That was an epic read. Thank you for posting it. I looked at the scroll bar on the right side of my browser and it barely budged in 15 minutes of reading.
This is the documentary "Finding Lost Hills" mentioned during the story.
If you would like to read an article about the intertwining of the mudslides and wildfires of the California wilderness that is increasingly encroached upon by residential development from 1988 that is similar in breadth, depth, and scope:
I agree. I love when stories get all the viewpoints and follow threads raised during conversations. I didn't even realize I spent about an hour reading it!
From a literary standpoint, I loved this article. It seemed like the sequel to Chinatown. The writing reminded me of a Michael Lewis story. Really enjoyed this.
> The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom won’t last forever. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired.
Every time I read something like this, it just baffles me. Not only are we technologically capable of producing the water we need for aggreculture via desalination, but we also have a delivery system already in place. Instead of funneling water from northern rivers, those same systems can be filled with water sourced from the ocean.
Power can be sourced sustainably as well, as it doesn’t matter what time of day the water flows or if there are fluctuations, so long as it averages out and can be balanced in the overall system.
A project like this could not only fuel CA economy for years to come, but also make farming something that not only mega-business can sustain. As is, the finances are fairly precarious and you need serious cash flows to be able to withstand the bad years. However, we can avoid these bad years all together.
Costs, ultimately, relate to the resources (and opportunity costs) required to provide or provision something.
Desalinisation costs energy, and even with advances in technology, reverse-osmosis processes require moving water across membranes that it doesn't want to move across.
And that's on top of everything else, so that you have to deal with pre-filtering and straining (probably through gradations of rock, gravel, and sand filters), and the flushing of those periodically, and other effects.
Technology is not some majickal bottomless bag of tricks from which you can extract endless efficiencies. There are limits, constraints within those, risks, and side-effects.
And the volumes of water required for crops is large. The more so for tree crops, as mentioned in the article, as they must be watered for their entire lives. (There are orange orchards still producing in Southern California which date from Mission times -- over 200 years ago. Though most orchards have an effective life of about 15 - 40 years or so, if I recall my research on this a few years back.)
Contrast alfalfa, another high-water crop, in which, in a predicted dry year, a farmer can simply forgo planting the crop (or allow it to die), without incurring a long-term liability, as the next year's crop would have to be planted afresh anyway.
Article states their entire operation uses 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. That’s 645,332,372 cubic-yards. Israel today produces 785 million cubic yards of water per year, using it for agriculture, among other things. [1]
From the same article:
“Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).”
At the $0.58 per 1000 liters, that farming operation would require $286 million to pay for the water needed. The article quoted profitability scratching a billion, so it seems that it is both within technological means and economically viable. For sure not as profitable as free water, but still viable.
The acre-foot in the desal prices would be $715. All you are proving is that $17 is an unsustainable price and not what non-ag consumers pay at all. California as a landmass has sunk measurably during the few years because of these unsustainable practices.
If you were to buy water at real unsubsidized prices in any metro area, you would not be able to find $17/acre-foot.
I am noting that present levels of ag activity are in fact predicated on that price. And that (as is prominently noted in the article) water is the limiting factor for virtually all California ag.
And that any significant increase (other contemporary news articles are talking of "only" 10x increases in water costs) would be devastating to existing operations.
I'm finding your views charmingly optimistic. But highly unrealistic.
The price isn’t the only limiting factor. Right now there isn’t water at any price that you can buy in unlimited quantities through the current watering system.
As the result, new land development of more sustainable ag is effectively blocked by more senior water rights.
We even legislate into our consumer laws that you cannot use water for your landscaping at any price beyond a certain amount or risk being completely cut off.
I find this absolute limit situation highly questionable, because as we have a physical ability to not have these limits in a much more sustainable sense.
Just look at pumping costs. There's a reason we generate hydroelectric power from water flowing downstream. Doing the reverse is incredibly energy costly.
Also scale only gets you so far. Once you max out the limits of the technology available, increasing scale provides very little extra return.
A nice read on the hubris of unsustainable development. Having grown up in area with fights (legal and physical) over water, the tragedy of the commons is all too frequent.
Chiming in with others to say what a fantastic read this was. So much detail and insight.
I prefer more substantive endorsements, but there's just so much to chew over: farming, water, drought, wealth, poverty, business, health, and more. I'll be revisiting this for examples and insights in numerous areas.
I lived in Fresno for over 2 years. While there, I read a couple of books about the history of water rights and water development in California. One is called Salt Dreams and is mostly about Southern California. The other was a local history about irrigation canals and water rights in Fresno County.
That area was initially desert. The only greenery was along river banks. One canal was built with essentially no money. Individuals would be assigned a section to dig and, in exchange, gain water rights. They sometimes had to take a break from digging it to get a job for a time. When financial drama and legal drama came along later, this canal was fine because money had never been a large part of the equation.
A later canal had money from the start. When financial and legal drama reared its ugly head, this canal really suffered. The fact that money was central to its development turned out to be an Achilles heel.
There were a number of important court cases in Fresno that helped shape water rights in California. California water law is influenced by two conflicting sets of rules. There is an old English principle that you can't take so much water from the river that you are depriving people downstream. This is one expectation of California water law. The other is first come, first served.
As the canals got dug, the once barren landscape grew lush. The book had interesting before and after photos of old farm houses in a barren landscape, then the same house surrounded by trees and greenery.
A number of canal building tools were developed in Fresno and patented. Fresno County played something of a keystone role in water development and water rights development.
They also developed ground water recharge systems. The success of the canals led to the emergence of ponds in low lying areas due to a rising water table. They worked to direct this into the aquifer and help support local wells.
Fresno probably has better water security than the rest of California. It has gone through periods where it was successfully improving the status of its aquifer, probably while most other aquifers in the US were being inexorably drawn down, leading to subsidence.
I am somewhat skeptical of the doomsday pronouncements of articles like this. I suspect there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of using drip irrigation and other conservation farming methods.
Having lived in Fresno, which is absolutely not a barren desert these days, and read about it's water history, I find myself a bit bemused by the fact that it gets so little attention for how it was transformed. People harp on the farmland in the desert. They fail to recognize that Fresno is something of a modern Hanging Gardens of Babylon scenario in part because it's current lushness goes back more than a hundred years, so we don't really recognize that it's current state is a case of widespread, persistent terraforming. However it only gets about 11 inches of rain a year. Without constant tending, the current greenery there would not survive. It would revert to desert.
Anyone interested in water issues in California should read Salt Dreams and also read about the history of water development in Fresno County.
No. It was in a book about the history of the Fresno canal system /irrigation district. I think it had the name of the canal system or district in the title and was written by a local. It was an extremely interesting book.
You might need to get a librarian to help you ID it. Searching online is failing to readily find anything.
No, that doesn't ring a bell. I can't tell you the author or the date.
I read it in the Sunnyside branch of the Fresno County library system. Sunnyside is an unincorporated community on the edge of the city of Fresno. The Fresno County library system could probably help you find the book. It had a light blue cover.
I remember the name as being something very boring and straight forward but open to misinterpretation, like "The history of the normal canal" where normal sounds like a description but was really the name of the canal (but normal is probably not the actual word in question and it may have been irrigation district or similar instead of canal).
Consolidated district is a vague possibility, where it sounds descriptive but is actually the name of the thing in question.
I am seriously bad with names and titles. My mind is a sieve for such.
This is the documentary "Finding Lost Hills" mentioned during the story.
https://vimeo.com/176388063
If you would like to read an article about the intertwining of the mudslides and wildfires of the California wilderness that is increasingly encroached upon by residential development from 1988 that is similar in breadth, depth, and scope:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/09/26/los-angeles-ag...