Comments on: California, Water You Doing?

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 27 May 2015 20:18:57 +0000

California should pay me for getting a vasectomy and moving to Texas.

By: Guy

Guy — Sun, 24 May 2015 17:33:14 +0000

That model, of course, assumes speculators are never replaced. If we suppose intelligent speculators have greater longevity than weak speculators (ie they are only replaced after retirement or greatly unexpected shifts), then the market should shift towards a proper speculation-regulated model over time…until this cadre of speculators retires. At which point you start “fresh” again and your progress is reset, since the population of potential speculators has not changed significantly. Meanwhile, you have a sizable population of weak speculators coming in and distorting things until they (the speculators) fail and fall out of the market. Well, them and whatever producers actually making things got blown out by the bubble the weak speculators caused. In any case, the weak speculators are then replaced by a group of new speculators, many weak and some smart. The process then repeats.

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By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Wed, 20 May 2015 08:02:24 +0000

The Great Depression was caused by cutting the money supply, at least as far as anything can be settled in history. That’s one of the things Milton Friedman won his Nobel Prize for, and as far as I know, no one has disproved the arguments.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Tue, 19 May 2015 18:59:40 +0000

It is right to ignore acreage. What is important water use per acre-year.

Weight of crop per unit water is an idiotic measure. What matters is dollars of crop per unit water. Alfalfa is cheap and that’s why California should reduce it.

Yes, the fact that alfalfa does well in a drought is a reason for California to grow it. It is flexible, which means that it can be treated in different ways. But this is only useful if the flexibility is exploited, if it is treated differently in wet years and dry years. It should be irrigated a lot in wet years and hardly at all in dry years. In dry years, the desperate almond growers should pay a lot for water so that their trees survive, while the alfalfa buyers just skip those years.

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By: Philip Ngai

Philip Ngai — Tue, 19 May 2015 18:15:53 +0000

Some more data on alfalfa:
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=17721
Alfalfa does not really use more water than other crops. At full canopy (when the leaves cover the soil surface), alfalfa’s water use is not much different than any other crop (think spinach, lettuce, tomato, wheat, almonds or corn) per unit time. The Evapotranspiration (ET) requirement (the amount of water a crop really needs to grow) is remarkably similar across crops at full canopy (see FAO tabulated values for the water requirements of crops).

Alfalfa’s water use profile in California is primarily due to its high acreage and nearly year-round growth pattern in many regions. If spinach were continually grown on 850,000 to 1 million acres all year long, the water use would be about the same as alfalfa, perhaps more.

Further, it’s not so much how much water is used, but how much crop is produced per unit water that is important – also known as water-use efficiency. In that category, alfalfa shines.

Contrary to popular belief, alfalfa has several unique valuable properties and advantages which would enable cropping systems greater resiliency under drought conditions.

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By: Jimbino

Jimbino — Tue, 19 May 2015 12:48:03 +0000

The obvious cause of shortages of water, energy and trees is the rampant human breeding. In times of shortage, rationing should be limited to those who have contributed to the shortage by breeding; the non-breeders have already done their part in conservation.

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By: dtreth

dtreth — Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:08 +0000

A commenter said “We have a nation to feed, ergo this situation where farmers desperately produce more and more crops while driving the price ever downwards is somehow a bad thing.”

IT’S WHAT CAUSED THE GREAT DEPRESSION, LEARN SOME ECONOMIC HISTORY!!!!!!!!

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By: Bram Cohen

Bram Cohen — Mon, 18 May 2015 16:55:48 +0000

The bit about buying out the alfalfa growers isn’t quite that simple. If alfalfa production dropped that much, it would cause a lot of desperately starving cows, and the price of alfalfa would spike, and other farmers would start growing it as a result. You could probably get away with paying off, say, half the alfalfa growers to not grow without causing immediate horrible distortions, but nobody really knows. It’s extremely difficult to manipulate markets piecemeal, because you’re deprived of the information gathering role which free markets play and forced to guess at all kinds of things. Simply making farmers pay for water would allow for truly efficient resource allocation to take place. You need to start charging for groundwater as well to do it properly though.

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By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Sun, 17 May 2015 03:34:49 +0000

A lot of Palm Springs golf courses use water from sewage treatment plants, although this has to be supplemented with freshwater in the summer when there aren’t enough visitors flushing their toilets.

Most of the older private golf courses in Palm Springs have wells into the giant aquifer.

Is it legal in Palm Springs to pump up water and sell it to Los Angeles instead of using it to water your golf course? There are a lot of laws and regulations restricting sending ground water out of the watershed. That sounds strange but there’s an “I drink your milkshake” problem — everybody with a well in Palms Springs is tapping into an aquifer that may or may not be interconnected, so it’s okay to water as much land as you own, but not to hoover up vast amounts of water out of the aquifer and pump it over the mountains in return for money, even though that makes sense.

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By: 1 – California, Water You Doing? | Exploding Ads

1 – California, Water You Doing? | Exploding Ads — Sun, 17 May 2015 02:07:47 +0000

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