California dreamin'

[telemann.livejournal.com]

NASA: California Down to One Year Supply of Water

Most of California's agriculture goes to feeding humans:

Comments

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Re: the second pic. What's the implication? Is farming for human consumption (as opposed to animal - even if those animals are eventually destined for human consumption) better, environmentally?

I've heard that some crops are a more efficient food source than animals, but I'm not sure as to details. I know there's talk about certain varieties of rice as being a potential vehicle for combating world hunger.

[immemor.livejournal.com]

If I understand correctly: It takes more water to feed cattle than it does to feed humans.It takes around 600 gallons of water to produce one cheeseburger. So animal farming wastes more water.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I was really surprised at how much water almonds require.

California farmers will reap a record 2.1 billion pounds of almonds this year, the USDA estimates—about three times as much as they did in 2000. That's great news for the world's growing horde of almond eaters, because the state's groves supply 80 percent of the global harvest. As this chart shows, California has been planting more and more almonds over the past two decades.

But in the long term, the almond boom may prove bad news for everyone who relies on California's farms for sustenance. You might have heard that the state, supplier of half of US-grown produce, is locked in its worst drought on record. Meanwhile, it takes 1.1 gallons of water to produce a single almond, as my colleagues Alex Park and Julia Lurie have shown. You don't have to scramble to figure how many almonds make up 2.1 billion pounds to realize that that's a hell of a lot of water.

Source: Your Almond Habit Is Sucking California Dry (http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/07/your-almond-habit-sucking-califoirnia-dry)

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

We could do a lot better. Almonds are currently mostly "flood farmed" which means they flood the almond tree fields. You can also grow Almonds with more efficient targeted irrigation and that transformation is overdue.

[drivebyluna.livejournal.com]

Yeah we've already made the decision to switch to eating peanuts once our snack bag from Costco runs out.

[immemor.livejournal.com]

I was surprised too. I just learned about all the water almonds require from watching John Oliver.

[blackdwarv.livejournal.com]

The problem with this figure is that it is over the 3-5 years it takes to grow a calf up to slaughterable age. It's *technically* true, but it conflates 1-3 harvests of a plant-based food source with a food source that takes many years to harvest.

...the most water-efficient source of protein? Crickets.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

The implications are bad for the rest of the country in terms of food production.

And I guess it's natural that farmers would be given a bit of priority if water rationing ever comes to California (there is a lot of criticism that it hasn't been instituted yet). And the general lack of a crisis-mentality in California has been odd, but understandable since until you don't have water, and just assume it will be there, it doesn't hit home. And the likelihood of a 'megadrought' seems very likely (a megadrought is one that lasts in a regional area for decades).

When it comes to drought in the West, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. That’s the conclusion from a new study that links an increasing risk of decades-long drought episodes in the western United States to human-induced climate change. The study predicts drought severity outside the bounds of what’s thought to have occurred over the past 1,000 years, based on local tree-ring records.

“It’s certainly not good news,” said co-author Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The study was published Thursday in the inaugural issue of Science Advances, an open-access journal from AAAS, the same publisher as Science.

Smerdon’s study is the first to examine the future risk of “megadrought” in the southwest and central United States in the context of historical episodes of drought in the same regions. Smerdon’s study suggests that the coming years are likely to see droughts worse than the epic dry periods that are thought to have caused profound changes to human settlement in the region over the last millennium.

The California we knew is going bye-bye. Palm trees are synonymous with the look of LA and southern California. But with one exception, palm trees are not native to the state; they require a lot moisture in the soil to thrive (and if that's lacking, they will require supplemental watering) . California will likely return to its pre-20th century natural ecology: semi-arid, a patchwork of grassland, chaparral, sage scrub, and oak woodland.

You can read about the Columbia University study here (http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/3232)

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

The idea of that kind of drought hitting our country is terrifying.

What in the hell are we doing to ourselves?

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Those palm trees are actually not so bad *once established*. Problem is that they are often grown and then replanted fully grown with is very brown process, lots of C02 produced and lots of water needed to establish them.


California will likely return to its pre-20th century natural ecology: semi-arid, a patchwork of grassland, chaparral, sage scrub, and oak woodland

If we let it happen.

http://www.californiachaparral.com/

[madscience.livejournal.com]

For obvious reasons, water conservation is also a big deal in Arizona. Phoenix and Tucson get their water from the Colorado, and we have to share it with Los Angeles. People have sunk so many wells in the last 100 years that formerly perennial rivers like the Santa Cruz are now completely dry except during flash floods, and the ecosystems that those rivers supported have changed radically. The water table is slowly recovering now, but it's nowhere near what it was.

The upside is that things like rainwater harvesting, landscaping with native vegetation, composting toilets, etc., are already trendy here. Grade school children learn about aquaponics. The Tohono O'odham cultivate and sell a variety of bean that is one of the most drought-tolerant crops in the world. And in fact, even a desert city like Tucson could be completely sustained by the rain that falls on it. (Well, maybe not the golf courses.) Until recently, the city treated rainwater as waste to be disposed of as quickly as possible. But that's changing, too.

[cindyanne1.livejournal.com]

That doesn't surprise me with regards to Ohio at all. The vast majority of our corn gets sold to Trillium Farms' Croton branch http://www.trilliumfarmsohio.com/ for chicken feed.

[immemor.livejournal.com]

I'm in Ohio, too. I was surprised we were this high. I always thought it was somewhere in the 50/50 range.

[cindyanne1.livejournal.com]

Also, too, this map doesn't always mean that animals in Ohio are eating the grain. China buys a lot of our (meaning America's) grain to feed chickens as well.

Just from eyeballing the map, it looks like the "grain producer" states are the animal feeders and the "veggie producer" states are the people feeders.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Beautifully understated!

[blackdwarv.livejournal.com]

Not sure if I believe the bottom map. I know for a fact that the biggest crop in California is alfalfa... which is generally used for more expensive animals like horses or pets. Not large feedlot animals.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I know for a fact that the biggest crop in California is alfalfa.

It's not marijuana? :P

[blackdwarv.livejournal.com]

...not in terms of water use.

[blackdwarv.livejournal.com]

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[wurzel-zweig.livejournal.com]

I realize the chart aims to make some high horse moralistic point, but those other states actually HAVE plenty ofwater.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Really?

And this is only March, snow packs are already low in the western states, so this map will get progressively browner/ redder.

[wurzel-zweig.livejournal.com]

Yes, really. Nobody would be talking about California right now if they were just a bit yellow like those mostly meat producing states. And a bunch of them are next to those reeeally gargantuan lakes.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

There is much drought in USA, but the issue is broader than raw water consumption. The emissions that come from animal agriculture are about equal to natural gas and petroleum production. Meat is vastly more destructive when it comes to water consumption, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. And global warming is exacerbating California's drought (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/02/record-california-drought-linked-to-climate-change).