[walnutclosefarm]

I am sympathetic with anyone whose livelihood and investments are threatened by external realities or evolving social expectations. But that has nothing to do with what I was saying, which is a realistic assessment of whether farmers will voluntarily alter their water usage. Most won't, and most won't even admit that their usage is a major problem that needs to be fixed. And it's for the reason I quoted: almost no one is able to see themselves as the problem if their livelihood or personal self-respect is invested in their not being the problem.

This isn't an abstraction to me. My parents were basically forced off the farm I grew up on, and their homestead made nearly valueless, by neighboring farmers whose hog-raising facilities and manure management made the place uninhabitable due to stench and dust. Their neighbors never saw their practices as a problem, at least until they retired and moved to town. I don't believe they were disingenuous in this. They simply were not equipped to imagine that their farming practices, on which they were dependent for their livelihood and self-respect, could be a terrible problem. It is precisely because they were deeply invested in them (both in $ and personal terms) that they could not see it.