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California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

nytimes.com

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Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#121

Post by PerfectElement »

slavik81 wrote: post #74
WillPostForFood wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary contribution of agriculture is feeding people, not GDP. What does watering one's lawn contribute to?

Is it? A significant proportion of that agriculture consists of luxury crops for export. Nobody's going to starve if the price of water-intensive foods like avocado and almonds increase a little. If you care about feeding the poor, give them money to buy their food. Don't wreck the environment and distort the market with supply-side meddling.

Why avocados? It takes 74.1 gallons to produce 1 pound. Much less than most calorie-dense foods.

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#122

Post by maxxxxx »

adventured wrote: post #103
Yhippa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, humidity, and mosquitos.

Most of the east coast doesn't suffer under a meaningful hurricane threat. For example, the average 'hurricane' that has hit Virginia in the last 40 years, had 40 to 70 mph winds. Earthquakes of any consequence are extremely rare on the east coast (basically non-existent). Most of California's population centers are humid in fact. Los Angeles averages around 71% daily humidity; San Diego is 70%; San Francisco is 74%…

You will perceive LA humidity as much lower as DC humidity.

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#123

Post by bradleyjg »

kansface wrote: post #117

Scott (from slatestarcodex) suggests[1] CA buy out all of its alfalfa farmers Catch-22 style [2]. The total pay out would cost on the order of a couple of dollars per CA resident which is far far cheaper than the alternatives. Alfalfa is an extremely water intensive crop that is used to feed cows. This measure would save water commensurate to the amount we lost in the drought. This is the easily the best proposal I h…

I'd think your best bet would be to buy the land currently used to grow alfalfa and permanently fallow it rather than trying to run a program where you pay alfalfa farmers not to farm. The latter program has the obvious problem of identifying would be alfalfa farmers once no one has grown alfalfa in a while.

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#124

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

eropple wrote: post #111
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation is where scarce resources go to die. Why not find a way to produce more?

Do you seriously think the answer isn't "produce more, and stop using so much until we do"?

I seriously have no faith that a group of people can regulate things efficiently. It sounds hopeful of course. I have more faith in desalination or some other engineering solution.

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#125

Post by nostromo »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #59

Can someone explain to me why we don't just build a pipeline from Seattle or some rich water source up north down to California?

Seattle charges more for water than SF or LA (or even Phoenix or Las Vegas).

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/rain-soaked-se...

Although that has more to do with Seattle's aggressive environmental policy than supply of water.

It's actually kind of funny: when they first raised the price of water in Seattle, people cut back their water usage so much that revenue fell... so they had to raise prices more!

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#126

Post by cbr »

ajmurmann wrote: post #11

Why can't we just have a 2 tier water pricing system? Tier 1 is very cheap, so that everyone can afford water to drink and wash themselves. Anything over that amount in tier 1 get's priced at something more realistic. That incentivizes industry to be economic about their water usage and private people are deterred from being wasteful.

We currently have a 2 tier system the other way. Municipal water is far more expensive than agricultural water. [1] We don't need tiers: personal water use is so small in comparison that it remains affordable even at rates that would make most farming impractical.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-24/california... described prices at $1,100 per acre-foot, but that's just $0.003/gal

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#127

Post by dragonwriter »

kansface wrote: post #117

Scott (from slatestarcodex) suggests[1] CA buy out all of its alfalfa farmers Catch-22 style [2]. The total pay out would cost on the order of a couple of dollars per CA resident which is far far cheaper than the alternatives. Alfalfa is an extremely water intensive crop that is used to feed cows. This measure would save water commensurate to the amount we lost in the drought. This is the easily the best proposal I h…

> Paying farmers in the desert to not grow crops is ... unamerican.

Why should the desert be special in this regard? Paying farmers not to grow crops has a long history in America.

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

#130

Post by kansface »

mc32 wrote: post #20
sliverstorm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you try to optimize your programs for performance, do you focus on the code snippet that is responsible for 4% of runtime, or the snippet responsible for 80% of runtime? Even if water demands in farming are relatively inelastic, cutting statewide water use by 25% is literally impossible without cuts to farming use, and at the end of the day the rainfall doesn't care how much water you think you need to farm.

True but the state well knew this was coming _some day_ but did not institute policies allowing farmers to slowly adapt to a new reality. That's bad leadership.

Water rights are a classic tragedy of the commons - its exceedingly rare industries or their regulatory bodies solve these sorts of problems before the resource is destroyed.
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