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Old 04-07-2015, 09:32 PM
 
Location: Greater NYC, USA
2,761 posts, read 3,415,932 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by VJDAY81445 View Post
Yup, it looks like a rice field to me.

Rice requires the flooding of a field.
To tell you the truth, for all I know they could be germinating seedlings.
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Old 04-07-2015, 09:54 PM
 
Location: West Hollywood
3,190 posts, read 3,173,882 times
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Agriculture does indeed use 80% of California's water. Residential water use is small potatoes in comparison. And while agriculture making up 2-3% of California's GDP is a big deal(that's 2-3% of the world's 6th largest economy) it's not a sustainable system for the future. Farmers rely too heavily on flooding fields instead of drip systems, which can often yield better results. And California farmers grows too many crops that need more water than the state can reasonably provide, like rice and almonds. Rice can be grown just about anywhere and almonds are a luxury item so there's no justification for putting the entirety or majority of the conservation requirements on residents, cities and towns that have already substantially reduced water usage since the drought started. Green lawns in the desert are nonsensical and the notion that you need a green lawn in these climates needs to change. The drought isn't going to just end and make everything go back to the way it was. We're entering an era of historically bad and historically frequent droughts. The experts are predicting a mega-drought will wreck the West Coast some time in the next 40 years so changes have to be made now to save our way of life. If California dies then the country dies.
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Old 04-07-2015, 10:08 PM
 
Location: Greater NYC, USA
2,761 posts, read 3,415,932 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MordinSolus View Post
Agriculture does indeed use 80% of California's water. Residential water use is small potatoes in comparison. And while agriculture making up 2-3% of California's GDP is a big deal(that's 2-3% of the world's 6th largest economy) it's not a sustainable system for the future. Farmers rely too heavily on flooding fields instead of drip systems, which can often yield better results. And California farmers grows too many crops that need more water than the state can reasonably provide, like rice and almonds. Rice can be grown just about anywhere and almonds are a luxury item so there's no justification for putting the entirety or majority of the conservation requirements on residents, cities and towns that have already substantially reduced water usage since the drought started. Green lawns in the desert are nonsensical and the notion that you need a green lawn in these climates needs to change. The drought isn't going to just end and make everything go back to the way it was. We're entering an era of historically bad and historically frequent droughts. The experts are predicting a mega-drought will wreck the West Coast some time in the next 40 years so changes have to be made now to save our way of life. If California dies then the country dies.

I always thought wind would blow sand into the house unless you had a lawn ? NO ?

I like neither almonds nor rice so I would stick with a lawn.
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Old 04-07-2015, 10:26 PM
 
Location: Living rent free in your head
42,764 posts, read 26,048,855 times
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this situation with farmers is more complex than it might seem. In the southwestern San Joaquin so much ground water has been depleted that large areas have dropped 30 feet and some say that the aquifer is in danger of collapsing. When farmers were planting mainly annual crops they could go fallow in a dry year but since almonds and pistachios require year round irrigation they are real game changers. Wells go dry so they dig deeper ones and get more salinity and selenium in the water and have to resort to field flooding to dissipate it. And while some small farmers are affected, for the most part it is the billionaire mega farmers who are doing the most damage and rather than doing something about the problem they are paying lobbyists not only to make sure they can continue doing business as usual but get this- they also lobby for Iran sanctions to prevent pistachio exports so they can have a lock on that market. Oligarch Valley: How Beverly Hills billionaire farmers Lynda and Stewart Resnick profit from the Iran sanctions they lobbied for – Mondoweiss

Last edited by 2sleepy; 04-07-2015 at 11:14 PM..
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Old 04-07-2015, 11:44 PM
 
Location: West Hollywood
3,190 posts, read 3,173,882 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DPolo View Post
I always thought wind would blow sand into the house unless you had a lawn ? NO ?
The alternative to green grass isn't sand. No one is saying grass should be ripped out and sand trucked in.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DPolo View Post
I like neither almonds nor rice so I would stick with a lawn.
It's not tit for tat. Things are going to have to change across the board. Growing rice in the desert doesn't make any sense and neither does having a green lawn. There are attractive alternatives to grass. Hardscaping is low-maintenance and attractive. Natural landscaping using desert flora can be attractive. Artificial grass requires no water and looks very authentic these days.
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Old 04-08-2015, 12:10 AM
 
Location: Old Mother Idaho
29,190 posts, read 22,240,647 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NeonGecko View Post
No. They should stop trying to grow rice in a freakin' DESERT.
Yup. But they grow fruit in the desert, and vegetables in the desert, and tomatoes and watermelons. The problem isn't the desert, it's the watering of it. The exact same thing happens in the deserts of Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oregon and Washington. The only thing that differs is the growing season. Hot deserts can grow food almost year round. Cold deserts cannot.

And California isn't the only state in drought. Every one on that list I mentioned is droughty. Cali's drought is only the most severe, and that could all change in a couple of months of temporary respite. While Cali was choking from lack of water last year, it was raining in Idaho so steadily that the ripe crops were rotting in the fields. Drought always skips around like that, but every state on the list is still drying up.

All that Big Winter that hit the east coast should have, by old weather patterns of the 20th century, landed in the mountains of the west where the snow belongs. This winter may have broken records there, but it's not the first- the northeast has been hit by big winters about every 2-3 years for a decade now. They are only growing worse. And rice won't grow in New England.
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Old 04-08-2015, 12:19 AM
 
Location: Old Mother Idaho
29,190 posts, read 22,240,647 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DPolo View Post
I always thought wind would blow sand into the house unless you had a lawn ? NO ?

I like neither almonds nor rice so I would stick with a lawn.
There are lots of plants that will hold the dirt down. Kentucky bluegrass, the most common lawn grass is particularly thirsty. There are hundreds of native grasses that will work just fine to hold the soil that need no artificial watering to survive. They all turn brown, but brown is the natural color of most plants in the west. It's only a matter of getting used to the natural, not the artificial we have become accustomed to.
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Old 04-08-2015, 05:00 AM
 
Location: Londonderry, NH
41,478 posts, read 59,638,996 times
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The California folks should look at the xeriscaping practiced in much of New Mexico. Even if all the cities and residences went into extreme water conservation the water use would not diminish a significant amount. The place to save water is revising agricultural practices including changes in irrigation techniques, choice of crops and allowing some land, (rice paddies) to go fallow until the drought is broken.

Indeed this will cost some farmers big bucks but that is farming. It is not risk free business and should not be treated as if it is. Sometimes the rains do not arrive and, unless they have saved for the dry times, farmers go out of business. This includes the mega-farms funded by corporate investors.
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Old 04-08-2015, 11:51 AM
 
Location: NYC
20,550 posts, read 17,585,990 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NeonGecko View Post
No. They should stop trying to grow rice in a freakin' DESERT.
There are tariffs on imported rice, we don't need CA rice. There are enough rice suppliers around the world.

CA will have some tough decisions, continue like this and exhaust all water resources or shutdown water usage where it is not needed or burdening.
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Old 04-09-2015, 09:10 AM
 
Location: Morrisville, NC
9,134 posts, read 14,707,757 times
Reputation: 9042
Quote:
Originally Posted by GregW View Post
A major problem is, under western Water Law, if a farmer does not use all of his allotted share of the water they can loose that share to others. I suggest replacing this law with state ownership of all the water and distribution according to economic and social value.

Another is choice of crops. Growing rice, a wet monsoon plant, in a semi-arid climate is a environmental absurdity that can only make sense under man made irrigation. It does make sense to grow grass in California and rice in Alabama but not the other way around.

Another thing is to use less wasteful irrigation such as drip feed and low spray only at night. The first would cost a lot of money but the latter is really simple.

So the water intensive farmers get economically damaged by the drought. Everybody else is as well so they should share the pain.

Best post so far. Unless a major overhaul is done to the water rules out there, everyone's lawn can me all rock and it will not make much difference to it all. Every year farmers literally do waste water (though it doesn't cease to exist) just because of the use it or lose it way things are set up out there.
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