California Goes Nuts

https://medium.com/mother-jones/california-goes-nuts-daa3632e5c55

by DamienSF • 11 years ago

70 78 11 years ago

ghshephard• 11 years ago

The photography in this article is gorgeous, the material is great, and the presentation is almost flawless. I continue to be impressed with the output on Medium - I wonder how they manage to get outlets like Mother Jones to grace them with such awesome content.

vskarine• 11 years ago

I am going to think twice before buying nuts again...

It takes 1 gallon of water to grow 1 almond! How many almonds' worth of water does it take to:

* Flush a toilet: 1.6

* Run a dishwasher: 8

* Run a garden hose for 2 min: 20

* Take 10-min shower: 25

* Do a load of laundry: 45

How much water per year does it take to (in billions of cubic meters):

* produce all of the almonds in California: 3.6

* provide water to all Los Angeles homes and businesses: 0.86

* provide water to all San Francisco homes and businesses: 0.11

ianlevesque• 11 years ago

According to the article China consumes most of them.

lr2• 11 years ago

I used to think China needed us. Now I think they are using us up the way the US has used up 3rd-world countries for decades.

saiko-chriskun• 11 years ago

* Produce a hamburger: 660

acadien2• 11 years ago

1 hamburger or 1 cow? Genuinely curious, also could you source that? Thanks!

nwenzel• 11 years ago

There's a difference between a) flushing water down the toilet and b) pouring it back into the ground.

edit - clarify; Edit2 - add the following

I shouldn't have been so short or flippant. There is a difference between using water in a way that renders it basically unusable without cleaning/purifying it through energy intensive processes or massive dilution (dumping into the ocean which is still unusable without desalinization) and using water in a way that allows it to naturally return to the system through evaporation.

We talk about agricultural use of water as if that creates some sort of excuse to be wasteful. Will not running the water while brushing your teeth or shaving solve the drought? No. Is it completely wasteful and unnecessary? Yes.

I completely agree that ridiculously minor "feel good" measures like only getting a glass of water on request at restaurants will do little to nothing to show love any actual problem. I think it also hurts finding an actual solution because we feel like we're sacrificing so we've dibe our share. Sort of like driving a Prius.

Solving the water shortage problem is going to take a lot more than low-flow shower heads. But it's also going to require a lot more than eating fewer almonds. And the fact that agriculture is a big consumer of water isn't a reason or an excuse to be wasteful.

If you really want to contribute towards a healthier more sustainable planet, skip that burger and have a salad with some California avocados and sliced almonds on top.

astrocyte6• 11 years ago

So, essentially they're targeting the least significant portion of water usage because they can do so more easily and they don't really consider this drought to be a big problem... Tax revenue from Agriculture means more. In the mean time, as the state heads towards a brick wall, they'll engage in silly water restrictions so it seems like they did something. Sounds about right for California. When something happens, use it as a reason to raise costs and taxes and do everything in your power to not solve the real issues.

Sales tax is up again too right? California really knows how to show its residents love. Tax revenue from almonds is 30x more important than the general comfort of its residents is what I gather. That's just nuts..lol

prawn2• 11 years ago

Agriculture has more unified representation than the public. It's easier to reach and mobilise them. The public would feel more helpless in comparison.

marricks• 11 years ago

Nope. Don't stop buying nuts. Stop buying meat & dairy:

Almonds -- 350-500 gallons; (added in an edit by popular demand, not in source)

Eggs -- 573 gallons;

Chicken -- 815 gallons;

Cheese -- 896 gallons;

Pork -- 1630 gallons;

Butter -- 2044 gallons;

Beef -- 2500-5000 gallons;

(gallons of water per pound of food)

Source:

http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Hoekstra-2008-Waterfoo...

And the meat & dairy industry takes up a whopping 47% of California's water.

Source (page 3 [pdf page 9]):

http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft...

I actually made an account to comment on these posts. No one else seems to be putting things into perspective. We aren't draining ourselves of water from small things like produce and nuts..

phamilton• 11 years ago

To properly normalize, a pound of almonds requires 350-400 gallons.

astrocyte6• 11 years ago

Here's an idea for California : Stop trying to hog the economic output of the world. Your state can no longer support it.

California : > 3 million illegal immigrants and growing (California policies welcome it) > Continuing to cram people into the major cities (stop) > Stop producing so much water demanding products.. Let another state that has a more adequate water supply and conditions do it > Stop trying to produce 80% of the nation's agriculture. Let other states do it.

^ Solutions that put things into perspective. Why are none of them being pursued? because it attacks tax revenue and money. Money from other sources > people's comfort who live in California. All of that money ($115 billion in annual tax revenue and still in debt up to their ears and no money to fund water solution projects .. corruption, waste)

Perspective : California doesn't give a rats ass about its residents. It exists and makes policies to further grow its tax base .. consequences be dammed. Residents always put up with the idiocy. So, screw them (over and over)

danjayh2• 11 years ago

To put things into perspective, you should mention that there are ~500 almonds/lb (just looked at a random amazon product page to determine this - probably depends on variety and quality). This is needed to compare the numbers in your post with the numbers from the article.

adventured3• 11 years ago

A critical difference being you can produce meat / dairy in all sorts of climates that don't have water problems, unlike almonds that need a very specific climate. For example where I live there hasn't been a serious drought in the last 200 years, and you can easily raise chickens, cows, et al. without worrying about water.

benihana2• 11 years ago

This was brought up two days ago when a similar story was posted. And the conversation then seemed to conclude it's not so much about how much water almonds and cows need to grow, it's about California inefficiently allocating resources and screwing its citizens in favor of farmers.

mc322• 11 years ago

Stop eating rice and drinking coffee and wearing cotton!

Rice: 5000 gallons per pound.[1]

Brewed coffee: 37 gallons per cup brewed coffee. [2]

Pair of cotton Jeans: 900 - 1800 gallons [3]

[1] http://www.usriceproducers.com/files/187_Rice%20Facts.pdf

[2] http://www.ocwd.com/ConservationEducation/WaterFacts.aspx

[3] http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/how-many-gallons-...

lr2• 11 years ago

The images of California reservoirs remind me of images of the Aral sea in Uzbekistan which was drained during Soviet times in order to grow cotton in the middle of the Central Asian desert. Humans really are greedy and stupid.

astrocyte6• 11 years ago

and myopic and self-centered ..

Not planning ahead for a foreseeable event

and

33.8 million people not batting an eye for over 5 years while their state runs completely dry of water

People have to face personal consequences in today's society before they wake up. Notably, that's when you hear the most yapping and observe the most activity : When something is too far gone and its too late.

sologoub3• 11 years ago

This is why we should be looking seriously at desalinization for both drinking and irragation water.

With proper designs, we should be able to mitigate a lot of the bad side effects while protecting more of the land based ecosystems.

seanmcdirmid4• 11 years ago

Costs a lot of money. We can always make water given enough energy, and we have enough uranium to last us a few centuries if we want to build expensive nuclear plants. But no one wants to pay the cost.

When we say: there is a shortage of X, what we really mean is that there is a shortage of cheap X, and we aren't yet ready to pay the cost for expensive X.

Like almonds, they are yummy, but if the price went up by 10 because they had to use desalinated water, we might not eat so many.

astrocyte6• 11 years ago

Last I recalled, California has some of the highest taxes in the U.S and has the highest Gross State product. So, where's the money going? I guess everyone is so busy working their faces off that they don't have time to ask such important questions. O'well, no Desalinization plants for you.

California Tax revenue : $115,089,654,000 (115 billion). I think this issues can get a hellavuh lot worse than it is right now before any serious action is taken. When I start seeing billion dollar steps being made to address the issue, that's when I'll consider that they take it seriously.

sologoub3• 11 years ago

We happen to have a lot of sunshine and wind... It's possible even with current tech to build plants that could basically operate on 100% renewables.

dspeyer2• 11 years ago

Any idea how hard it would be to genetically engineer an almond tree that could drink sea water?

adventured3• 11 years ago

Makes me wonder how much electricity a 50 acre almond farm could generate from solar power, to contribute to the vast electricity requirements of desalinization.

The new billion dollar San Diego desalination plant can produce 18 billion gallons of water per year, at a cost of $1 per ~162 gallons (1/2 of one cent per gallon; or roughly $2,000 per acre foot of water, about 325,000 gallons).

From what I can find, almond growing in California consumes 1.1 trillion gallons of water per year. So it would take ~60 modern desalination plants at a cost of $1 billion each to provide water for just California's present almond growing....

thrownaway24244• 11 years ago

On 50 acres you could get maybe 5MW peak power, extrapolating from the utility-scale project being built in San Benito County claiming 247MW on 2500 acres.

raldi2• 11 years ago

According to the following op-ed written by an almond farmer, they're paying $1000 per acre-foot for their discount water. That works out to three gallons for a penny. And that's 40x what they were paying quite recently.

To put that in perspective, if you were paying $1000 per acre-foot for the water in your home, you could flush your toilet 42 times a day for a month and your bill would come to less than $5. Remember that the next time someone tells you to let it mellow.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gleason-almond-fa...

tdaltonc• 11 years ago

A gallon of water delivered to your toilet and a gallon of water delivered to an orchard have very different infrastructure, quality, and leakage costs. I'm not saying that water prices are reasonable, but neither is your comparison.

chatmasta2• 11 years ago

I pay comcast almost $100 a month for shitty Internet, throttled at peak times, max 20mbps one direction if I'm lucky, and I think there is even a cap on the bandwidth I can use.

I can pay Layer3 or HE $0.50 per mbps and get 200mbps to my server for the same price. The difference is that layer3 only needs to lay cables between a few dozen datacenters. Comcast needs to lay them between the data centers, and then millions of homes.

Economies of scale, etc.

lsc3• 11 years ago

I can pay Layer3 or HE $0.50 per mbps and get 200mbps to my server for the same price.

I find this unlikely, or at the very least, exaggerated

If you buy several gigabits from he.net, you can get around $0.50 per mbps.

As of last year, for the same quantities, you are looking at about 6x that for Level3 (I assume you mean Level3, not Layer3)

Level3 is probably the most expensive major bandiwdth provider you are likely to encounter (they also have the largest network... if I was going to spend three bucks a megabit, and to be clear, I'm not, I'd spend it with Level3.) He.net is one of the cheapest, and only approaches "largest network" if you are counting IPv6 peers.

If your provider is charging you the same for both, most likely they have a he.net link for normal traffic, and then a burstable Level3 link, and they only use the latter as a backup.

(Also note, the pricing I'm talking about is only valid for the "one to five gigabits" level... bandwidth is one of those things that gets dramatically cheaper as you buy more. Dramatically.)

Also interestingly, if you want comcast in the datacenter... their pricing is closer to Level3 than it is to He.net. Even if you want to do 'paid peering' and only want to send data to/from comcast over the link. (Of course, no sane person would send traffic other than the traffic to/from comcast customers out said comcast link.)

(Of course, none of this has anything to do with your point, but someone was wrong on the internet, etc...)

dmm• 11 years ago

My local electric coop recently ran fiber to every cow farm in this rural county and offers symmetrical gigabit for $100/month. Why can't everyone have this?

Co-mo.net

rb2k_3• 11 years ago

I never quite got what "it takes x gallons" actually means. Where does the water go? Does it get sucked up by the plant somehow? Does the plant split the water into oxygen/hydrogen and those get bound to some other atom? Does it just disappear into the ground and end up as groundwater? Does it just evaporate and rain down somewhere else? Does it end up going to a river and ending up in the ocean as saltwater?

(Actual question)

vacri2• 11 years ago

It evaporates through the leaves of the tree, as the plant respires. One tree produces X amount of almonds/year, and requires Y amount of water to stay healthy. Y/X gives you the water-per-almond.

Most of what makes up a tree's physical substance is pulled from the air, but it still needs some nutrients from the soil and water to move those nutrients in order to survive.

Almaviva• 11 years ago

So if it evaporates, as in the parent question, what does "requires 1 gallon of water" mean? One gallon goes back in the air, right? It will presumably end up as rain? So the net loss of water is 0, or am I missing something?

Is there some loss that is permanent or slow to recover, here?

pmorici• 11 years ago

This USGS website explains the various forms of water loss...

https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleevapotranspiration.html

Assuming the farmers are irrigating efficiently then most of the water is being lost to evapotranspiration aka the plants sweating it out through their leaves. Almond trees let more water escape through their leaves than say a cactus might and that is why it takes more water to keep them healthy.

rb2k_3• 11 years ago

So I guess the main problem is that the rain might fall somewhere else that is not California and we now have to move that water back there because otherwise they'd run out.

benihana2• 11 years ago

Can they not put plastic covers like that around the trees and capture water that way? Or does that kill the tree?

lurchpop• 11 years ago

meanwhile california residents are lectured about watering lawns

mapt2• 11 years ago

I'm curious:

How do the following compare in water utilization, in typical preparation? Bonus: since we're comparing gallon of water to gallon of caloric beverage, you get to use a dimensionless quantity! Or you can be boring and call it "Gallons of water used per gallon of ____".

-Almond milk

-Peanut milk

-Soy milk

-Cow milk

mapt2• 11 years ago

Quick googled + calculator estimates:

Cow milk seems to be around 1000 gallons per gallon. Soy milk comes in around 130 gallons per gallon. Almond milk, around 400 gallons per gallon. Peanut milk is less popular than I thought, but should come in somewhere close to soy.

vvpan• 11 years ago

"Low in carbohydrates and high in monounsaturated fat and protein, these nuts are buoyed by a rising wave of nutritional consensus and diet fads (gluten-free, paleo, low-carb, etc.)."

Important point. The dietary fads seem to completely disregard environmental concerns and general impact on the production area.

eclipxe2• 11 years ago

The more important point is China consumption, which doesn't seem to be tied to any dietary "fad" as you call it.

gorachel007• 11 years ago

To put this in another perspective; 1 gallon = 128 ounces. If you're supposed to drink 6 to 8 8oz glasses of water a day, for the same amount of water you could either remain well-hydrated for 2 to 3 days or eat a single almond.

crazy1van• 11 years ago

Sounds like the state needs to let the price of water rise naturally according to its increased scarcity. That should raise the price of nuts, which will lower demand and bring water consumption back to equilibrium.

Hold the price down on a resource that has its supply drastically cut and we'll end up with scarcity.

physcab• 11 years ago

As a fun thought experiment I tried thinking about this issue as if it affected my profession (software development). Imagine if electricity was going scarce. Yet prices are pretty cheap in the kWh such that I don't really notice it. I just pay my monthly bill (actually it auto-pays itself) and I go on my merry way. But what if the electricity problem was real such that at a certain point we wouldn't have any light. Would I change my profession to "do my part"? Probably not. This is why you can't expect almond farmers to stop pumping ground water. This is their livelihood. They have families to support too. They need to pay their rents and buy food and maybe have some fun from time to time. That raises the question...who is going to be first? How does the government even begin to regulate? What a mess.

dspeyer2• 11 years ago

[H]e’s heard ... that I’m a magazine writer looking into California’s almond boom. He demands to know what my angle is. Am I going to blame almonds for the state’s mounting water woes, like other articles have?
When I assure him I’m after the whole story, he softens.

And yet, is not blaming almonds exactly what the author proceeds to do?

I'm not saying they aren't to blame, but this seems a bit dishonest.

California Goes Nuts

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