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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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John M
climber
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Feb 23, 2014 - 02:41pm PT
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the devil is in the details. How would you determine what size farm was a family farm?
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 23, 2014 - 05:27pm PT
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How would you determine what size farm was a family farm?
one of the reasons i always either qualify "family farm" or use other awkward phrases-- small-scale, boutique, whatever -- is that "family farm" is widely used by california agribusiness to describe any farm that isn't a publicly traded corporation. thus boswell's jillion acre cotton empire was regularly described as a "family farm."
"family farm" or small-hold or freehold as it developed in 19th century popular and then legal terminology, was pretty well politically measured in The Homestaed Act: 160 acres. That was, in 19th century terms, the amount of decent ground required for a family of, say, 4-10, to produce a substance or even middle-class income on decent quality farmland in the ohio or upper mississippi river valleys. the key idea is a farm that is owner-occupied and run by family rather than contract labor.
But 160 acres was useless in arid climates-- most places a decent ranch would've needed at least a thousand acres to provide a similar middle-class living. On the other hand, 160 acres was way more acreage than could be managed with irrigation-- irrigation farming is generally way more labor intensive than what farmers were doing back in Indiana. Even in the early 20th century, irrigated 80 acres would've been too large for most family farmers to manage without contract lots of seasonal labor. John Wesley Powell's famous Report on the Arid Lands made that clear back in the 19th century. It also included the logical proposal that political and water districts in the arid West should be drawn along water basin boundaries rather than other random lines. He was all but tarred-and-feathered for it.
When the Newlands Reclamation Act passed, it included a clause that limited subsidized water deliveries to farms of 160 acres or less (already too large). That clause was unpopular with western growers who were already tenanting, leasing and contracting labor, so it was basically never enforced. Eventually agribusiness managed to get the limit increased to 960 acres (a bill signed by Reagan but endorsed by Jerry Brown).
But CVP hasn't even really enforced that limit. Technically, it wouldn't be difficult to impose an 80 acre limit, although you'd have a fair bit of evasion. But politically it's probably impossible.
That;s before we wade into the mess of rights and legal clusters. And the electric grid.
If this really is a mega-drought and we hit rock bottom, at some point, urban users are going to learn that they are paying 5 to 20 times for water what the Resnick's Paramount farms pays. WIth no deliveries scheduled for 2014, the next thing we're going to see, though, is a test of California's status as the principal irrigation ag state that doesn't regulate groundwater mining.
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John M
climber
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Feb 23, 2014 - 05:52pm PT
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thanks KLK. I really appreciate your explanations. If this is a mega drought, things are going to get very interesting. If not a mega drought, then I doubt much will change. We seem to need big pushes to make big changes.
I have a friend from Germany who says they still have small farms there. She says in the smaller villages you know the farmer who produced what you are eating and you can even know which cow you are buying and who raised it and who butchers it. To me that helps build integrity throughout the system. If I lived close, I would totally buy produce from Khanom.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Feb 23, 2014 - 06:29pm PT
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160 seems reasonable to me.
but I'm flexible.
I'll accept 500. Anything to exclude the 100,000 acres.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Feb 23, 2014 - 06:38pm PT
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My sister and her husband run a cattle ranch in SLO. She reports that this is the worst drought the ranch has experienced in the 5 generations the family has been in the business. Their cattle are primarily grass fed - not this season, though. There isn't any grass.
As of the end of Jan, NOAA's data confirmed that this is the worst drought in over a century - ie, the worst on record.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 23, 2014 - 06:50pm PT
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Plenty of water here in Ireland (pissing down as usual), much of it wasted on poor infrastructure. And they still fluoridate the water here, just about the only EU country that does. And they are bringing in water meters and Ireland's richest man (though he lives as a tax exile in Malta) will be looking to gobble up water once it is privatized. Just watch, he'll do it to add to his billions.
But I digress.
Many of you have the finger on the pulse better than I do about California and water, though I know some things, having been born and raised in California. And having studied natural resources and hydrology at Columbia College (then CJC in 1974-77).
What I do know is that this thread I started is a new record for me, most of my threads die young, but this one has been flooded with responses. But the rain of information is, well, intoxicating. ;-)
And much of the information on this thread, that one hopes is accurate in one way or another, is both interesting and informative. Like a fresh spring rain.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Feb 23, 2014 - 07:17pm PT
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There has been some discussion about family farms. They are alive and well in some areas - and can be far more efficient than their factory counterparts with regards to inputs v yield.
The Land Stewardship Project is a great example of an organization that fosters the growth of sustainable domestic agriculture in general, and family farming in particular - through local organization (setting up CSAs, fighting the construction of mega dairies, etc), public and farmer education, and lobbying at both the state and federal levels:
http://landstewardshipproject.org/
The variations in quality of life and health conditions for the farmers, quality of the product, and environmental impact between neighboring farms can be stark. I visited a MN dairy farm that changed its practices under this above organization's tutelage - it now makes more profit (much lower vet bills, for starters), has won more awards for this products, and loses 50 times less topsoil per storm event than its neighboring dairies.
Just a data point - but the link provided is a great resource for those who want to know more about family and sustainable farming today.
Ending scheduled federal farm subsidies would really help the growth of sustainable agriculture. The world isn't fair, but that really stacks the deck in the unsustainable direction.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Feb 23, 2014 - 07:35pm PT
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My sister and her husband run a cattle ranch in SLO. She reports that this is the worst drought the ranch has experienced in the 5 generations the family has been in the business. Their cattle are primarily grass fed - not this season, though. There isn't any grass.
As of the end of Jan, NOAA's data confirmed that this is the worst drought in over a century - ie, the worst on record.
prolly the worst since 1580 according to lynn ingram's calcs.
really feel for the small ranchers. if i were king, we'd be giving those folks subsidized water to water pasturage. there's rain coming this week-- hope there's enough seed for it to help. just got back from a short jog around the local bit of ranchland. just freakin grim-- there's like nothing to eat. they're running way fewer head than the textbooks say you can run on that acreage, but they're still digging down to dirt.
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