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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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...)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.