[lettergram]

Maybe we should stop using water for agriculture in Cali?

5% of the water in California is for urban use[1]. It always drove me up the wall when the state issued rules reducing water usage for people when they give plenty of water to all the farms ... IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT ...

[1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

There's plenty of water for the cities, just not the agriculture. It's part of the reason people are buying up farm land.

[einarvollset]

Well, something like 1/3rd of all the vegetables and 2/3rds of all the fruit in the US is grown in California. Where do you propose this gets grown instead?

[dlor]

The price for the water is also several orders of magnitude different. Farms pay 100-1000x less. It's not drinkable so some difference is expected, but this is too much.

Raising their price would ultimately increase food prices across the country - but that's the reality. Right now CA urban water users subsidize food prices across the nation.

[einarvollset]

If only 5% of CA water is urban use, then surely the subsidy is minimal.

Also - driving the Central Valley I see no end of “Congress stole our water” signs, so clearly some change is happening. Why can’t agriculture in more rain prone areas compete?

[b9a2cab5]

Just a guess: probably a combination of weather/soil and cheap labor. California is always sunny, the central valley is very fertile, and the state is very friendly to illegal immigration.

[Spooky23]

The miracle of the desert is truly a miracle. Sunny warm California is a farmers dream, except for the lack of water.

[fersho311]

Adding some facts to this, because California tends to get hot frequently. When it gets too hot, plants slow (and eventually stop) photosynthesis above 68 degrees F

https://sciencing.com/effect-temperature-rate-photosynthesis...

[0x0nyandesu]

The rain prone areas are too cold for much of the year.

[hasmanean]

Hydroponics allow you grow crops in PVC pipes with a lot less water wastage and theoretically maybe even move them around on trucks. You could grow something on a parking lot.

Could be the future if climate change results in unpredictable weather and you don’t want to lose your crop to an early frost.

Northern Ontario has tons of lakes, nice summers and lots of rock to anchor humongous hydroponic towers to.

[mcphage]

> Hydroponics allow you grow crops in PVC pipes with a lot less water wastage and theoretically maybe even move them around on trucks. You could grow something on a parking lot.

I really like hydroponics, but you never (rarely?) see it used to grow heavier, food-dense foods like potatoes, or anything that grows on a tree. It’s all leafy salad greens and strawberries. I don’t really know why that is.

[zdragnar]

Or too hot. Lots of crops grown on california would be happy in Georgia if not for the heat.

[sbierwagen]

Humans managed to scrape along for ten thousand years without the ability to eat fresh fruit and vegetables at any time of the year. I think doubling the price of an apple in exchange for Los Angeles to continue to exist is an okay tradeoff.

[dboreham]

Yes but there weren't this many people for the last ten thousand years.

[sbierwagen]

Sure?

According to https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339 the US used 5.38 billion bushels of corn to produce ethanol in 2019.

A bushel is 56 pounds of grain. 87,696 calories. Assume a human needs 2500 calories a day, times 365 days per year. 912,500 calories. About 10.4 bushels of corn. Feed about 517 million people just with the corn the US wastes to make a few thousand Iowa voters happy.

The world is not short of food.

(Although once you start talking about synthetic fertilizers needed to grow that corn...)

[na85]

Calories in corn is mostly from the sugar and it doesn't contain enough essential nutrients. Calories alone is not the whole story.

[AlotOfReading]

That's an artifact of immature harvesting. Nixtamalized, mature maize is almost nutrient complete, lacking only protein, a couple amino acids, and fat. All are pretty easy to add in and eating pure corn gruel for every meal would get old pretty quickly anyway. We know that this is a perfectly viable long-term diet because maize spent thousands of years as the overwhelmingly dominant calorie source for many indigenous groups prior to European colonization.

[klipklop]

Humans also used to commonly starve to death as well.

[sbierwagen]

According to https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ California exports $6.09 billion of almonds, $2.22 billion of strawberries and $1.94 billion of pistachios a year.

Do you rely on strawberries and pistachios in your daily diet to the point that you would starve to death if they were twice as expensive?

[HarryHirsch]

There's plenty of rain-safe farmland available in the Northeast. A good amount has reverted to forest because the terrain is easier farther out west, but the rains are failing there. We'll see it reactivated.

[einarvollset]

Okay great!

[lettergram]

Repurpose some of the corn, soybean, and grass fed cattle land. I'm surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn... which is turned into ethanol. That's more than Cali produces in terms of raw weight of food.

[Spooky23]

My neighbor growing up had a 300 acre vegetable farm. Now defunct as the family couldn’t compete with subsidized Western and Canadian agriculture.

[edgyquant]

I doubt it’s just western farms. I’m from the Midwest, my mom grew up on a farm and she ended up selling that land, pretty much 90% of family owned farms went bankrupt in favor of corporate farms that benefit from economies of scale. I actually think it’s something like 95% of farms are now owned by corporations.

[Spooky23]

Small farmers face a lot of hazards.

At that time (early/mid 90s),the western farms were the boogeyman post-nafta. It’s sad because IMO companies will be less efficient and have lower overheads than smaller operations in the long run. As more and more consolidation happens and competitive forces make way for cartels, the overheads of $2M/year CEOs and other corporate bs will start to impact prices and supply - but of course it will be too late.

[reedjosh]

Which is a complete travesty.

People care about the future generations' continued use of farm land. Corporations don't.

[reedjosh]

Subsidies bad. Only encourages low quality monocrops that themselves are unhealthy and destroy soil health.

[pg_bot]

In other states or internationally. If someone loses their competitive advantage, there is usually someone else there to pick up the slack.

[tzs]

Some places have great soil for agriculture but not enough water.

Some places have plenty of water but not so great soil.

You can have a globally more productive society if you arrange to bring the good soil and the abundant water together.

Since it is way easier to transport water than to transport soil (there is no soil equivalent to the pipeline or the aqueduct) that is generally the direction we've went.

[antisthenes]

It's mostly a myth that you need great soil to grow anything in farming.

Most of the time, the soil merely acts as a substrate to temporarily hold water with nutrients from the fertilizer that was put there during irrigation.

Having great soil does help, obviously, in that you can probably save on fertilizer costs, but in the end the soil will be depleted regardless by industrial farming.

[trickstra]

Or hydroponics/aquaponics, where you don't need any soil, and only about 10% of the water.

[zz865]

That's not the whole story because when you water a farm much of it goes back into the ground or evaporates into clouds. When you flush the toilet it gets treated then sent to the ocean.

[klipt]

The ocean also evaporates into clouds doesn't it?

But we could certainly improve efficiency by recycling urban water. A lot of people jump to desalination but recycling is like desalination just with fewer solutes, so more efficient.

[reedjosh]

And nuclear plants are kinda like desalination plants on steroids, so yeah, doit!