[tablarasa]

Imperial Valley farmers are paying a trivial $20/acre-foot of water and are primarily growing hay to feed domestic and foreign livestock. Looks like 685K acre-feet per year to feed livestock out of a total water extraction of 1188K acre-feet (had to add up the totals from their graph to get that). So that means ~58% of the water is for cows.

Given how politically impossible it seems to be to increase rates or re-litigate water rights, I think I have to agree with the conclusion of the article: we got to stop eating the meat they're producing.

The health of the Colorado River Basin affects tons of people very directly in the U.S. and Mexico. We have been over-extracting it for ages. I am in favor of wise water usage in non-agricultural settings, but it's time we took action to mitigate the increasingly detrimental impacts of legacy water users from a legacy social and environmental climate.

[dporter]

The article states that 50% of hay grown in Southern California is exported to China, and another 10% is exported to Saudi Arabia. If American meat consumption decreases, the portion of hay that gets exported will likely just increase. I think water intensity should be taken into account when determining export policies. Every time I read an article about water usage in an industry, the biggest or one of the biggest users ends up being the export market. We're shipping one of our most precious resources away.

[ethbr1]

I believe the US Constitution prohibits federal taxes on exports. It was put it to convince Virginia (tobacco) to sign.

>> No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

So it'd need to be a water-consumption-based income tax adjustment.