farms suck up the groundwater) and labor.
> systems in place which subsidize water use in agriculture
Once this is said, lawmakers can complain all they want about depleted water resources. It sounds like "let's take water from citizens and give it to farms"...
Actually I'm suggesting to raise taxes to increase water price. It's not totally capitalism and I wonder whether there's a name for that.
In my country:
- Left wing politics are about increasing taxes on the rich to redistribute to social systems,
- Right wing politics is about making things simpler for companies, including lower taxes,
- Capitalist ecologists (which I'm trying to find a better name for) are about transferring taxes onto rare/polluting resources to integrate the side effects of those resources. Example: If petrol provokes greenhouse gases, we should tax petrol enough so that people would use it in reasonable amounts only. Thanks to this new revenue stream for the government, we can lower the taxes on employment (which are above 50% here), because taxes on employment lower the demand for employment and that has been a stupid thing to do. Instead of taxing employment, let's get the same taxes from nasty resources like petrol.
It's all explained in detail in some books (in France, Jancovici is the leader for those), but I don't know whether there's an international name for that.
What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source? At that point, government can do things (increase vehicle weight through higher safety standards, refuse to invest in public transportation) to safeguard their cash cow.
> What do you do when petrol consumption diminishes to the point that it's no longer a good revenue source?
... Survive?
I mean that's the goal of it, it's to decrease the consumption of this resource if it's considered harmful to the biodiversity (in the case of petrol) or wasted (in the case of water). At no point is the goal is to make the govt richer, that's why I said income tax should be reduced thereasmuch.
Reducing residential water usage is not 1. expensive and 2. massively inconvenient. It's low hanging fruit that's just a total waste. Getting mods for your shower and toilet to conserve water will run approximately $40-$100 to do both. While transitioning your lawn into something that either doesn't require any water at all to a more water efficient garden will save you money in the long run.
Cutting down that 9% makes a difference.
However, I do agree with you. Ag and food corporations need to do their share as well under regulation.
We do need food, but much of what California farms produce is exported, often to places with plenty of water. It doesn't make sense to export water from an arid state in a drought. If the water's real economic value were priced in, that would not be so bad.
You have a point. I just thought water bottlers like Nestle, who continue to use CA water for bottled water, are considered different from agriculture.
Besides I feel that people are missing my main point, which is what's wrong with going after low hanging fruit? Reducing our water intake in the form of lawns and in the bathroom is neither a major inconvenience nor is it a financial burden. In fact, it saves people money.
So we are going to inconvenience the largest population, smallest demand base? How is that low hanging fruit? Even if the cities disappeared, and thereby California's population, there would still be a water issue from AG alone.
Low hanging fruit mean the most impact for least effort. You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people so that a few can avoid any changes at all. We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.
> You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people
That's the thing, it's not a huge inconvenience. I'm not handy and I was able to easily install devices to both the shower and toilet to reduce water usage. This law would also force home owner associations to cut down on water waste for lawns. I really don't see the inconvenience unless I'm missing something.
> We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.
I totally agree. I'm just saying that a step in the right direction is better than nothing at all.
We are not talking about a huge inconvenience, but we are also not talking about a huge effect. If we want to have a significant impact we can either have almost everybody cut their usage in half, or have a few cut their usage by a few percent.
"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."
I don't really see a comparison of the meat industry in California compared to other agriculture in the state. I see a lot of facts and numbers comparing eating a steak vs showering, for example, but if the steak came from the other side of the country, then it would make little difference in terms of the Californian drought.
Looking at a source from the HuffPo article (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf), I can see 188 million gal/day used in livestock in California, while a staggering 23,100 million gal/day is used for irrigation.
So no, giving up meat would not really help with the Californian drought. It is true that meat consumes a bunch of water, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the agricultural use.
Except that the bulk of water used by cattle production is that >same< irrigation. I can't find numbers breaking down the irrigation usage, but I would be surprised if it doesn't comprise the bulk of agricultural irrigation.
"By far, the largest component of beef’s water footprint is the huge volume of virtual water consumed by cattle through their feed, in this case both forage and grain."
1. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/30/how-growers... 2. http://gov.ca.gov/docs/4.1.15_Executive_Order.pdf