“Crops” don’t grow in nature. Agriculture is a human invention, both in labor and economics.
But that is why I asked you if you are OK returning to an agrarian economy, where a much greater portion than today of the GNP would be spent growing food?
Maybe you are, I dunno. I don’t think most Americans would be, but who knows? If that is the price of hording water, maybe people are willing to pay it. It’s an open question to me.
That is not out of line with producing ~40% of the total production. Even more in line when you consider the total production includes 40 other states, not just 3.
You are wrong. The water in the Central Valley comes primarily from California. I can look out my window and see the snow in the mountains. I am producing a film where a location near here will need low running water, and this being the wettest winter in 15 years has really screwed things up for us. I have been watching our relatively small river since last October. There is no doubt every drop is coming from CA. Also, I just returned from driving over a midsize canal, it is fuller than I have ever seen it in the 3 years I have lived here. The water in that canal definitely originates in the Sierras also.
Sorry, you are flat out wrong if you think that the water in the Valley does not come from California. Maybe you just don’t realize how much water gets stored as snow in the Sierras and then melts each year. This year, above where I live, if I am reading the historical record of other wet years correctly (and the Army Corp of Engineers has hourly data posted back at least 30 years) the snow way up top may not melt completely at all.
OK, then be more specific. That is just fortune cookie talk. Get down to brass tacks. Let’s hear about this “modified economy” of yours.
Yeah. Now picture this morning I drove to the next town over, 30 miles or so, and back. Nothing but orange groves the whole way. Every 19-21 feet the trees are planted. This citrus belt extends maybe 40 miles north of here and 50 miles south (although I suppose the density tapers at the edges). My rough estimate is that there are a million citrus trees in my town alone. People are very much on edge about this - like I said, essentially all of the table citrus (not juice) in the US is grown here, and we know that the FL juice crop is essentially dying history.
This is only a very small part of the Valley, but citrus needs very specific climate conditions. It can’t be grown just anywhere. There is still a bit around Riverside I think, and a bit around Ventura, but that is pretty much it for commercial citrus. Of course Orange County is all paved over now. You can see how fast it can all be lost by looking at FL. It’s no joke.
I didn’t realize CA produced most of the table citrus. God, I love my home state!
I knew Florida citrus tends to have a thinner skin, and more juice, and assumed CA and FL just supplied their halves of the country with their own citrus. Does Florida citrus, with its thinner skin, not last as long in shipping and on the shelf?
I still haven’t forgiven Florida for Anita Bryant, don’t drink much citrus juice, and generally pass on Florida citrus given a choice. But, I’m saddened at the loss of citrus, no matter where it is.
That’s what I thought too until I moved to citrus-land a few years ago.
that’s beyond my pay-grade to say I am sure people have told me, but I don’t recall the details.
Funny you say that because I remember that from HS too. I will say that CA citrus country is virulently anti-gay, having voted the highest for Prop 8,. the removal of marriage rights, of anywhere in California. 75% or more in favor. That really sucks. And I live in Roy Ashburn’s district, where until he recently he was all but exalted and revered. Now it is as though he doesn’t exist - a social fiction that he will serve out his term the next few months, and then be scrubbed and forgotten as though he was never there.
I don’t know what exactly the economy would look like if we cut back on irrigation, but I personally would be willing to give up some of my high standard of living in order to keep from running out of water. It is something which we (as a country) need to be thinking about and planning for IMO.
Parts of California maybe but not the Central Valley (from what I can gather). Cite.
I’m still in the learning stages. Here is some good reading however:
That only covers surface water diversions. The Central Valley Aquifer is also mined at the rate of about 11 million acre-feet a year. The in-state surface and groundwater pumping diversions cover the northern part of the valley, but California also imports 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water. A little over a million of that goes to LA, but 3 million plus goes to agricultural operations at the southern end of the Central Valley.
That pattern of water use is the reason people say that California hasn’t been a good steward of its water resources. Groundwater mining in the central valley resulted in a huge drop in the aquifer - similar to the drop in the Oglalla aquifer that not alice mentioned earlier. More than that, the land surface itself subsided as much as 30 feet between 1925 and 1977 due to compression of fine-grained beds when pressure on the confined water was relieved by pumping.
The state’s response to this wasn’t to regulate groundwater mining or to improve the efficiency of water use - it was to divert water from other basins for use in the Central Valley. The diversions from the Sacramento Valley, from the Sierras, and from other parts of the state have severely impacted those areas. Look at the salmon streams in northern California and the efforts to maintain sufficient flow for spawn, or the dry Owens Lake bed in the Eastern Sierras (the Owens Valley now supplies much of LA’s municipal water supply, at the cost of almost all the indigenous surface water from the valley).
Now that California has exhausted its own groundwater and surface water resources, it’s looking to get more water from other locations. The people, organizations, and states reluctant to provide that water aren’t knee-jerk reactionaries who think California is the land of fruits and nuts; they’re people who have seen the depletion of California’s resources (and those of other Western States) and learned from that. Depleting your water resources has sever, visible impacts, even in areas where water appears to be plentiful.
California is by no means unique in the west - it’s the biggest mess, not the only one. Every year, 16.5 million acre-feet are allocated from the Colorado River, but
the average annual flow in the Colorado is around 14 million acre-feet. I would bet that most of the sizable rivers west of the Continental Divide are over-allocated. The water resources in the Western US simply aren’t sustainable, and the solution is going to have to be more nuanced than “let’s get more water from somewhere else.” That’s shifting the impacts upstream, but it’s not doing anything to actually solve the problem.
I’ve seen “40% of the country’s fruits and vegetables” in this thread a few times. I assume that 40% is based on weight, because the USGS (caution: PDF) indicates that the Central Valley supplies about 8% of the nation’s agricultural output by value. That discrepancy is telling: it indicates that we’re not placing a realistic dollar value on the availability of water. That’s been the case since the large-scale irrigation projects undertaken by the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 20th century, but it has to come to a stop sometime. If that means we pay more for fruits and vegetables, so be it - the greater cost would be a more realistic reflection of the cost of producing them.
I have a naive question: what’s stopping California from adopting the Israeli model and going full-bore with desalination plants and drip-irrigation technology? If a tiny country like Israel can do it, surely a huge state like California can. Cali isn’t lacking in ocean water.
Cost and scale. Desalination is a thermodynamically expensive process, and the technology to scale it up to the quantities that would make a dent in California’s water demand just isn’t there. The plant in the linked article is supposed to serve 15% of Israel’s population, but that’s barely over 1,000,000 people. LA has 3.8 million people in the city itself, and more than 15 million in the metropolitan area.
Drip irrigation is a different story. The technology is pretty mature, and off-the-shelf equipment is available, but it’s more expensive and more maintenance intensive than sprinklers. Without some kind of financial incentive, producers aren’t going to make that switch.
California can, but it’s more expensive than recycling waste water, and it’s basically a last resort thing. California isn’t quite at last resort yet. Yet.
I’m curious about environmental concerns about desalination plants. They claim it’s devastating to marine life around the plant, but what does that mean? Like, for meters around the plant? Miles around the plant?
You are incorrect. It supplies 40% of the fruits and vegetables, not 40% of food It certainly doesn’t supply 40% of the grain or 40% of the meat eaten in the US.
That is, in fact, true - Detroit really could have built smaller cars all along. The reasons it did not were valid in one sense, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that they could have (and sometimes did) build smaller cars even while they were building larger ones.
Except it’s NOT such a choice - there are LOTS of other places that can grow every single item grown in the Central Valley today. That’s why it supplies less than half the fruits and vegetables eaten in the US. All that stuff it grown other places, too.
Don’t get me wrong - I wish no ill will on the people of California or the Central Valley. I hope they can continue to produce wonderful things for the indefinite future. However, their ability to do wonderful things does NOT entitle them to snatch other peoples’ resources.
And currently westerners prevent the Colorado from reaching the sea. Actually, the Dust Bowl wasn’t a matter of “overfarming”, it had to do with an extended drought and certain practices that worsened the effects of drought. Since then farmers have adopted practices such as not plowing under stalks too quickly (they help hold soil in place) and planting extensive windbreaks, which shield dry fields and help prevent dust storms. Of course, this takes more land area that such concentrated farming as in the CV, but concentrated isn’t always better.
If there is so much water in the CV why do you need to bring in any at all? The CV relies on both groundwater for irrigation and “surface water diversions” i.e. bringing it in from elsewhere. That means you’re using more water than naturally occurs in the CV. Mind you, that might be the most logical and reasonable use for that water in that particular region, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to ship some more water from thousands of miles away to further intensify the agricultural production there.
Really, concentrating agriculture so heavily in just one area is not a good idea - ANY area could be hit by a disaster, natural or man-made, and having multiple sources of food is something I see as a reasonable measure for long-term security of the nation.
Around here - Northwest Indiana - planting can start in May and harvesting can run through November. That’s 7 months out of 12.
So… that’s gotta mean you use a crapton of artificial fertilizers, too, since no farmland could possibly remain productive indefinitely with such year-round use without fertilizers.
Of course, the Midwest uses fertilizers, too. Because we have more land area devoted to agriculture, though, we can also let fields lie fallow, or grow a nitrogen-fixing crop to plow under to increase the soil fertility in a more natural manner. It doesn’t eliminate artificial fertilizers, but it does reduce their use.
For us backyard gardeners, of course, there’s composting - but I don’t see that being “scalable” as you like to say.
There is quite a bit of farmland in the Midwest that is lying fallow right now, or is even abandoned. We don’t need the greenhouses. If - Og forbid - Something Terrible Occurred to the CV we’d go back to the old days of canneries working overtime at harvest, to preserve/process the glut at harvest so there would be sufficient supplies until the next harvest. Some things would become highly seasonable again.
And, frankly, the US produces far, far more grain than is needed. If the CV was knocked out of commission then some farmers would switch to commodities that would then be in short supply. Probably one harvest cycle would be off-kilter, but no one would starve (though they might miss a favorite food or two) and in a year or two alternate sources would arise, at least for vegetables. Fruits and nuts requiring orchards would, admittedly, take longer.
As I said - there are other areas in the US that can grow what is grown in the CV. For example, most asparagus in the US comes from the CV, but there are local farmers (meaning within the Illinois/Indiana/Michigan/Ohio group of states) that also grow asparagus which is featured in our local stores with the state of origin advertised. Thus - “California asparagus” and “Michigan asparagus”. Not really any different than a display of apple varieties listing fruit origins as “Washington State”, “California”, and “Michigan”. Or California vs. Georgia peaches. When local produce is in season there really is a demand for it - California produce is seen as filling the gap in between such seasons. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
So - hypothetically, Something Awful happens to the CV. Well, fruits and vegetables will jump in price for a few months. But some of the farmers elsewhere will plant those crops in the next growth cycle, and some of us will have our gardens, and we’ll probably import a bit more until we can finish ramping up production. It will be disruptive and uncomfortable - it will NOT be disastrous. Except to California. But you folks are tough survivors, between the earthquakes and wildfires and what not.
See, that’s one advantage to a real winter - it DOES kill off quite a few pests. I don’t use any pesticides - so yes, I have losses. Then again, I’m not growing food for profit, I’m growing it to supplement my budget. As I mentioned, in 2008 I lost my strawberries. Well, not all the local strawberries were killed off, sometimes I trade other things I have in excess for them. That’s the benefit of disseminated agriculture - it’s becomes much harder for a local disaster to become a problem for the larger populace.
Except you don’t supply 40% of “the food”, just 40% of a subset of the food, all varieties of which actually can and do grow elsewhere.
Right now it is very convenient to obtain it from the CV, but the CV is not essential. If it disappeared that same food would be grown elsewhere.
I think we still have robust enough, and disseminated enough, agricultural base to weather such an occurrence. I’ve never denied it would be inconvenient, annoying, and take some time to really work around, but seriously - there HAVE been shortages of particular commodities before.
I frankly don’t care how much California affects my life. It was this thread that made me think about it, and I realized that I don’t, in fact, rely on it to the degree you seem to think all other Americans “need” your state. There is not one thing in my life that comes from California that couldn’t possibly come from elsewhere. Right now, this or that might come from California, and I really don’t care - I mean, bravo that Californians are able to make a living and all that, but I’m not boycotting the state or anything. I just don’t utterly depend on it, either.
You are COMPLETELY missing my point, which is that while California might serve that function today that in no way makes it compulsory that it be that way 10 or 20 years from now. If Something Awful happened and every port in California was destroyed other ports would either expand or be built elsewhere on the west coast. There is not something magical about California that makes it the only possible place on the entire west coast of the US to build a major seaport.
Drought does not affect the entire North American continent all at once. Even during the Dust Bowl years there were still may US farms that weren’t suffering drought and were producing just fine. Again, it’s an argument for disseminated agriculture, not putting all our nuts in one valley.
And, actually, Indiana does not have “just the right amount” of rain - it actually gets MORE than it needs most years. Which is why drainage ditches and flood control are major concerns around here. Farmers are just as concerned with getting rid of water they don’t need as they are with getting sufficient water.
Which is not to say that such “extra” water is really extra - it’s not. It’s a vital part of the local ecology. You see, there aren’t any huge rivers like the Mississippi draining into, say, Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes are wholly dependent on the water returning from their watershed regions - that’s what those outside the watershed aren’t permitted to use it without having a solid means to return it to the Lakes. It’s rainfall and run-off that keeps the Lakes filled. It doesn’t matter if you divert the lake water or the rain, either strategy drains the Great Lakes and eventually destroys them.
Until some disaster hits the Central Valley, or you have a shortage of something not naturally supplied, like sufficient water or artificial fertilizer or pesticides…
California alone can’t feed the US, either. What’s your point?
Not if that “assistance” means destroying the Great Lakes and surrounding regions.
Why not grow more in the eastern half of the Midwest? There IS land available, agriculture could be expanded there. The water supply is more than sufficient.
So… you are familiar with the East Coast and the West Coast and you know jackshit about the flyover country. Gotcha.
Yeah, yeah, yeah - Irish Potato Famine, the Great Banana Scare…hardly the first crop to be threatened by a pest for which there is no known cure. You’re talking about a hypothetical that is unlikely to occur, based on past agricultural experience. They might have to switch to a different cultivar. And whose to say the CV might not be affected by a similar pest one day in one of its crops?
Not to mention that E. coli problem that actually killed some people. Remember that? Pretty much pulled a lot of affected produce off the shelves once it was announced it was California stuff that was contaminated. Gee, if we’d grown spinach and lettuce elsewhere, too, maybe we’d been able to have SOME of that still available… oh, wait, we did.
I suppose WRT desalination plants it becomes a “diminishing returns” type scenario. It seems to me that California, with its huge population centers around semi-arid climates is not sustainable. Perhaps investing in desalination infrastructure for the long term becomes viable if they build enough of the plants.
This of course would require far-sighted politicians realizing the impending water crisis. Which appears to be a “sooner rather than later” type scenario.
I know these plants are expensive, but going forward, what’s a viable alternative given the population?
In California, the problem isn’t the population. There are a lot of people. but municipal wazter supplies are essentially pass-through. The water is taken from the source, used, treated, and returned to the environment. Less water is returned than is extracted, but the difference isn’t all that great.
Agriculture is a different story. Irrigation water is extracted from the environmental source and applied to the field. The application method has an inherent efficiency - drip irrigation is ore efficient than sprinklers, which are more efficient than flood irrigation. Sprinklers (the most frequently used application in the West) lose a lot of water to evaporation - up to 30%, depending on wind speed, relative humidity, and solar radiation. That water is essentially lost; it’s carried wherever the prevailing air currents take it, but it’s typically removed from the basin. Much of the water that makes its way to the root zone is taken up by the crops and assimilated into the tissue of the plants. This water is removed when the crops are harvested; when they’re shipped, this water is removed from the basin. The upshot is that water allocated for agricultural is water lost - it’s not returned to the environment after it’s used.
Desalination of ocean water would be an ideal source of irrigation water. The source is essentially unlimited, so the fact that the return flows aren’t there isn’t as critical as it is with terrestrial sources. The technology exists - we can use distillation, reverse osmosis, membrane filtration, etc. But the overarching problem is chemistry and thermodynamics. We’re trying to remove dissolved solids from the solvent they’re dissolved in, and there’s a threshold amount of energy that’s needed to separate those species. We can build a desalination plant, but we then have to provide that much energy (or several times more, accounting for process inefficiencies) to the desalination plant. At this point. we’re looking at a trade-off between CO2 emissions from energy production and the production of clean water.
[End of GQ answer - from here on, it’s just my opinion]
Ultimately, there isn’t a simple solution. I think desalination is going to be the solution to the irrigation shortfall in California. But the cost of that water is going to increase, and that’s going to drive up the price of our fruits and vegetables. Likewise, the energy to drive the desalination processes is going to have to come from somewhere. Southern California is in an energy crisis already, so that’s a whole new problem.
There’s an amazing amount of solar power available in the southwest, but the production scale solar plants are water-limited. Wind and geothermal are available, but they’re not going to be producing enough to be anything more than supplemental power for a long, long time. With current technologies, nuclear power seems to me to be the most promising alternative… until you consider the regulatory environment in California.
If you’re looking for easy solutions, you’re in the wrong thread. :smack:
I live a mile from Lake Ontario in western New York. The drinking water for everyone in this region comes from the Finger Lakes, ~50 miles to the south. Swimming from the local beaches is routinely prohibited because of E Coli or algae levels. And there’s no commercial fishing in this area because of federal regulations on selling fish with toxic contaminants.
actually i am in favor of blowing up the water tunnels at the grapevine and telling LA and its damned swimming pools and lawns to go take a hike. my husbands family is from Fresno, you know how badly the water table is tanking in the Central Valley because of all the water being shipped over the grapevine for idiots to have green lawns and swimming pools? They could very well install a massive desalination plant for Orange County/LA and stop sucking the water out of the northern end of CA.
The great thing about living in the Great Lakes watershed: no droughts or water restrictions. There’s a much greater emphasis on stormwater management, watershed planning and environmental protection than usage and conservation. When I was growing up in WNY, city water was unmetered.
This actually was seriously considered. In the book “Cadillac Desert”, the author discussed the “North American Water and Power Alliance” which in the early 1960’s was developing plans to bring Alaska and Canadian rivers south through the Rocky Mountain Trench.
