California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

Post by raldi » Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 11:31 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #220

raldi wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone should be specifically antagonized. If agriculture paid market rate for water, instead of pennies on the dollar, the market would do a great job ensuring our scarce water got allocated for maximum utility.

The problem is that a lot of farms and ranches get their water from wells on the farms/ranches themselves. For those that have to pump in their water from elsewhere, then yeah, let's get water prices restructured. For those pumping their own water from their own property, however, we'd need some major rejiggering of property rights in order to justify charging land owners for the use of what's arguably their own prop…

> For those pumping their own water from their own property, however, we'd need some major rejiggering of property rights in order to justify charging land owners for the use of what's arguably their own property

This is doable. "California is the only western state that doesn’t really monitor or regulate how much groundwater farmers and residents are using."

http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2014/06/02/drought-drives-drilli...

Post by sbov » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #216

sbov wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my research, pound for pound rice takes less than almonds. Guess what crop California spends almost 50% of its water on? Alfalfa, which is used to feed cattle. Also, just cutting out beef can make a huge dent. It's water usage is truly wtf level, whereas chicken is closer to almond level.

> Guess what crop California spends almost 50% of its water on? Alfalfa, which is used to feed cattle. Alfalfa isn't used for just cattle, you know. Also, do you have a source for that number? I'm having trouble finding one from a U.S. or California government source (USGS, USDA, CDFA, etc.), but at least one article [0] pins that number at closer to 15% (and almonds at 10%). > Also, just cutting out beef can make a…

> Also, do you have a source for that number? I'm having trouble finding one from a U.S. or California government source (USGS, USDA, CDFA, etc.), but at least one article [0] pins that number at closer to 15% (and almonds at 10%).

I got my numbers a bit mixed up. According to: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft...

Meat and dairy uses 47% of California's water. I'm not sure how I transplanted that into Alfalfa alone.

> I'd suggest that cattle water usage is nowhere near the "WTF" level.

Here I'm merely speaking on how much water it takes to produce a pound of the product. From what I can tell chicken is around 500 gallons of water per pound, but beef is more like 1,500+ - I was mostly looking at waterfootprint.org, but other sources seem to back up these estimates.

Chicken is at least close to almonds, which people are freaking out about since its several times other options, but beef is 3x chicken. Hence, WTF level.

Lets do some math. I have some friends who live in San Francisco, which (going off memory) has an average water consumption of 50 gallons of water/day/person.

But some eat steak for dinner every day of the week, probably around 12 ounces. At 1,500 gallons of water per pound, thats 1,125 gallons of water for their meal. If they switched that to chicken, assuming the same number of ounces (not sure if we can do this though - if people need to eat more ounces of chicken than beef) and 500 gallons per pound, thats 375 gallons of water. A savings of 750 gallons of water per day.

They just reduced their personal water footprint by many times what the water utility sees. They could 100% cut out flushing toilets, taking showers, doing the dishes, doing laundry, and not come even close to what eating chicken instead of beef does.

I've seen some maps comparing SoCal water usage vs NorCal. Going off memory, 50 gallons vs 100-150 gallons day/person. The reality is, the gap between 50 and 150 is covered by choosing to eat chicken over beef 4 times a month.

Dietary water footprint is much more significant than what our water utilities show us.

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers

Re: California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers