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:
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidw|2 years ago|reply
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:
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug...
And denser housing tends to use water more efficiently.
Edit: dug up a picture of that pipe I took. https://photos.app.goo.gl/PisNhiA81Rsw45Rx8
[+] [-] ethbr1|2 years ago|reply
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.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/colorado-river-water-cut...
[+] [-] BurningFrog|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] epistasis|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whinenot|2 years ago|reply
[0]https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/la-times-today/2022/02/...
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
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.
In 10 years that will be commonplace, water will be rationed. While meanwhile, there's datacenters using tens of millions of liters of drinking water for cooling: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-...
[+] [-] jimbob45|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RC_ITR|2 years ago|reply
Of all the water use cases to go after, they want to make children think water is so scarce that spilling one can of it is somehow a problem?
Meanwhile, eat whatever produce you want at any time of year, as long as you can’t see the water being wasted, it’s fine right?
[+] [-] coryrc|2 years ago|reply
Oh, right, Saudis would lose money.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanp2k2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] RationPhantoms|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|2 years ago|reply
That's because the actual problem is intractable. Urban metropolises shouldn't be built where profitable farming can make better use of the water.
But good luck evacuating the greater Los Angeles area. Or getting people to move to areas better suited for living, in general.
[+] [-] zackkatz|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
https://dwr.colorado.gov/services/water-administration/water...
[+] [-] mabbo|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] intalentive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bix6|2 years ago|reply
“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”
https://www.sunset.com/food-wine/bottled-water-companies-are...
[+] [-] tzs|2 years ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] wongarsu|2 years ago|reply
- 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]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration
[+] [-] ceejayoz|2 years ago|reply
Eventually, rain. Usually somewhere else.
> 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.
[+] [-] laserbeam|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] appleflaxen|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lucidguppy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grapehut|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kylebenzle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|2 years ago|reply
If you deplete the reservoirs and sources faster then the cycle replenishes them, you eventually have a problem when they get too low.
Abnormally hot or dry years become disasters if you’ve depleted your reservoirs too much.
That is the problem.
[+] [-] downrightmike|2 years ago|reply
https://www.agrivi.com/blog/modern-management-of-centennial-....
And then you have to imagine that these places are hitting 110+ degrees recently, so they lose even more water.
[+] [-] 1234letshaveatw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Justin_K|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Gasp0de|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catchnear4321|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] throw0101b|2 years ago|reply
"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.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-arizona-farmer-on-h...
"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.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-the-real...
(Episode available on most of the major platforms (including YT?), Apple just came up first in the search.)
[+] [-] Mistletoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajbot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] freeopinion|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ensignavenger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1lint|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JTbane|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccorcos|2 years ago|reply
Very odd comment at the end considering that the only reason the Salton Sea exists today was due to a different “ecological disaster” in 1905.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
[+] [-] slantedview|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silexia|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cboswel1|2 years ago|reply