Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP and we could do without some of the most water-intensive crops, such as almonds. There won’t be food insecurity or famine if we cut back on almonds.
I talk with my friend who works in water law a lot about this, and he always comes to basically the same conclusion as this. Almonds and pistachios are a huge waste of water. The problem is that farmer's water rights are constitutionally protected (California constitution). You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it, and that's not going to happen anytime soon.
IMO I think we should tax the heck out of pistachio and almonds and just make them unprofitable to sell.
Pistachios are a high-value crop, and other places under drought like the La Mancha region of Spain are also switching from olives and wheat to pistachios.
Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.
Agricultural water is heavily subsidized in California, and the absurd system of senior and junior water rights means a senior rights owner has absolutely zero incentive to be efficient, so instead of installing efficient drip irrigation, they simply flood fields. But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
This is not just the story of California, but the entire US southwest. Unlike back east, where water is subject to municipal authority and policy (thus allowing a town/city/county/state to decide what the best way to use the water is, especially in times of actual or imminent shortages), the western states ended up with this absurd "water rights" concept that prevents effective policy making.
Eh, back east water isn’t life and death - in the sense that for the vast majority of the east coast, everyone has plenty unless you’re a gigantic super metropolis.
In the west, water is scarce and the most limited resource in most areas - and literally life and death.
An old saw here is, ‘whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over’
You'd have said that in the UK and Western Europe if you're less than 100 years old ... until this summer. Sure, it may not literally be life or death the way it could be if you were lost on foot in the deserts of Nevada, but the prospect of running out of water for agriculture in certain parts of what has hitherto been a well-watered part of the world became quite tangible this summer.
The old dividing line for "agriculture without irrigation" was the 100th meridian. It has already moved at least two degrees east, and there are some forecasts that predict that climate change could move it as far as the 90th. So "the east" is a bit of a mutable concept at this time.
‘literally life and death’ is exactly what I mean.
And it doesn’t require being on foot for it to be so. Las Vegas could literally not be more than a tiny town of desert rats without the water rights on the Colorado they have, same with Phoenix.
Instead they’re huge bustling metropolises.
Even with the issues going on in Europe, crops may die, farmers may go bankrupt - but no one will be literally without water and die from it, or even have to resort to overland tanking.
According to this random PDF from one of the Universities there, the typical household has decreased water usage down to 222 gallons a day. Which is quite low compared to the average in the US, no question.
The current Las Vegas metro population (not counting visitors) is 2.2 million people.
So that’s roughly half a billion gallons of water a day, or 178 billion gallons of water a year. Just for residential, not counting businesses, which typically are much larger water users.
Las Vegas typically gets a bit under 5 inches of precipitation a year.
5 inches of water on an acre of land is equal to 135770 gallons (an ‘acre inch’ x 5).
So to support the current residences in Las Vegas off precipitation alone, they would need to capture 100% of all rain over an area of approximately 1.2 million acres, or 1875 square miles.
Again, that isn’t counting commercial use at all.
Damming up the river which is the final terminus of a watershed estimated at 246,000 square miles (aka the Colorado) makes this a drop in the bucket.
Constructing something equivalent independently?
Not so easy.
And Las Vegas doesn’t have geology amenable to making due with some local damming. Red Rocks is quite pretty and would make a dent, but isn’t big enough.
Pistachios grow on saline ground and can be irrigated with high salinity water. And that is precisely where it is (and should be) planted in CA.
We are looking at entire valley farms going to have to deal with salt water intrusion. Those farmers are hoping to cash in for housing, but pistachios would probably grow well in Salinas/Monterrey valley region.
I haven't heard of anyone doing pistachios in Salinas Valley, and was always curious why. Seems that it is mostly salad greens and broccoli, with wine grapes quickly taking over.
Does central valley have high salinity water now? It's this becoming a problem in be Salinas Valley?
I have lots of family farming there, but am not directly involved in the farming myself, so could be out of the loop.
I think pistachio needs cold spells to fruit properly.
"Pistachios require long, hot, dry summers and chilling in the winter, but don't tolerate ground that freezes. They require approximately 1,000 accumulative hours of temperature at or below 45° F during dormancy.
...
Pistachios have the narrowest environment requirements of any commercially grown nut crop. ...In the United States, that pretty much limits growth to the San Joaquin Valley in California, southeastern Arizona, far west Texas and the high desert of New Mexico."
not now. the timeline is 35-60 years when salt water intrusion is a guaranteed reality. all those salad and strawberry fields wont exist anymore. there are a few people who own most of the chunk of acres there. it will likely all be housing developments.
Compare this to alfalfa, an ultra-low-value crop the Saudis are growing in California because they bought senior water rights, then shipping to Saudi to feed cows, essentially laundering water.
Alfalfa is used/needed locally for cattle feed. Unfortunately for all of the noise over growing nuts in the desert nobody's talking about the immense amount of water used to raise cows.
But reforming the system would take so much litigation no California politician has dared to do it.
Yeah, it's a bit like Prop 13 in that respect. One only needs to drive down I-5 to see how militantly opposed farmers are to water conservation. California's got a vast system of aqueducts dating back sixty odd years and we're only now getting around to talking about maybe covering them to reduce evaporative losses.
Those billboards you see along I-5 opposing water restrictions are largely funded by Stewart Resnick, "the wealthiest farmer in the United States".[0] Cutting off the water would make Stewart less of a billionaire.
Yes a ballot initiative could do the trick. However it's hard to get urban voters to really appreciate the scale of the problem or what needs to be done. As long as their home water supply works and the bill isn't exorbitant then everything seems fine. Plus even with a ballot initiative to change the state Constitution, it would probably still be necessary to compensate current water rights holders at fair market value in order to seize or significantly curtail those rights. That type of eminent domain property seizure would be extraordinarily expensive, and so politicians hesitate to propose the tax increases and bond sales that would be necessary to fund it. But the current situation is unsustainable, so eventually we'll hit a true crisis where some large areas literally run out of water.
You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they
cannot access water.
That said, instead you make it illegal in... say, 5 years, to irrigate certain crops without drip feeding. You also provide grants to convert people over to it, for free.
Of course, it's still very expensive to maintain all that infra, it clogs, needs to be monitored, etc, but if the whole state has to do it, at least it's comparative competition.
> You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they cannot access water.
What’s difficult to understand? Why should society be subsidizing these senior water rights holders? Nobody is saying they can’t access water, they should just fucking pay for it the same way the rest of the world does.
Society isn't paying subsidies to water rights holders. Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away. You can complain that it shouldn't be that way, but that is the legal reality.
> Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away.
That's precisely eminent domain, "the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation."
They barely pay for it. Most of the people holding these rights pay an absurd fraction of what a city-dweller would pay for the same amount. That's the only reason it's profitable for the farmer.
They use different water systems. There is no single ‘water system’ or water source in the state. A senior rights holder has rights on a specific source of water.
Water itself is ‘free’ until there is no more - minus the infrastructure costs to get it where you want of course, which can be zero to insanely expensive depending on the source of water.
City dwellers are paying for the infrastructure to get clean, drinkable water to their doorstep at precise pressures 24/7 + any payments to water source rights owners.
Farmers are paying for bulk delivery of massive quantities of non-potable/drinkable water to their fields during specific times of the year.
Nah, thats just a completely revisionist history. All of these works projects were funded by federal dollars or city dollars, including the infrastructure to get it to the farmers. They pay a fraction of the delivery cost the cities pay. All the purification and recapture facilities are built and paid for on top of that. Western farmers have never, ever paid a fair price for the water they use.
That's bullshit, at least in California. Most of the problem water usage from Farmers, for example in the central and antelope valley, has been from private wells on private property they themselves sunk, or an equivalent small co-operative they were a member of did. They've been tapping huge underground fossil aquifers that way for nearly 100 years now, to the point it's been collapsing. No canals required. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence]
It's estimated the ground has permanently sunk ~ 28 ft. from this alone.
Before this started, the water table in the Antelope valley was at ground level in many places, with literal artesian springs popping up. It's now well over 2500 ft below ground level.
The Delta Mendota canal (finished in '51) was an extension and redo of a number of existing canals that were there far before. The army corp of engineers did a lot of the work then - but it wasn't that new. And this was all water just a few feet above sea-level and that would shortly become seawater if left unmolested.
Most of these original Canals from the Sierras existed before the concept of a state water organization existed. Some of them existed literally before the state did, and were from Spanish colonization/slavery. They weren't as mechanized or as large scale, but they were there.
It usually is not, depending on what you mean by ‘government’.
Even some of the large metropolises don’t get much water from state sources - San Francisco and the Bay Area for instance is almost exclusively using Water sources it purchased a long time ago. It’s why most of the hills east of Milpitas are private property of San Francisco Water, for instance. Most of the water that feeds LA, the city itself bought control over (and quite controversially so).
Often it is pumped from private wells on private land.
Often when it isn’t, it is part of large regional co-operatives of farmers, who buy land and then sink wells under it for water.
The rare times that isn’t the case, the ‘government’ is the local county water control board, not the state or feds.
The rate times THAT isn’t the case, it’s often overflow from flood control, or part of outflows from reservoirs built for flood control - where the water HAS to be let out or there will be flooding, depending on the season.
I’ve lived in California my entire life, and I’ve only gotten water from anything state owned on very, very rare occasions (aqueduct) and it’s terrible.
IANAL, so don't know the right words, but water in my jurisdiction has something like opportunity costs. Any water not used for agriculture or humans is available for fisheries, power generation, and habitat.
FYI, most hydropower and flood control dams have minimum flows they must sustain to avoid overtopping during spring flood seasons, and a maximum height they are allowed to store water at because of it. It's called the Exclusive Flood Control Storage Capacity.
If they can use that for power generation, it's 'free power' - they'd literally have to put it through the spillway instead of the turbines instead. That water also ends up in whatever farming areas can use it during that time too.
The issue of course is that weather is unpredictable, and if there ISN'T a flood, that was storage that could have been used for water for later. Either power, or crops, or drinking, etc.
What you're referring to I believe is prioritization of water - humans get x percent up to a certain cap, then the rest is fish and wildlife, or on demand power, etc.
That is what folks in the thread are generally referring to as 'water rights'.
Legally speaking, water rights are one type of property rights. Those rights can be taken away, but the owners must be compensated at fair market value. The state government can't just arbitrarily seize private property.
The Colorado River is the source of water for a huge chunk of Southern California, six other states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming), and Mexico. You're not going to change that unilaterally without causing an international incident.
Uhh, we just literally told Mexico they are getting less allocation then usual, because the states also had to take cuts to ensure minimum flows/levels.
There is no international incident if everyone understands why the water is not there.
And that is not a reason for the states to avoid collectively reconsidering what they are using the water for. We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.
Yeah, allocations were reduced after months of negotiations prompting a ton of teeth gnashing. Tijuana, for instance, gets almost all of its water from the Colorado River and is already subject to water outages.
We all need to look for ways to cut usage, including passing the true costs on to agriculture.
There's always the proposition system. It costs several million dollars to hire signature collectors to get a proposition on the ballot. Californians could vote on it via direct democracy.
Frankly I'm astounded some of the municipal water companies or development-oriented industries haven't banded together to make this happen.
The answer is to use taxpayer money to buy the water rights from the farmers who will sell it the cheapest. The state can then use it for something they deem more valuable, perhaps urban usage.
That sounds like a workaround for a ridiculous & pathetic inquity that never should have been, that has metastasized into a societal scale suicide pact. The state forever paying people to give up an infinite right to natural resources the state didnt have may be a legal answer but it's immoral & this buying-out "solution" keeps the injustice going uncorrected.
British paid out slave owners and abolished slavery decades before the USA did and without killing 1.5 million people. Sometimes it is better to pay out an injustice.
The US civil war was primarily over different modes of production, not slavery directly.
The British working class was forced to pay the former slavers until a few years ago, while the former slaves got nothing. That was in no way just or good or useful.
Why are you trying to white wash the civil war? It was fought over slavery. That is what the declarations of independence signed by the confederate states actually say. They spell it out.
Whitewashing the Civil War as grandparent post did was in error, but don’t let the evils of slavery blind you to the leadership’s more immediate, stated war goal: to preserve the Union. Freeing slaves was an ancillary matter at best.
If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.
You misunderstand me. The ruling class in the north didn’t care about slavery, just their own profits. It just so happened that they were in competition with the ruling class in the south, whose wealth depended on slavery.
Of course many workers did care about slavery and wanted to end it, so they allied themselves to the northern ruling class.
Itself a perpetration of iniquity- the state spending vast amounts to make vastly wealthy immoral undeserving people who should never have had a thing further wealthy.
Buying out unjust holders changes the form of injustice being carried, makes the illegitemacy less viscerally real & more palatable. But, imo, it's embarassing that law offers itself no options to fundamentally correct it's problematic past. It feels like a misalignment, to protect property & capital above all else, even in the most absurdly unfair & illegitemate of situations.
Perhaps in places such events are politically necessary for change. But I dont think I am alone in finding that these past events & this present one reek, that it is low actions to escape the crime but still enable & make profit of the stunning injustice. To govern without ever permitting any actual rebalancing feels inadequate to build a worthy way.
From what I understand it's not a democratic vs republican thing, it's a rural vs urban. There are enough rural democrats that they wouldn't be able to pass a constitutional reform.
"You need a super majority in the California senate to do anything about it"
I heard that it's worse than that: the water rights in California are structure enough like property that there might be a US constitutional challenge based on the 5th amendment's property clauses.
...in the same sense that we are literally importing water whenever anyone buys a computer (~400 gallons), a phone (~200 gallons), a polyester shirt (~3500 gallons), or a pair of jeans (~1800 gallons) not made locally.
I.e., not at all. Most of the water used to make those things doesn't end up in those things. Same with almonds.
Your analogy doesn't hold water, if you'll pardon the pun.
The discussion is about water being consumed. Production consumes water, and when we then export the product it is reasonable to say that the function is, in essence, exporting the water, because the water is consumed during production.
Saudi Arabia grows their alfalfa in California instead of locally. The only reason they've done this is to use our water instead of theirs. More water is consumed by industries which turn water into exported products, like alfalfa, than is used by all homes in the entire state put together -- including all lawns, pools, golf courses and parks put together.
> The only reason they've done this is to use our water instead of theirs.
I’ve spent some amount of time in Saudi Arabia and they don’t have a lot of water there for them to use.
I also take issue with the term “our water” like you have some “manifest destiny” to seize someone else’s property rights because you feel you are more entitled to it than the current legal owner. They thought ahead, bought property/water rights and are using them in a way you disagree with. Fair enough, pay them more than the utility they currently derive from their usage and everyone walks away happy campers.
"I’ve spent some amount of time in Saudi Arabia and they don’t have a lot of water there for them to use."
Interestingly, I have as well. They're having to desalinate water for growth just like we are planning to do.
"Fair enough, pay them more than the utility they currently derive from their usage and everyone walks away happy campers. "
Purchasing the farms with water rights is a very reasonable path forward, actually. It would be cheaper to buy farms and shut them down than to build the water conservation initiatives California's currently engaged in.
The problem is political. CA leaders don't actually want to solve the water crisis - they want to grandstand.
"I also take issue with the term “our water” like you have some “manifest destiny” to seize someone else’s property rights because you feel you are more entitled to it than the current legal owner. "
The state does have this power, as a matter of fact. So there you go, the perspective is reality based.
I always regret that I didn't plan ahead enough to be king of the world so that no one would have any moral right to disagree with my legal right to do whatever I want.
Illegal and immoral are entirely two different words.
So if you are accused of doing something immoral and your only replay is "but it within legal bounds" my only take away is that you agree that it is immoral as hell, but would rather not talk about it.
Literally no one has given an argument on the morality of using water to grow food, they just assume that their opinion is the correct one and anyone who doesn’t agree is, I don’t know, worthy of ad hominem attacks. I expect a lot more from HN honestly.
I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem, what I do care about is all the talk of using the government to seize private property because they think they both have the right and they can use it better than the rightful owners — this is the kind of moral issue I worry about.
The thing is, not all property rights are equal. Some are more established than others.
Owning land and owning our own tangible possessions are some of the most firmly established rights. Even in these cases there are carve-outs for public good (taxes, eminent domain) but I'm right there with you that we should seek to preserve these property rights above all else.
But there are other property rights which are much less well established, and which change over time. Copyright, for example, is a relatively new property right and it has changed, expanded, significantly since its inception. When we talk about reducing the scope of copyright, are we talking about seizing private property? Well, maybe, but only in the same sense that extending copyright is seizing public property and making it private.
Water rights in human history are older than copyright, but the particular structure of western water rights in California is newer and less well-established. In fact, the basic structure of water rights is very different in the western US than in the eastern, and this difference is a major source of our water troubles. This didn't matter for a long time, but now it matters a lot.
Talking about correcting these types of incongruities inherent in the way we structure ownership is substantially different from the banal picture you paint of seizing tangible, real private property.
> Literally no one has given an argument on the morality of using water to grow food
Correct, that is a complete straw man. The argument was about wasteful use of water, which is legal but arguably immoral.
> I really don’t care about the morality of water usage in California because that’s someone else’s problem,
Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud?
> seize private property because they think they both have the right and they can use it better than the rightful owners — this is the kind of moral issue I worry about.
You are aware of "eminent domain", no? That is not a new thing. Also it is not about "private property" but about entitlements bought from the government.
> Are you sure you wanted to say that part out loud?
Sure, why not.
I’m currently in the Central Valley and every other farm has a sign about water something or other, they don’t need me advocating for them.
> You are aware of "eminent domain", no?
Of course but that’s not what was being proposed. The suggestion was to kick out the Saudis because they are growing crops in California and that’s not okay because reasons.
The basic proposal is to nationalize foreign owned assets like they do in places like Venezuela and I’m not fine with that. We have the rule of law for a reason and violating the property rights of a group of people so they can be used as a scapegoat is not something I want to be done in my homeland or in my name.
If people really want extremist viewpoints on water rights then I propose that if you aren’t a native born Californian then you are the problem. California water for Californians is my new slogan…
I don't think anyone proposed nationalizing foreign owned assets. I introduced this topic and I certainly didn't propose that. I offered the Saudi situation as an example of commercial exploitation of resources for the benefit of non-Californians, not as a target to focus on.
California has already been changing water rights over the past few decades, requiring meters on wells and so on. This will continue out of necessity as it is the only meaningful way to curtail water consumption. These programs do not single out any particular groups.
I'm a third generation Californian, fwiw, and before that my family operated farms elsewhere in the PNW. Contemporary agribusiness in California is a big problem and it's not just the water. Labor is a huge issue as well. California farms don't have much standing to be righteous about their current position.
> Agriculture is also a small portion of the state’s GDP
Be careful not to fall into the GDP trap. This is a place where free markets looking for efficiencies will cost you in p99 events. It's one thing when there's a toilet paper or semiconductor shortage. It's another when it's food, so it makes sense for governments to subsidize farm production, whether it's though cheap water or buying surplus product, to ensure a stable food supply.
We're not talking about staple crops here, there's no impact on food security - in this context "food" means agricultural products like almonds and pistachios, and if a farm gets restrictions so that they don't have enough water to farm almonds, they can start growing something less water-intensive like wheat.
Totally right about almonds and ‘luxury’ crops. FYI measuring agriculture in general by its GDP isn’t really useful. Stable food supply via agriculture is the foundation of the economy. It allows people to specialize in technology, medicine, etc that generate more GDP. The entire Ag industry is around 5% of GDP in the US and farms account for 0.6% of GDP. That doesn’t mean Ag in general shouldn’t get first priority for water usage.
California is building desalination plants, for example [1]. However, these are expensive to construct and energy-intensive.
It's definitely worth the expense to ensure that people will have access to water, even in a future with intensifying droughts.
But is it worth it to ensure that people's lawns have access to water? Probably not. Especially when there are plenty of landscaping options that have much lower water requirements than a lawn.
A "growth mindset" generally refers to growing the amount of economic value produced - not the amount of resources consumed. Often, such growth can come as a result of technological improvements that increase efficiency. For example, more fuel-efficient aircraft allow airlines to fly more passenger-miles with reduced fuel consumption. Water conservation technologies - including some things, like xeriscaping, that you might not immediately recognize as technologies - are in the same category.
Desalination is exceptionally expensive compared to just waiting to have water fall from the sky.
You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.
Those three premises are still insuficient to warant desalination.
"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.
