There isn’t much of an invisible hand if people don’t have to pay for water.
They do pay for water, just not enough. They paid for the dam building and the canals, just not enough.
It isn’t free. And property does go unplanted do to lack of water and the cost to water it.
I am no expert but the basic problem is all the water infrastructure was pretty much built by the 60s and 70s and the farmers basically pay based on rates from that era.
Probably. It mirrors the ridiculous ‘market’ in buying grazing rights on public land. But government doesn’t want to drive up food prices, so farmers and ranchers are going to get cheap access to public resources.
Oats, potatoes, and rice are the worst? While I understand rice… but oats and potatoes? That floors me. I always assumed potatoes had negligible water demand.
I am no expert on crops, but my understanding is potatoes retain a fair amount of water in them, and they last a long time without a lot of extra preparation for that, and they’re easy to grow. This doesn’t take other factors into consideration either like those fruit trees require a fair amount of pest control, are very touch to extreme weather, and they have to prune and change out those trees a lot.
When I was a kid you could ride your horses through some local orchards without any fuss. It was an easy ride with rows and some small areas you could jump them. These days they’re too worried about liability but you could actually see the areas where new and old trees existing and when we had some early frost or extreme weather, the damage too.
It’s not really saying that CA should or should not grow these almonds. It’s more like, when you consider how much water is being used you should also consider what you’re getting out of it. Almonds are like a lot of our nuts, just packed with good stuff.
My position is fairly simple though. Either the region can sustain the crop, or it can’t. As a species we can do a lot to adapt to or just adapt our environment, but we certainly don’t know how to make water just appear. If we lost the massive almond crop from CA, no one is going to starve, prices for almonds might go up, and farmlands would have to change to new crops, but that all seems better than draining the water until the place is just not safe or habitable anymore. It just makes sense. And of course because I care about everyone involved, I would expect assistance to anyone affected by a needed change like that as well.
We have water battles here all the time, just like CA, but we’re not as big so we don’t make the news as often. I’ve been in the save the fish and the rivers park and help the farmers and ranchers because we can replace orchards and fields, but if we lose say the salmon, that’s it, no more species.
I am clearly in the sustainability park not just for environmental reasons but doing it “right” also helps the communities. Also, believe in markets and capitalism is not exclusionary. You can believe in relatively free markets and at the same time acknowledge there are some things more important than what a free market can offer.