Rice and almonds appear wasteful when measured by mass produced per unit of water used, but that's not a particularly useful measure for food. More useful is calories per unit of water and protein per unit of water.
Rice measured by calories per unit of water is more efficient than lettuce, celery, tomatoes, spinach, cauliflower, lemons, raspberries, peaches, and broccoli. It's less efficient than carrots and strawberries.
Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is completely missing the issue. The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population. LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water infrastructure is necessary for humans to live in most regions of California and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago.
"Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental move-ment would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reser- voir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temper-ance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Ah Pah reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored fifteen million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for thirty years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that envi-ronmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities...
In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed to grasp that farmers’ drilling and pumping is driven not by greed or insensitivity to the environment but by a doubling in the state’s population and a water infrastructure that has not kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to increase vastly the reservoir surface water for agriculture so farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps...
Continuing drought means vast tracts of westside farmlands will turn to dust. California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export industry—led by dairy, almond, and grape production—is in grave peril. Its collapse would crush the economic livelihood of the Central Valley, especially its Hispanic com-munity. When the five-million-acre west side goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs in a part of the state where the average unem-ployment rate still hovers above 10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to further deepen their wells and save what water they can. Everything they and their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with extinction.
Water use in California is being curtailed by those least affected, if affected at all, by the consequences of their advocacy. But environmental-ists, who for forty years worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the state’s water infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon. No reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduc-tion of their salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to claim possession of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what was above it...
Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert, the exasperated left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project. And as the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made stor-age lakes will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even Southern California’s municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When Silicon Valley tech lords and academics can’t take a shower and find them-selves paving over their lawns and gardens or letting their pools stand empty, perhaps they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than for fish. The new dust bowl may see a different generation of Joads abandon-ing California for a wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest."
> Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is completely missing the issue. The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population. LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water infrastructure is necessary for humans to live in most regions of California and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago.
If you reduced direct human usage of water to ZERO in California, you still wouldn't have enough water for agribusinesses.
This is playing out. As water prices rise, the coastal cities will turn to desalinization, and the agribusinesses will be left to knife each other.
Nope, farmers are totally a major factor in the water crisis.
There is a hard limit on the total water delivered to California in the form of rain. Some fraction of that is effectively uncollectable (it doesn't pool into anything dammable in the first place). Another fraction of that is ecologically necessary, to prevent, say, salinification of the bay (see the Aral Sea for a very good example of what happens when you ignore that).
Based on the current rude ecological health of the Bay Area, damming any inflow to that would not improve the water budget overall. You might improve capacity, but you wouldn't improve throughput, and it's the throughput budget that's in the negative right now.
There's another factor, too: municipal water supplies are basically reusable. When you take a wasteful shower, most of that water is going down the drain and into the sewer, where it can easily be discharged ahead of the municipal intake. Getting 90% of the water back is not unimaginable. It's lawn-care (~50% of municipal water usage) and agriculture where the water is nowhere near as recoverable.
To put numbers on that: the 5.2 million acre-ft that municipal water systems use (excluding lawn-care, itself 4.8 million) comes out to more like .52 million in practice... compared to 34 million acre-ft for agricultural usage. You could double the residential population of California, and, assuming you don't add new lawns, with an increase of water usage of just 1%.
That article appears to be banging an ideological drum. The part you quoted is high on charged language and low on nuance, and I don't trust it.
The quote "curb farmers' ability to pump water from beneath their own lands" is the part that set off my bullshit detector: isn't it well known that water rights aren't that simple, as pumping water from beneath my land results in less water beneath yours?
> The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population.
Maybe a better plan would have been to arrive at a steady state population and economy in equilibrium with the natural capital supplied by the environment.
Sounds like there are too many people competing for to few resources.
I am in the UK and I brought almond hair oil - at the back it said "almonds grown in California".
How does this make any sense ?
Its not even almond but almond OIL. Knowing what I know now I look at the bottle and wonder how many thirsty Californian babies did I just kill buying this.
Its the same feeling you get when wearing Nike shoes that you know were made in some sweatshop.
It's peculiar to me that I've heard so much attention on almonds as a water-intensive crop, and so little about beef, given that they're comparable in terms of water cost per pound or per calorie, and both are major Californian products.
I'm not a vegetarian or an animal rights activist, but my urge to add this disclaimer might have something to do with why that's so.
Cattle can be moved to water, if necessary, or herd culled. They're restored fairly quickly. Beef cattle are butchered at about one year of age, dairy cattle live about 6 years. Milk is typically produced somewhat locally, in that it's a heavy bulk liquid which is expensive to transport.
Trees are far more difficult to herd than either cattle or cats, and orchards have lifespans in the decades, with some historic California orange groves up to 300 years old. Most nut and stone-fruit trees have a 30-50 year ife. Moreover, there's a period of 4-7 years depending on tree crop during which an orchard is nonbearing, so if you remove an orchard, there's a significant hit.
The upshot is that it's much more difficult to rapidly adjust tree-crop water use than cattle, whether dairy or beef. Though on a gallons per unit protein basis, almonds do rate as more efficient as I understand.
I cover what little I know of that in the links above, see them for reference.
On herds: not clear, though I believe they're somewhat reduced. Though alfalfa, not almonds, in support of cattle, are the largest single use (ag or otherwise) of water within California.
As with herds, alfalfa cultivation can be switched on or off rapidly.
My understanding is that the actual amount of supplemental water for cattle varies greatly throughout the state. For northern coastal California, irrigation (or "virtual water" in the form of supplied alfalfa) is less necessary.
1 gallon of milk weighs about 8.3 lb. For that you get 1632 calories, 38.4g fat, 195.2 g carbohydrate, and 131.2 g protein. It's about 16 standard servings, and half to 80% of a day's total calories. If not UHT-treated (not practiced much in America), it keeps for about a week. Cross-country truck transit would be 4-5 days. Rail about 2 weeks.
The same weight of beef is far more concentrated: it would deliver nearly 7,000 calories, 235g fat, a staggering 1142 g of protein, and is 40 servings of food.
The beef doesn't require pasteurisation (heating is expensive), can be frozen, doesn't slosh (though hanging sides can be hazardous truck cargo), and frozen it will keep for months.
Shipping routes into California generally require crossing high mountain ranges, which further increases shipping costs. It's something on the order of a 1 mile elevation gain being equivalent to 400 miles of level travel, if I'm recalling earlier research properly. Outside California, your available dairy land would be Oregon and Washington (both affected by drought), or points east of the Mississippi. That's a long way to haul a heavy, awkward, perishable, liquid cargo.
Wisconsin has few deepwater ports within 7 days shipping time to the West Coast.
Your alternatives:
● Powdered milk. Stores indefinitely, much more portable (no water weight), but taste and consistency issues. Much surplus milk has traditionally been powdered.
● Condensed milk. A compromise, but expensive as I recall.
● UHT. Though as noted, it's proven unpopular to date in the US. It's possible that might change, but it would be a significant change.
It's not just the water that cattle consume directly, it's the water that is used in the grain that fattens them up in that year before they are butchered. The latter dwarfs the former.
> It's peculiar to me that I've heard so much attention on almonds as a water-intensive crop, and so little about beef,
Because beef is a red herring. Beef uses next to no water.
Alfalfa used to feed that beef, on the other hand, is a huge water consumer and completely silly given that it could be grown elsewhere quite easily. California exports something like a billion dollars worth of alfalfa to China. It's nuts.
Much of the 'water per pound' likely comes from food and growing food for the cattle to eat. Most of that corn comes from the midwest, where at the moment there is flooding from too much water. So growing corn to feed cows surely makes cows use more water per pound of grocery, however California water is of a very different kind than Illinois or Iowan water.
And like many things, it's due to misaligned incentives causing a cascade affect. The farmers aren't stupid, they are simply optimizing for a system where water has little to no cost and almonds (and pistachios, I hear) are extremely lucrative. Each farmer is making a sane decision for themselves to maximize their profit based on their capabilities, and to not do so at this point just means the same end result, but with less profit for that farmer and slightly more for their competitors.
It's not really any different than the environment (pollution had no direct cost), except that a) consumers started caring, making a market for responsible treatment of the environment, and B) governments are starting to get involved, putting caps on pollution, trying to assess actual environmental affect, and in some cases making companies offset it (a market, yet again).
> growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state.
I've seen this sentiment a few times, and it's never made sense. Crop growth isn't determined solely by water availability. There's plenty of water in Florida, but the climate there is likely less almond-friendly than the California climate. In a toy world with just those two states, you'd have to pick your preference: climate control in Florida, or water importing in California. Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is giving up on the whole idea of growing almonds in particular and of comparative advantage generally. Maybe California's exceptional climate justifies doing a certain amount of work you wouldn't have to do to grow crops somewhere else.
I've also seen two more sensible points about almonds and California water:
- It's difficult to make property rights in water work, because two people drawing from two wells into the same aquifer both just lower the level of the aquifer everywhere. Off the top of my head, you'd need tradable allotments, like ocean fisheries, rather than property lines which I believe are what we currently use.
- If you own a field and want to grow alfalfa (hugely water intensive), you can just let the field lie fallow if the price of water goes too high. You'll lose that year's alfalfa crop. But, if you own an almond orchard, you can't abandon it just because it'll cost more money to water it than you can make back selling the almonds -- if you don't water your orchard, all of the trees will die, and you won't own an almond orchard anymore. Since the California precipitation cycle is much longer than one year, it might be good policy to discourage crops that require maintenance on a yearly basis.
It's also hurting bees and other parts of the ecosystem. Endless mono-culture all flowering at once. Local bees can't survive and they need to truck in bees to pollinate. A few months ago I was driving past an overturned truck (those trucks from the other article) full of bees. A month later it was a truck full of salmon but that's a different story...
Actually, there kind of is. The drought has given restaurants intellectual "covering fire" for not bringing out passive-aggressively small cups for drinking water.
I know, "minor inconvenience" and all, but it's pretty ridiculous that it's come to that, as if that somehow is at all noticeable for urban water consumption.
The thing is growing almond is okay if its to meet local demand. But growing it in a state that is experiencing drought and then shipping it halfway across a ocean is just way out of wack.
Is there a lack of area with water in the rest of the world ??
Why cannot almonds be grown somewhere in the second largest continent of africa ? Its much closer to me than bloody California.
Because it's profitable? If the true cost of growing almonds was actually paid by the farmers (including water cost, which is the real problem, it doesn't really cost anything to the farmers compared to it's true cost to the surrounding area), they would cost more to buy, reducing demand, cost more to grow, reducing profit, and more than likely be grown in other areas.
Farmers are just optimizing for a system with cost inputs where the cost of some inputs (water) are paid by others (CA residents, via ecological and water supply problems). The quicker we can shift this cost to the true user (farmers) the quicker the system will stabilize.
