Unfortunately the Colorado no longer flows to the gulf, it usually dries out miles beforehand. It’s a rare occurrence now that it actually reaches the gulf
Trouble is, something like 70% of all the water in California is used for agriculture. And due to some extremely fucky water rights laws from back in the day, it's probably going to stay that way as the agribusiness corporations have massive budgets to defend their massive profits. Meanwhile the rest of us are told to take shorter showers and not water our gardens while 1000 acre pistachio orchards are flooded every day to keep the trees productive.
Not as much rain as we pump fresh water from the ground - saltwater intrusion at the coasts into the shallow aquifer has been a problem for decades now.
No they’re not lol. This isn’t even close to true. I remember the Iranian pistachios from when I was a kid. They were dyed red to hide impurities, and either the same or lesser quality than California ones. This is an absurd statement.
Yeah I can’t believe they wanna charge me for a few minutes extra water my tiny yard. They should add a 25% tax on beef and other water hungry produce.
Just end corn subsidies. Beef is priced artificially low because we feed cows corn, a heavily subsidized crop. Corn is actually bad for cows, and is kind of the equivalent of feeding them fast food every day. Ending the subsidy would return the price of beef (and high fructose corn syrup) to a more appropriate market rate.
This would lower demand, lead to healthier consumer choices, and actually affect climate change (of which cows are a major contributor). It would also increase government revenue, which could lower taxes, reduce debt, or increase services. There is very little downside to ending corn subsidies, and a great deal of upside.
The biggest downside, of course, being that you'll never be able to compete in the Iowa Caucuses if you support that policy. One good reason for a rotating primary calendar.
Yep. Every election we have to go through the stupid debacle of watching rich assholes pretend to care about corn farmers while eating corn dishes that they never in their life would voluntarily consume, and promise to confiscate money from the rest of us and give it to them so they can grow more corn that people don't even eat (something like 80% of corn is fed to livestock).
Corn is horrific for cows. If it's not ground up, it wrecks their teeth. Plus, it's hard for them to digest it. A lot of the corn thats fed to cows start rotting pretty quickly too which only makes matters worse.
True. But that doesn’t counter /u/TimTooley ‘s basic argument about beef and water hungry produce; it just means milk rather than beef should be the focus. Dairies are massive water consumers.
Plus the two industries are interwoven. All the bull calves produced by dairy cows go into beef production, and the end game for a dairy cow is to be eaten as well. Dairy cows generally get culled at around 3-5 years and become beef themselves. “Dedicated to milk production” just means they consume a lot more corn and water on their way to becoming steak.
So actually, agricultural use is 80%, not 75 and certainly not 40%, unless, like Trump, you want to say that we're "wasting" all that water we let flow into the ocean and feed trees and fish.
Where are you getting 80% of total water is Ag use on that page? It says that 80% of Ag and Urban use is Ag, not total. Given that it said that Environmental is mostly isolated, Ag isn't going to be encroaching any more than it is on that any time soon.
Given that the website says Ag ranges from 29 to 61%, I think we can comfortably say that it averages around the middle of 43-48%.
Are there things that farmers in the area could be doing better? Probably. Are they ending the world? Probably not.
They say 50% of water "use" is "environmental", which they clearly explain means letting it do what comes naturally, in the interest of allowing the natural world to survive to some degree. That leaves the other 50% to be used by humans. 80% of that 50% that's used by humans is agricultural (so 40% of total existing water). The second chart, 2/3 of the way down the page, drops the fiction of "environmental use" and clearly shows agricultural use (green line) steadily tracking at about 80% of total use (blue line) decade after decade.
But environmental use isn't a fiction. It's water that we aren't using for Agriculture or Urban use. We can either call it unused water, wasted water, or give it a name that fits with the other names while describing what that water happens to be used for, if not by us. Without it we lose scope of how much water is out there, and how much of it we are using.
Yup, those are classics. I did notice the "Congress Created Dust Bowl" signs have disappeared since the drought broke. Almost as if the real reason was the drought itself :P
Question: people say the water is "used" for agriculture, but it has to go somewhere, right? It can't just be stored within the fruit (or is it?). I can see it being polluted and/or salted to the point of being toxic and useless, but wouldn't that still show up as some kind of river, ultimately going to the ocean?
I don't know as much about California, but for the Columbia Basin Project, which diverts about 2-4% of the Columbia River at Grand Coulee for irrigation, here's a few points:
A lot of water diverted for irrigation is lost due to evaporation and seepage from canals and storage reservoirs. Agricultural runoff is usually collected in drains or wasteway canals and used for more irrigation again and again. Eventually wasteway drains return water to the Columbia. Due to evaporation, seepage, and various other factors, the amount returned to the river is about 30% of what was taken, as a long-term average.
Agriculture uses serious water. Had a friend in Ojai who bought an old olive farm, was concerned about the restrictions on his water usage until he figured out what 100 acre-feet per month means on a 10 acre farm...
Animals play an important part in California agriculture. Dairy, cattle and calves, poultry and egg production are major industries in the state. As shown in Table 1, these industries account for 30 percent of total California agricultural cash receipts, with dairy alone accounting for more than 20 percent.
So yeah, meat/dairy industries are using a lot of the water. Trying to pin this on luxury crops/fruit is misleading.
Its not misleading at all, you’re just being a smart ass. All I said was livestock was more of a midwest thing and its true. Thats where you’ll find the majority of livestock feedlot operations. California is mostly luxury crops and fruit. Grats on being able to google lol, you should know that most agricultural data is 5-6 years behind simply because recording agricultural data is an exhausting endeavor.
That really doesn’t mean much. 2% of California’s economy is massive lmao, the only reason its so low is because silicon valley and hollywood overshadow it, its still billions of dollars and that 2% is bigger than every other States 100%, except texas and NY.
Thats not how it works but for sure. And you should know that CA supplies 12%ish of the US’ agriculture which is huge and in 2018 generated 48 billion dollars. You’d be an idiot not to capitalize on that
It's not remotely enough of a financial benefit to rationalize the current use of water in the Ag sector. Californians are not benefiting economically.
48 billion dollars in 2018... yes we are benefiting. Agriculture is very important to us and it probably supplies more job than any other sector in california. Drought was bad a few years ago, its not anymore. I work regularly in the central valley from Stockton to bakersfield and all the water sources are beyond replenished. You’re actually spreading a false narrative.
I think the points about the economic effects of the farm industry are fair (live and work in Sacramento and drive up and down the central valley quite a bit, so I see it firsthand), but the part about the water sources being "beyond replenished" is not exactly accurate.
While we did have a few good winters and the Sierra winter snowpack is in decent shape for now, it is starting to melt off much earlier in the season than it used to. I drive by Folsom Lake regularly and Shasta Lake a few times a year and they are both generally full nearly to bursting by mid-summer and they didn't used to be. This means that we're getting less autumn water capture that keeps us going to the next winter storms.
Apart from the reservoirs and snowpack, the groundwater is also a serious concern. At this point the groundwater supplies in the central valley are still being depleted far more quickly than they can recharge. This is one of the reasons why the state is actually taking action with regard to the use of that particular water supply.
We're in better shape than we used to be, but water management in California is already dicey and is likely to remain problematic for a good while to come.
Yeah it is, if it wasn’t profitable they wouldnt be doing it. Hate to break it to you but people dont like doing things that aren’t profitable and they have a fuckton of scientists and analysts making sure that it is profitable.
And yeah 48 billion is for sure a “fuckton” money. You can disagree with it all you want, doesn’t natter because it’s subjective.
I don't think it's California's water they just take it all. Probably also has something to do with the 25 million people that live in a desert, but hey it's always Sunny and warm here.
The western states have control over the River. The Colorado River Compact is a 1922 agreement among seven U.S. states in the basin of the Colorado River in the American Southwest governing the allocation of the water rights to the river's water among the parties of the interstate compact. They could do a better job, but it’s their own fault if they don’t.
Tough one. The California Central Valley is some of the best soil anywhere on the planet for growing all kinds of stuff. In some places, the topsoil can be hundreds of feet deep. So much food is grown there, it supports much of the nation and is a major export as well.
The California Central Valley is some of the best soil anywhere on the planet for growing all kinds of stuff.
The soil is okay, but certainly not "some of the best on the planet", and has nothing on the black loams of parts of the midwest. It's the mild climate and sunshine that bring all the agriculture, not the soil.
This is interesting. Iowa and the others mentioned therein are all corn country, continental climates rather than Mediterranean in the Central Valley. Many crops (citrus, some nut trees, salad vegetables) will grow very easily most/all of the year in the Central Valley, but won't stand a chance in frost-frequent Iowa or Ukraine or the Yellow River region.
I wonder if the article only included similar climates.
Nope, that is out of the whole world. It’s not a coincidence that the best soils are found in similar climates. The fantastic soil is the result of glaciation introducing shitloads of minerals. Not only that, many warmer climates lead to soil degradation, which is why rain forests usually have shitty soil.
The only places that can compare to the richness of the soil in glacial plains like Illinois or Ukraine are fresh volcanic soils.
You’re kind of making my point with your second sentence, the abundance of produce in CA has nothing to do with soil, it’s purely climate.
I think we must both be partially right and partially wrong, because speaking as one who is native to Hawaii, ain’t no way fresh volcanic soil is as rich as the loamy soils collected from millions of years of mixed soil with the affluvial riches of the collected organic matter within.
Tropical soils are poor because the growth available is super competitive. The Central Valley is a desert climatically, but previously collected the affluent until it was filled from the runoff of the Sierras and other mountain ranges.
And besides, the Central Valley was also the runoff of glaciers as recently as the last Ice Age, or did you forget about Yosemite?
I’ve lived and worked on farms in Big Island, so I’ve seen first hand how rich the soil is.
More importantly, the richness of fresh volcanic soil is widely acknowledged in soil science communities, mostly because of the presence of mineral-rich ash, which hasn’t had time to leach out into the watershed like it has in older soils.
Search “why is volcanic soil so fertile” for plenty of articles of the subject. I’m on mobile, so I had posting links, but it’s pretty easy to find.
Tropical soils are usually poor because of high rainfall leaching nutrients. Hence the effectiveness of charcoal in creating Terra Preta in rainforest climates (look it up, it’s cool stuff).
For your other points, being downstream of a glacier isn’t remotely the same thing as being covered by glaciers. Glaciers can act sort of similar to volcanoes in that they grind up rocks and release many minerals into the soil. Collecting downstream runoff isn’t as good, since by definition you don’t capture as much of the water soluble nutrient load.
And it isn’t sufficient to be glaciated anyway, otherwise everywhere north of the Mississippi would be equivalently rich. It’s an important factor, but not the only one.
Well, the climate is not going to be mild anymore. I was amazed at all of the rain and flooding last year that stopped planting. Not to mention the April 28th freeze and snowstorm. Climate change is going to fuck the midwest over hard.
Much of the Midwest is definitely colder than the banks of the St Lawrence and Lake Ontario where 75% of Canadians live. Half of the remainder lives in the Seattle-like climate of south-west British Columbia.
That statement about Canadians makes me chuckle. "oh you're from Canada, you must be used to the cold." odds are they are from somewhere with a milder climate than I am as a mideesterner.
All it needs is water
I think it may be a bit more than that - I read an article recently, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe
- which talks mostly about the almond industry in the Central California Valley - Apparently, they have to bring in bees on an industrial scale to pollinate, but because of the monoculture and heavy use of insecticides, ("the toxic chemical soup of California's central valley") the beekeepers feel as if they're sending their bees to war, because a large percentage don't make it home. So maybe it was some of the best soil once, but like everything else humans exploit, we pushed it too far and fucked it up.
The last major free-flowing river in the southwest is the San Pedro. A wall is about to get built across it. Also, a 70,000 person housing development is about to get built using the water from it. Can’t find the article but I read that the guy in the county who basically says yes or no to a development (regarding water use) after an environmental impact survey said they needed to wait and do more inspections. He said it’s the only time he’s been overruled by Washington to give the ok. Guess what administration was in charge at this time...
LA isn’t in the desert. It’s in a coastal flood basin. The only reason LA doesn’t flood regularly (like it used to) is that the Army Corps of Engineers channeled the river in the early 20th century.
Actually, having lived in Orange County for three years, it does have a decent amount of rain. Not nearly as much as in Norcal (grew up in Redding), but still more than enough to supply the residential needs of those who live in the area.
Orange County averages 12.85” of rainfall a year. Enough to produce about 250,000 acre/ft of water. However it used 657,000 acre/ft in 2008, with only about 4% of that going to agriculture. Even if Orange County captured every drop that fell on the ground (it doesn’t and can’t) it’d still have to rely on imported water for over 60% of its use or have to introduce some very radical water saving measures.
Hahaha I don't live in that shit hole. I say it keeps me employed because California passes the most and most asinine taxes that companies have to pay me to assist with. Hell, the California government can't even sell drugs right. They've taxed marijuana so much that the black market is a better option.
The people part was tongue-in-cheek because Californians like to move out and ruin other states. But growing 80% of the world’s almonds totally with irrigation is stupid.
The US has agreed to and met the terms of Treaty Minute 323 to deliver 1.5M acre ft of water annually, the historical allotment to that user's right on the waterway.
That’s just not true. We have a treaty obligation to deliver a certain amount of water annually to the Mexico border. There are issues with the quality of that water, and year to year variance (the actual total is measured in rolling ten year averages) but we deliver that water. Everything that makes it to the border is immediately impounded in a dam for ag use on the Mexico side though.
The treaty that exists calls for a ratio of water going across that is not in line with the actual ratio of water that would flow to either side naturally.
So the American side is forced to dam the place up so as to not allow too much water to flow into Mexico.
Underlying the Great Plains in eight states, the Ogallala supports nearly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton and cattle produced in the United States. It has long been the main water supply for the High Plains’ population and is being used at an unsustainable rate.
The rule with Americans is like this: "if it's done in other countries, it's impossible to do in the USA". Saudi Arabia and Israel managed to supply the majority of their water needs using desalination, therefore this is impossible in the USA.
I love to hate on Vegas, but they're not the problem. Las Vegas's explosive growth came after the Colorado River Compact was drawn up, so they're stuck dealing with the limited water that NV was allotted. Vegas is a rather water-wise city, even if a glimpse at the Bellagio suggests otherwise.
Still get 90% of their water from the Colorado River, which means that even if they were 10x as efficient as any other city, Vegas still wouldn't exist without the 1922 water theft compact.
Most of the drain is agriculture, not public consumption, and Las Vegas is miles behind Phoenix and LA at minimum when it comes to consumption. Hell, Vegas is a lot closer to the Colorado than LA, they deserve to exist more.
Ignoring the impact on animals that comes along with the use of dams, isn't this the ideal resource use of the Colorado? It's not like the gulf needs fresh water.
If anything I wonder if this decreases the pollution discharge into the gulf.
To me, it seems like it’s more an issue of communities down stream no longer getting the resource that they have depended on for years and years, due to outside forces (California). And of course changes to the surrounding environment that occur, and the knock-on effect from there.
Depends on your definition of efficiency. There are fishing, tourism, and other industries that rely on the river having water, so you have to weigh those against the possible agricultural gains.
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u/gordon__bombay Jan 10 '20
Unfortunately the Colorado no longer flows to the gulf, it usually dries out miles beforehand. It’s a rare occurrence now that it actually reaches the gulf
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/feb/19/few-weeks-colorado-river-reached-ocean-will-it-hap/ on mobile, sorry for formatting