Good timing. Most non-immigrant agriculture worker visas aren’t able to be issued right now anyway.
The produce doesn’t care about politics and the growers are more attuned to the produce than to the INS.
When native-borns want to pick tomatoes all day for $100, let us know, 'K?
If the current trend continues, it looks like California WILL flat-out run out of water – someday. (Just like those predictions that we WILL run out of oil – someday.) If it starts to rain again some year in the near future, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief that we dodged a bullet.
All the increasingly-severe water restrictions will, of themselves, not save us. They are nothing more than desperation measures, buying time, hoping that we can stave off the water-armageddon for just another year (or several) in the hope that it will begin to rain again by then. If it does, we are saved. If it doesn’t, we are doomed.
There are already some communities that have run out of water, and their wells are sucking mud.
If the drought continues much longer, then some communities WILL simply need to shut down and be abandoned. Various news articles and op-eds that I have read over the past year have already noted this possibility.
California has had multi-year droughts before, in living memory. It always blew over after a few years and the rains came back. This time, it’s less clear if that will happen. Because of the global climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise), there is more speculation this time around that the long-term climate change, towards drier climate, may be permanent this time.
I find it quite ironic that just a few years ago, California was experiencing a crisis being caused by the disappearance of farms. People were bemoaning the fact that farmers were selling their land to outlet mall developers.
As late as 2013, they were citing the continuing decline of farm acreage and calling for tax policy reform to save the farms.
But now the tide of popular opinion is turning and Californians are viewing farms as the enemy. Irony.
A better comparison would be “try to convince the leaders of New York State that they need to shut down their dairy and grape industry and chase them out of the state”, since NYS agriculture is around 1% of their economy. The difference being of course that NYS isn’t facing a water crisis.
You’re conflating a couple of things, although I can see that there is indeed some ironic counterpoint involved.
There is NOTHING bad about opposing the further sprawl of California cities, especially onto potentially arable land that will then be lost for generations, if not forever. No one needs another fucking “outlet mall” and anything that prevents another subdivision of shit houses rolling over the hills is a positive.
It’s really the same issue to stop expanding things that need more water in the southwest, even the relatively modest increases in household and light commercial consumption.
So if the “no malls” crowd waved the “save our farms” banner, it was to the good. If something like the same crowd is now waving a “save our water” banner, it’s still good.
California ag can convert to other crops or simply face the reality that’s hit other farming regions, going back to the Mayans. It’s game over for the high-irrigation crops, and the farmers (and mall developers) can go suck wind like their increasingly deep wells.
Well, they have to chase them out twice to get to 2%. California’s agriculture-related economic activity (transport, housing for farm workers, marketing and so forth) is worth approximately 3 times as much as the agriculture itself, so we’re really talking about something like 7% of the economy.
Still, even assuming that California stops giving water to farms, it’s not like the entire agricultural sector will disappear. Farmers will just have to adapt to not growing high-water crops like almonds and alfalfa.
Perhaps, but not necessarily, pumping the ground water is a mob loan. It could be also be viewed as a safety reserve to help get though a drought, sort of like having a emergency reserve of accessible money for a individual. Slow to build and slow to build back but very helpful if and when needed.
So it depends on how it is used. With that said it does appear there are warning signs of overuse and perhaps permanent damage already to the substructure so score point for the mob loan side.
Exactly.
In a high-ag state, it would be a much bigger crisis. As it is, I think that ag is a bigger part of the functional economy than 2%, since things like tech occupy a disproportionate part of that pie (and tend to concentrate economic valuation in small areas, both geographically and in real-world terms). But this is not a solvable problem, it’s not going to go away, and Cal ag has to adapt or be euthanized. Adaptation will mean shrinkage, in both fewer farms and lesser economic yield, but it does not have to be abolished.
The remaining problem is get SoCal and Cal ag to recognize that is is not “just another drought” with a long, lush rainy epoch on the doorstep.
ETA: Ground water is coming from largely “fossil” aquifers as well. It was laid down slowly, over hundreds of years if not millennia, and it’s basically not coming back, either.
Damn, I’m glad my front yard is Lake Michigan, and that the lake levels are up a bit. Winters may suck, summers may be mosquito-filled, but damn I never have to turn off the tap in the sink when I brush my teeth, because my well flows all the time anyway. Just like all the other wells and artesian springs that surround me. Cap the wells, and the artesian springs just put out more water.
Other than to waste water, what earthly advantage is there to running the tap while you brush your teeth? Or are you boasting that you can waste water cause you gots plenty, maybe? You just seem so surprisingly proud of this!
There is no wastage, if I’m not running the water out my tap, it’s running out of a nearby spring anyway. My own farm has at least a dozen springs/seepages that run year-round, all into Lake Michigan.
And since turning off the tap is an extra effort that makes no difference to conservation of water, why do it? I prefer to brush my teeth to the music of the water on the drain.
I’m happy I’ve got lots of fresh water. It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth.
When you’re talking about well water (and presumably a septic system) in Great Lakes watersheds, water isn’t really “wasted”. QtM’s water is probably pumped up from a very shallow water table, he uses it, it goes down the drain and into the septic system, where it filters through the ground back to the lake that feeds the water table. That’s the essence of recycling, isn’t it?
Water is “lost” when it is dumped into the ocean because it’s the cheap way to deal with waste water, or when it is sprayed across deserts where it evaporates.
(As a side note, I’m really amused by the reactions to the idea that California treat its sewage well enough to go back into the water supply. ZOMG everyone’s practically drinking from the toilet! Except that’s already what happens in large parts of the country: a town gets its fresh water supply from a lake or river, and treats it well enough to be potable. The resulting sewage is treated so that it’s cleaner than the original source of the water, and dumped slightly downstream, where in turn it will be part of the next town’s water supply.)
I don’t think people view farms as the enemy. And improving the water efficiency of farms isn’t going to completely crater agricultural production. It’s just going to make it a bit more expensive.
Water is horrendously underpriced right now, and as a result farmers use much more than they could because there’s no economic incentive to invest in more efficient irrigation or lower-water-use-crops.
We really can solve this problem pretty cheaply by increasing the price of water just a bit and providing some state-backed loan guarantees to farmers for investments in better irrigation. And nuts and stone fruits will get a bit more expensive. The world will continue spinning.
But the legal and political barriers to a relatively simple economic policy solution are huge. Water rights are very very messy for a bunch of historical reasons.
“Thrift is its own reward.” - you either agree, or don’t. And East and West will meet, have wild sex and tons of babies before these two sides shake hands.
(ETA: Just to make clear, I am a “hoarder” because I have about three banker’s boxes of things from my first 30 years. The Mrs. could fit every single thing not part of her daily life and immediate needs in a shoebox. And yes, I am parsimonious with water use, because. She and her siblings start after-dinner cleanup by flipping the water on, full. Then usually walking away to collect the dirty dishes, etc. Sigh. Sigh, I say.)
I’m not going to click on breitbart, so I did some googling.
All parties agree that enough water will keep flowing for health and safety purposes. This bit leads me to have a bit less sympathy for Mountain House, though.
The answer, obviously, is, “Who cares?” I don’t understand why people don’t accept that the magnitude of the crisis requires severe measures.
Sorry, forget, here’s the link.
I agree with what others have said. California does not have enough water for both the amount of people and the amount of farming it has. And it’s not going to get enough water in the future. So California needs to decide what it wants to reduce; its population or its agriculture.
Curtailing towns may be part of that process. It might be a method of encouraging people to leave those towns and move out of the state.
Because it’s “just another drought” and everything will be hunky-dory in another or two, like it always has.
After spending my first half-century there, I can tell the difference. But if I owned an avocado farm down around Ceres, I might not want to.
A better way would be to plant less thirsty crops in place of high water usage crops.
A big problem seems to be that the people in rich towns, with big houses and big lawns, are not very interested in conserving, and the governments of these towns are not very interested in trying to get them to conserve. Poorer towns have done better. The rich don’t care if they pay a bit or even a lot more. So, trying to get people to move out of the state will probably affect the set of people who don’t use that much water anyway.
Personally, I have no dog in this fight. I’ve never even been to California and I don’t live in any of the states that provide California water. We have good water supply in New York.
But if it was my decision to make, I’d work on reducing agriculture in California. Agriculture is a relatively small part of California’s economy but it’s a relatively big part of California’s water usage. You could, in theory, transform California into a west coast Nebraska - a low population farm state. But if that happened California would lose most of its non-farming economy and most of its political power. I don’t think California wants that and I doubt that such a model is even sustainable. The reduced economy and political power would mean California would have a hard time getting the out-of-state water it needs for its agriculture. So California could end up sacrificing everything else for its farms and then lose its farms anyway.