Actually my brother is moving back from California to live in rural Ohio after 30 years. He says he is feed up with the smoke and water issues. And he can sell his house for 4 times what he paid and live in rural Ohio where he can rent a 2 bedroom apartment for $550 a month (water paid).
There are already people moving back to inner city Detroit for various reason but the infrastructure is very old and needs updated. Access to water is not an issue, if Flint had stayed on Detroit water they never would have had the problems they had.
That might have seemed amusing were it not for the time I had a tank of chilled water overflow at work and the environmental officer made me fill out a form because some of it escaped containment and touched soil.
But the Midwest isn’t going to replace it. Which was my original point to FlikTheBlue No fractional amount of “quite a lot” of grapes in the Midwest is going to replace current California production, unsustainable as it is.
The midwest is pretty big. Sometimes people don’t realize just how big the US is.
California has about a million acres of grapes. That’s a square less than 40 miles on a side. Could fit that quite comfortably in Southern Ohio, and then not worry about water. Short of some pretty dramatic climate change that completely changes everything the Ohio River Valley should have plenty of water.
What’s the current grape production of Southern Ohio today? Grapes generally do well in warm, dry climates and are finicky about soil type and drainage. There are problems in moist areas with rotting of the roots, diseases in the leaves, etc. I do not think grape vines do too well in areas that freeze a lot. At least for wine grapes, they are pretty selective on where they grow, down to microclimates and hillsides with a specific number of expected hours of direct sunlight and shade. The point is, while moving growing of some crops from one area to another looks good on paper, there are likely conditions in place that a) made the original location preferable, and b) make alternate locations prohibitive.
However, setting aside the grapes for a moment, there are thirsty crops being grown in CA that should not be - cotton is one that need not be grown in the desert, and there are viable cotton growing areas all over the southern half of the country. I have already mentioned some tree nuts as well, where a large portion of the crop is exported.
I don’t know that there is anything that “should” be done here, tho, as climate conditions here in CA are making some ag industries contract on their own (ripping out orchards and replacing with different crops).
This is true, I was just responding to the claim that the midwest would not be able to grow as many grapes as a couple desert valleys in California.
Pretty much most of the land east and a little bit west of the Mississippi river is going to be much more conducive to growing things than further to the west, where you either have to tap into fossil waters in aquifers, or divert rivers from their original courses.
One way or another the crops in California will fail. We can waste resources and try to find more ways of getting water to them, and maye make them eek out a few more years, but eventually it’s going to come to an end.
Hard to break down, as there are wineries in southern Ohio along the river, northern Ohio near the lakes, and central Ohio around Columbus, but there are about 280 wineries in Ohio.
It’s not a huge industry, but not because grapes won’t grow here.
IIRC someone else had posted in a different thread that when California was being settled in the 1800s, it was in an exceptionally wet period, and that the current situation is more the rule than an exception.
Grape vines have no problem with freezing in winter; they drop leaves and start up again in the spring. This is normal. (I’m in the middle of grape growing country in the Finger Lakes, and used to raise grapes myself.)
There are minimum temperatures below which they’ll take bud damage or even die; this varies with the variety, and also with other factors (such as whether the vines were fully hardened before the temperature dropped that low.)
Grapes are indeed selective as to microclimate but there’s a lot of microclimate on the east half of the USA that can grow them (most definitely not only in Ohio, which doesn’t even make the top ten; New York is third in the nation, though admittedly way behind California. It’s not clear to me why people are talking so much about Ohio. – Grape production does seem to be increasing rapidly there, though; as well as in a number of other states.)
And maybe we’ll need to use fewer grapes and more of something else.
You’re right; don’t know how I missed that. Mea culpa.
About a fifth of NY’s production currently, but you might be gaining on us, I don’t know. Pretty sure our production’s going up these days but yours might be going up faster.
But I don’t know why we’re talking specifically about the midwest! I’m certainly not.
I don’t think current production really is meaningful when the whole diversion was whether the amount of grapes California grows could be grown elsewhere. That amount of grapes absolutely, positively, without any doubt, could be grown in the Ohio River valley. I’m not sure that contention needs to be discussed further.
Now would those grapes produce the same economic value as the California grape harvest? Not anywhere close to it–as I mentioned, Ohio is not a good area for growing good wine grapes, and wine grapes a huge % of the economic value of the California grape harvest. But as a mental exercise concerning “could x tons of grapes be grown in y place”, yes, they could. Large swathes of the Ohio River Valley are actually underdeveloped, with low population density and even lots of it are just forested areas completely undeveloped.
The reason I don’t find the diversion that interesting, is grapes aren’t really big offenders in water usage, particularly in the higher value wine growing regions. Central Valley grapes are worse water users than North Coast grapes, and are also less important for wine. For satisfying society’s desire for “grape flavored” products like grape jams and such, most likely that quality of grape can come from anywhere that can grow grapes. But I don’t actually think California needs to stop growing grapes, either. California’s overuse of water problems and the linkage to grape production is kind of nonsensical when there are many other much larger water using crops that are arguably less important for society in many ways.
