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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 21, 2014 - 12:50pm PT
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statewide, urban water users subsidize agricultural water users thourhg a variety of obvious and inobvious ways. the most obvious is the differet pricing of water for urban and ag use: urban users pay way more for state water and federal water than do ag users.
in the numbers i have for (i think) 2005, you can see the disparity: the state water project charged major users in the smaller Westlands districts $30/af. Kern Co Water District paid $45/af.
Folks up north (where the water actually came from) around Feather River, were paying $144/sf. And the water that went to the MWD cost $298/af.
Moreover, urban users bear the bulk of the cost of the project-- because the contractors are paid from property taxes collected statewide, and urban land assess higher than ag land and is more frequently reassessed. THe usual figure folks hand out is that MWD has paid about 2/3 the cost of the SWP, while receiving about a quarter of the water. I haven't run the numbers, but they are in the ballpark of what one would expect, given the structure of the deal.
Moreover, since many of the SWP ag clients have export rights, they can take their 30 or 45 dollar water and then turn around and sell it to folks willing to pay that 298. Or they can take their delivery and simply pump the living crap out of the aquifer and then sell that water at market rates. As they mine that aquifer (California being the only state in the union that doesn't regulate that kind of thing), the Valley floor subsides damaging highways, railroads, buildings, and even the SWP canals that deliver the subsidized water. California taxpayers (mostly urban ones) then pony up more dough to repair the damage that the Valley pumpers have inflicted on the public infrastructure.
The real bonus here is that the Central Valley Project-- and the various Colorado Fed Projects, have traditionally subsidized at much higher rates than the SWP.
The biggest, least responsible, and most recent farmers are precisely the ones we've been subsidizing most heavily.
Jerry Brown is going to tell all the urban users to quit flushing their toilets so that we can continue this kind of thing. There are individual residential districts where conservation can have a huge impact, but statewide, more urban conservation isn't going to have that much effect.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Feb 21, 2014 - 12:56pm PT
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Thanks for the information klk.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Feb 21, 2014 - 01:02pm PT
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A quick look at a topo map, Mr Milktoast, will show why none of that water makes it to where I'm at.
I suppose if they wanted to, they could tap into Lake Silverwood and use that water. Silverwood has sufficient altitude. But that would require transporting it across the Santa Ana River / Mill Creek drainage, and there's no point doing that because S.A.R and M.C provide plenty of water.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 21, 2014 - 03:36pm PT
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yeah, wes, that giant sucking sound you hear are all those megawells firing up in the valley.
it's going to be a race to the bottom. the big growers are going to compete to sink the deepest jumbo wells as fast as possible because it's tough to imagine a situation where there isn't some kind of pumping moratorium in effect, maybe as early as this fall, if it gets bad enough. residential and small farm/ranches users who depend on well water could get really f*#ked. half of modesto's water comes from wells, and they're competing with a host of new jumbos.
folks driving to yosemite from the bay area can stop outside oakdale and listen to the sound of the ground subsiding-- the stueves were among those bringing in the new jumbo wells to convert all that old rangeland into almond orchards.
a whole ot of folks in westside sierra drainages are going to get shafted, too, because if you live in a place (like a west-side sierra drainage) where the groundwater below your property flows, it gets treated as riparian and you can get denied the right to drill or expand wells. once that water flows down into the valley aquifer, of course, the almond growers have no trouble getting new well permits to suck it all up.
a lot of rural folks in eastern conco and western tuco are going to feel some real pain.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Feb 21, 2014 - 07:52pm PT
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HO LEE FUK. My bad. I said $678 thousand bucks upthread. No politician, republican but especially democrat ones, can do a $678,000 project, much too small. I should have said $678 million. Crap, missed a bunch of Zeros. I will admit to voting democrat on multiple occasions, and thus my poor math skills no doubt. Apologies extended.
DMT said: Couchy, that Governor Brown announcement is all President Bush's fault. Hhaha! .....Dingus you bastard, I'm afraid with that well placed blame assessment comment the thread is about to go all global warming and "why republicans are always wrong" here, and thus another 20000 posts will be hitting soon. Real mean bitchy self-righteous acrimonious ones too.
You know, typical politics.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Feb 22, 2014 - 04:15am PT
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hey there say, Ken M... wow, as to the rainfall collecting, wow who would have thought... oh my, it just seems so natural... (i am kind of invisioning those old water-barrel type towers--you know, like on the beginging part of that old 'petticoat junction' show that folks used to watch)...
rain barrels, etc...
here, i was just thinking, after my MOM told me of her trip down to santa maria, with my sis-in-law, to see mom's sister:
she said:
"all the hills were bone dry... just bone dry... it was like an ominous bad feeling, seeing that..."
it made me wish all these PILES upon PILES of snow, could 'at melt' drained into tanker trucks to use for crops, or something, :O
i may not be a calif gal, now that i had to move, due to marriage, first (to south texas--where we did see a few sad bits of drought and dying animals) :( AND NOW to michigan, but my heart still 'knows the feel' and has that worry, concern and compassion for 'how it could be'...
well, it is too sad, it seems about not being able to keep rainwater, however, i will go read the article, at the link, IN CASE i am missing a
'key part' (like if that water, needs to flow somewhere else, that it is needed at???? but still ... keeping some, seems so minor??
thanks for sharing...
oh, say, khanom, yep, please email when you see this...
i know you been busy, :)
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 22, 2014 - 12:37pm PT
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Generalizing about farming in this way is not helpful. You can't get rid of agriculture, so we better figure out how to make it profitable without subsidies -- either financial or environmental.
no one in any of the modern, industrial democracies has worked out a way to make agriculture generally market sustainable. in each of the major developed economies, from western europe to japan, the total number of farms has fallen even as acreage and production have increased-- ag has been industrialized. the same economies of scale that work for wal-mart work for corn or wheat or rice.
california was arguably the world's first ag producer to industrialize. we're number one! the sectors of agriculture in those developed ag economies that have maintained something like a small-producer practice are in sectors that are intensely subsidized and regulated-- dairy in ch and tirol, viticulture in fr and it, etc.
since ag, statewide, uses almost all of the water, there's no way to have a policy discussion without that level of generalization. like all generalization, it is subject to exceptions along the statistical margin-- which is where you and, apparently, chaz's neighbors live.
the majority of folks like that (and you all represent at best a rounding error in calculations of the state's total ag production much less water useage) have traditionally been used as ideological cover for campaigns that deliver directly subsidized water to folks like the resnicks and paramount farms.
to the extent that there is a market-rational niche for small production farming in cali or anywhere else, it is increasingly coming from luxury markets. local, small-producer ag stuff, from beef to kale, has to find consumers willing to pay 5-10x what they'd pay for factory food in a megalomart.
the problem isn't that we can't find a way to make small, family farms work without subsidies, the problem is that we're subsidizing the mega-farms that drive small, local producers to the edge.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 22, 2014 - 12:49pm PT
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btw, before this gets out of hand, i am not using the verb, "subsidize," the way that Ken M is using it. Ken's definition seems to be a whole lot more expansive than my own.
I use the word "subsidize" specifically to describe the ways in which the State Water Project, the Central Valley Project, and most of the various federal water projects in the lower CO River Basin, as a matter of policy, deliver water to agribusiness at rate that typically run from 2-20% of what urban users are charged for the same water. I also use that verb to describe a variety of related practices that are part of the production and delivery of the water. Again, most of California's water is delivered to agribusiness at rates vastly lower than what urban/residential users pay, and that differences is paid for by urban/residential taxpayers.
The word, "subsidy," the noun, is tougher because some folks want to use it only for direct cash payments. Thus the new farm bill eliminates "subsidies," i.e., eliminated direct cash payments to many farmers, but instead discounted federal crop insurance by the same amount as the former subsidies. That gives cover to agribusiness lobbyists and politicians who want to go on TV and announce that they've ended "subsidies."
There's a jillions of other ways in which federal, state and local govts support or encourage ag. A huge chunk of the research carried out in the UCs, for instance, has been in the service of farming-- one of the reasons we have the viticulture and horticulture we do is because of public investment in that kind of research. Farm BUreau, ag extension, even the Master Gardener program, all could, theoretically, be described as taxpayer support for agriculture. Most folks I know who work in ag econ or ag science or history or whatever aren't looking to shut down those kinds of things, even though many critics of ag would also go on to describe them as "subsidies."
I appreciate Ken thinking broadly about the way that water gets used in arid environments, but I also think that if we dilute "subsidize" we risk losing sight of the basic and actionable issue, which is California's use of public treasure to incentivize water exporting.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Feb 22, 2014 - 02:34pm PT
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Fair enough.
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Chief
climber
The NW edge of The Hudson Bay
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Feb 22, 2014 - 06:45pm PT
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Relax, it's just short term pain necessitating a bigger solution.
We're probably not far from shipping or pipelining Canada's water south to quench the thirst of the American Southwest.
Many of BC rivers are already commodified by being piped through privately owned (and GE financed) "green" energy systems to produce LNG to ship to and burn in China, (They breathe from a separate atmosphere over there).
Word around the campfire is that Site C on the Peace is really about water for the US.
The Campbell Liberals have ensured that BC Hydro is being intentionally bankrupted and likely to be sold to a US energy giant for pennies on the dollar in the very near future.
Plenty of water in BC and the wild salmon won't need it because the Harper Conservatives, DFO and Norwegian multinationals see greater economic value in farmed Atlantic salmon.
The current drought in California will serve as a rationale to hurtle down a road long ago mapped out by the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers as soon as possible.
Some call it free trade.
Meanwhile, back to the hockey game or American Idol.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 22, 2014 - 07:50pm PT
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you might want to call me a irrational market niche
not irrational at all-- just boutique, and i'm a big fan. small-scale production of specialty crops remains viable if folks are really smart about it, but on small and local scales. probably the most market-rational farming current done in california is getting done by the laotian family growing medical cannabis in the backyard in stockton.
but those small specialty ops, like yours, don't scale up easily or efficiently. that's why down in the valley (in california as in france, germany, austria, japan) it's megafarms, monoculture, and economies of scale, aided, here, by subsidized water. and that's why-- according to the most quoted figures-- just 10% of california's farms contribute 90% of total production.
i'm glad you have a good, viable well, and it sounds like you're in a location where you don't have to worry about neighbors with a dozen new jumbos sucking the water out from under you.
saddest day of the year for me, is always the saturday in october of the last farmer's market in sonora.
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the albatross
Gym climber
Flagstaff
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Feb 22, 2014 - 07:53pm PT
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One of the many consequences of the drought is wildfire. I don't have a link, but a source told me that CA has responded to some 500 wildfires over this winter, when in a "typical" winter they may get 25-50 fires. I thought it was grim last summer on the fires, it is looking to be worse this season in CA.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 22, 2014 - 07:54pm PT
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perry, i think that although there are prolly water and electric sales likely to happen across the border, you hockey fans are protected by the current political dysfunction in the US. national politics are far too polarized to manage any major new infrastructure projects like a major can-am canal.
i don't get to follow the bc water wars in real time, but i check in periodically and still have friends in van and beyond. yeah, it's a real cluster.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Feb 22, 2014 - 11:45pm PT
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http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25201634/california-drought-big-cut-backs-announced-water-that
California drought: Feds say farmers won't get any Central Valley Project water this year
Friday's announcement followed a similar one last month in which state officials announced that there would be zero deliveries from the State Water Project to cities and farms.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District, which has asked 1.8 million people to cut water use 10 percent, will consider expanding that to 20 percent on Tuesday, spokesman Marty Grimes said.
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pyro
Big Wall climber
Calabasas
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Feb 22, 2014 - 11:58pm PT
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Chief should i post pictures of pipe fitters!
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 23, 2014 - 01:18pm PT
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1. Dude, the WHOLE POINT is small-scale and local. The WHOLE POINT is we don't "scale-up" and become just another mega-corp. The WHOLE POINT is we can feed people just fine and do so without direct (I say for your benefit) subsidies or charging an arm and a leg.
2. I don't grow "speciality" crops. I grow food. I feed people. Regular ordinary working people. They are not rich, they don't give a fuk about "organic" anything, but they do care if something tastes better. Or around here that they can actually get fresh food without driving down the hill. I would say at least 80% of our customers have very limited or fixed incomes. Some of our stuff is more expensive but some of it is actually cheaper than local stores or even, as I mentioned, Costco.
The whole mindset that you need to have 10% of farms producing 90% of the food is the problem. The idea of "get big or get out" in ag is the root of all evil in agriculture. All of it!
A relatively small farm like me, if it's efficient, can feed thousands of people.
So in a nutshell, you are completely wrong. Small-scale ag scales perfectly well! It's just that you need to stop thinking of monolithic farms and start realizing that spreading the load out over more but smaller farms is more secure, provides a better base for competition, provides fresher produce and is far more environmentally sound even without organic production.
that went sideways fast.
are other folks having trouble following my posts? i didn't realize what i was saying was that hard to follow. for a start, i've been trying to defend the kind of farming khanom's doing and have been highly critical of our system of subsidizing megafarms and monoculture.
i'm using "irrational" in the technical economic sense, not the psychological sense. the story of california agriculture, of all agriculture west of the 100th meridian, is the story of north americans trying and failing to impose the small-hold farming methods of the ohio river valley on an arid climate. the history of california agriculture is the history of the failure of 'scaling up" small-hold family farms in an arid place.
it was precisely the inability of small private ventures, and private capital, to develop and manage large water transfers for irrigation that gave us the various failed attempts to manage water: swampland act, wright act, newlands reclamation act, cvp, and the swp. no small farmer, and no combination of small farmers, could could develop irrigation agriculture on that scale. no one anywhere, in the history of irrigation agriculture in the world, has ever done that. irrigration agriculture as a system requires far greater concentrations of resources and skilled labor precisely because it inolves the movement of water across distance.
that's why we have so many layers of old, failed legal/technical attempts to move and distribute water, and that's why the current rights/distribution system is so tangled. you don't need to know the history of cali farming to do the farming you're doing now, but you will need to know it to disentangle the mess of water law.
you're personally outside of the irrigation complex that undergirds most of cali's agriculture, because you apparently have a water-rich property with a viable well adequate for your irrigation. most of the best farmland in cali doesn't have that. indeed, much of the most productive farmland in cali was under water as recently as 1880.
we could, if californians decided they wished to, develop a system through which subsidized irrigated water from the big public projects went only to small family farms. but that's only now, after we've pumped trillions of dollars over a century into public construction of irrigation infrastructure.
at no point in california history have small family farms been the leading sector in ag production. from the spanish period forward, large farms worked by landless and transient labor has been the dominant form
now that there is a statewide public irrigation infrastructure in place, we could try to create the kind of small-hold farmscape that was once typical of, say, indiana in the late 19th century. i would personally be all in favor. but i'm not holding my breath.
and "specialty crops" is another term of art-- it's not derogatory or aimed at you personally. it just means that the statistically tiny percentage of california farms run primarily off family labor typically grow non-commodity and non-staple crops-- greens, berries, vegetables, etc, rather than wheat or rice.
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Gene
climber
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Feb 23, 2014 - 02:05pm PT
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Who the hell isn't subsidized? That is the $17 trillion question.
Whether the subsidies are worthwhile is the issue.
g
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Feb 23, 2014 - 02:38pm PT
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now that there is a statewide public irrigation infrastructure in place, we could try to create the kind of small-hold farmscape that was once typical of, say, indiana in the late 19th century. i would personally be all in favor. but i'm not holding my breath.
The funny thing is that I believe that 90% of voters would support such a scheme.
But we don't get to vote on such decisions.
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