Monthly Archives: December 2008

December 17, 2008 · :

Grow your own.

First, if you are looking for an example of completely excellent work, go check out the Almond Board page. It is one of the best products I’ve ever seen. The design is attractive and easy to use. They offer the site in, like, six languages. They don’t get sloppy; every single picture of an almond radiates pearly light. They show tons of data, all of it clear. With monthly updates! That means they’re keeping tons of data. They aren’t going to be surprised by the next couple tens of thousands of acres planted to almonds. They know those are coming.

Besides that, they’re inventive and thorough and carrying out a plan. Their presentations cover the agronomy side of almond growing and the marketing side. They’re seeking out ways to use almonds and convincing people they wanted them. They have a pastry strategy. If you saw an almond croissant at your bakery, or have come around to thinking that a handful of almonds would be a healthy snack with omega-3s, you are the Almond Board’s bitch.

They’re doing amazingly consistent high quality work and I wonder how that came about. Did they just happen to hire someone good, who built a good organization? Did that person love almonds or just doing good work? Coincidence that it was the Almond Board and not the Walnut Board or Citrus Board? Does everyone talk about almonds as the shining light of California agriculture because of some quirk of hiring and personality? Anyway, I don’t know what almond growers pay for the board (I assume some small percent of their price/piece), but they’re getting stellar value for it.

***
Standing across from a tomato processing plant one day, I happened to ask what the big boxes were. They’re big woooden boxes, perhaps a third or half the size of a railcar/shipping box, stacked all around the processing plant’s paved back lot. I was told they’re processed tomato sauce, waiting for prices to recover. The tomatoes are processed into sauce, then poured into monstrous plastic bags and vacuum-sealed. One bag per huge crate. Then they sit in the yard for months or years, until the plant finds a canner who wants them at a decent price. I looked a little shocked and they assured me it was all sterile and kept indefinitely. I suppose it is and I still buy canned tomatoes. But I also think of those crates, out there in the 110 degree heat all summer. I’d like row crops be grown to satisfy an existing demand, not wait around for years until demand comes along.

Seeing that, I wasn’t surprised by this.

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December 17, 2008 · :

I don’t even like wine.

It is nearly a cliché to hear laypeople or enviros say that ag should stop growing alfalfa in the desert!!! and start growing higher value crops. If you press for examples of high value crops that would be a good choice for growers, the first two examples are always vines and almonds*.

Really? What the world needs is more almonds? More wine? As we foresee another couple billion people and international famines, you think we should commit our world class farmland to almonds? Yes! That’s the ag solution for California! Almonds will support the farmers! Almonds get such high prices! Then I wonder if people have really thought that through.

The good prices for almonds are the result of excellent work by the California Almond Board. The Almond Board has done magic and created demand for more than a billion pounds of California almonds in the past fifteen years. They have run marketing campaigns to get Americans to buy more almonds (“A can a day, that’s all we ask.” Do any of you really want a can of almonds a day?). They have created new almond drinks. They’ve introduced almonds into breakfast cereals. (Think back to the mid-nineties. Don’t you remember that breakfast cereals rarely had almonds in them?) California almonds have replaced and destroyed every other major source of almonds in the world. Right now on the Almond Board front page, they report happily that almonds are the number one nut ingredient in food.

This really is superior work by the Almond Board and I can only imagine that the walnut and cashew boards look on in envy. They have done great job placing a billion pounds of almonds every year (Almond Almanac, pg 24). But understand this clearly. This is not the market responding to some innate world desire for almonds. This is demand creation and pushing on behalf of a specific crop. Looks an awful lot like corn, doesn’t it?

You know what? I don’t really care. I like almonds and I’m happy that growers are making money on a crop. This is fine as long as we’re all wealthy and willing to consume luxury foods. But as a policy preference for what we do with California’s water, I think it’s a pretty crappy example. (Lots of this applies to wine as well.) I think that what the world is going to need as we add another three billion people is cheap, nutritious and portable foods. Like grains. Planting almond trees and grapevines commits ag land to those two things for decades; you can’t get out of them to plant wheat without destroying your investment**. So yes. Almonds and vines get high prices now. But I don’t think they should be the example of what California ag should look like and I am not sure they could even continue as successes if more acreage were converted.

 

 

*Vines are what we call grapes. Vines. No one confuses that for kiwis, which are also grown on vines. After someone says vines, your next question is table, raisin or wine? Because you are savvy like that. (Well, if you are really savvy, you look ’em over and guess. Armenian, from Fresno? Raisins. Can’t tell, from San Joaquin Valley? Table. Overeducated? Wine grapes.) Almonds are always pronounced aaminds (very soft d) to rhyme with salmon.

**I’d be happy to consider a vision where California ag always supplies the world’s luxury produce and the Midwest moves out of corn into a broad range of field and truck crops. But I don’t see the Midwest moving out of corn and soybeans until the federal subsidy regime changes. Mostly, I think that we are going to need the world’s breadbaskets to be breadbaskets.

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December 16, 2008 · :

I didn’t like the crop-shifting section.

The weakest section of the Pacific Institute report is the section on crop shifting. They wrote that shifting from low value field crops* that use more water to higher value row crops** that use less water could save 0.6 million acre-feet of water. I wish they hadn’t published that without much more data. Here’s why:

The issue that bothered economists didn’t bother me:
1. The Pacific Institute explicitly states that they base their model off gross values for the crops they put in their model. They admit that the net amounts may differ, because crops that fetch a lot of money at market may also require expensive inputs. That is something of a crucial point for growers. The economists get all hot and bothered and assert that if the net amounts for row crops were higher now, growers would have shifted already. I don’t think that is self-evident. I don’t believe that growers behave like the rational economic model. I think some are traditionalists, some may choose a crop out of familiarity, or because they accept lower profit for lower risk, or because they don’t know about all markets for all crops or because of local custom. So I think two things. The Pacific Institute model would be vastly better for using net values and it may be true that growers could make more money shifting from field crops to row crops.

Something else bothered me:

Unfortunately, the Pacific Institute didn’t show their model output telling us how many acres of what field crops would change to row crops. Without knowing each field crop and row crop, it is impossible to evaluate that section. For example, did they say that a few thousand acres of rice would change to peaches? Because that won’t work. Rice is grown up in big clay ponds up in the north Sac Valley. You can’t grow other things on that soil. You could get rid of a few thousand acres of rice, but you aren’t shifting to anything. Are they shifting out of alfalfa into broccoli? Alfalfa has had some extremely good years recently with all the new dairies in Kern County and broccoli processors are shutting their doors. Basically, anyone who keeps current with ag wants to know exactly what acres would change to what, and they didn’t tell us. No one current in ag believes a blanket assertion that whole sectors of ag are worth more than other sectors. There are far too many counterexamples and I don’t know if their model included those.

The irrigation professors critiqued this section by saying that they don’t observe year-to-year expansion in the row crop market, from which they conclude that growers are currently providing about all the vegetables the market wants. Switching to row crops might save water, but this isn’t a strategy based on responding to an extrinsic demand for row crops. (pg 9)

These complaints make it hard to take the crop-shifting section of the Pacific Institute report seriously.  I would love to see a version of this section using net values for crops and showing exactly which acreage would change.  But even with that information, I have a different, abstract objection to the whole concept of switching to higher value crops.

 

 

 

* Pasture and grains, mostly.
**Row crops are also called truck crops and are basically vegetables.

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December 15, 2008 · :

I like to start by namecalling.

I must say, the Pacific Institute has balls of steel. They do what everyone else is scared to do: they predict how much water could be saved by changing how agriculture uses water. They give estimates, say that efficiency measures could save 3.4 million acrefeet. This is important. Now we know that the Pacific Institute is talking about more water than new dams would yield. Even more audacious, the Pacific Institute says that agriculture can save a couple reservoirs worth of water just by using more sophisticated irrigation methods and crop shifting. It can still be ag! Better ag! It can be even better ag, and we can have another 3.4 million acrefeet of water!

There’s a reason everyone else is scared to do this. If you ask ag water experts how much water can be saved (or how much is wasted, the same question), the answer is a lot of hemming and hawing, until they collapse into “it’s complicated.” This makes everyone outside of ag crazy. How complicated can it be? Tell me how much your crop needs and tell me how much you put on. My brain tells me the difference is the amount you wasted. The ag expert says no, it isn’t like that. We don’t know very precisely how much water the crop needs. It changes! It changes with the weather and time of year and stage of growth of the plant and what you want the crop to be like and what you want next year’s crop to be like. But, if you insist, we can make a rough guess. You know what else we don’t know? How much water we put on! Hah! Take that, Mr. Fancy Subtractor! OK, there has been a lot of improvement here too and a lot of fields are measured now. If they exist, those measurements are probably good within ten or fifteen percent (pg 8). Now you’re subtracting a rough amount from a rough amount, and the range is pretty big, maybe twenty or thirty percent of your totals. In fact, that range is just about the swing between inefficient water use and efficient water use.

That’s OK, say people who are determined to chase this down. We’ve worked in complicated systems before. Everyone thinks their system is complicated. Tell me, is there anywhere else the wasted water could have gone. Yes! Three places. Two of them are invisible! It could go into the air, through the plant or just off the ground, both of which are hard to measure! It could go underground, which you can’t see and lags by days, months or years and you need permission to measure, which you probably can’t get, and is different in the next soil lens over! It might also run off the end of my field. In that case, it might go to the next grower, who also irrigates his crops with it. Or it goes into a drainage canal, which is the last pitiful remnant of habitat left in the county. Or it goes back to a river, hot and full of pesticides. That might happen three or four times. So tell me, Mr. How Hard Can This Be, is it wasted? Remember, whatever you calculate for this field can’t be extrapolated to another crop type on a different soil type or different location in the region.

The problem is genuinely difficult and most people retreat about now. But the Pacific Institute is not afraid. They made rough guesses, well qualified, and give enough of their methods and calculations to be critiqued. Like all sensible modelers, they aren’t vested in any precise output of their model, but think it offers useful ballpark information. This is entirely respectable and their report just radically stretched the boundaries of the conversation about ag water use in the direction of efficiency and conservation. This is great. Sadly, I find the critiques of the model to be pretty persuasive. I think their rough guesses are too broad. I do not think 3.4 million acrefeet of water can be saved in the ag sector without substantially shrinking California ag.

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December 15, 2008 · :

Lay of the land.

Couple months ago, the Pacific Institute put out a report, one in a series laying out a vision for California in 2030. Their overarching premise is that we have enough developed water sloshing around the state to get us through 2030, if we stop wasting it. They put out a volume on urban water use, but urban water conservation bores me to tears*, so I didn’t read it. They followed that with a report on the agricultural water use side. Since every last detail of irrigation is inherently fascinating, I read it breathlessly. They assert that agriculture can not only use substantially less water, but would profit by doing so.

Reaction to the report was mixed. It attracted a lot of attention, and in general people take what the Pacific Institute has to say pretty seriously. Some people liked it a lot. Others didn’t.

Enviros tended to like it because they see agriculture as the only potential source for the amount of water it would take to restore our rivers and the Delta. So much the better if agriculture can withstand the loss of that water and even thrive. Also, the Pacific Institute is talking big numbers, 3.5 MAF of water. That’s more than the size of the only proposed new dams that are real possibilities. We won’t need those dams if we can get that water from agriculture!

Ag didn’t like it, predictably. They don’t like being told they aren’t doing a good job at the livelihood that is also their identity. They especially don’t like being told that they aren’t doing a good job based on an outdated but widespread perception of their practices. They don’t like the implicit threat that the outside world is coming for the water they’ve always used. They (possibly mistakenly) see new dams as the only way of continuing their way of life, so they don’t like reports that suggest that dams aren’t necessary.

I’m sure you remember the sensational swirl of editorials, and how you yearned for someone to go through the report section by section and discuss each piece. You were hoping someone would look at it side by side a critique of the report issued by four irrigation professors. My heart heard your heart, dear reader. That’s what we’ll do this week.

*Here. I can tell you what it said. Meter water use and bill by volume. Fix leaks, big and little. Replace appliances. Switch out lawns and collect stormwater. That’s all good stuff, but just typing that bored me. I know you don’t come here to read boring things, so we won’t be talking about urban water conservation much here.

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Filed under Drought, Irrigation!

December 12, 2008 · :

Exciting preview!

The stuff to write about is coming faster than I can work on it, but in the near term, I want to write more about:

A trio of reports on California agricultural water use.

Two rival lawsuits that are actually pretty amazing. As far as I can tell, both sides are going all in. Cental Valley farmers are suing to abandon endangered smelt protections. “Fuck ’em, they’re ugly minnows and they aren’t worth the cost of shutting down pumps.” Enviros are suing to have a judge shut down several hundred thousand acres of farms on the west side of the valley. “If the public trust doctrines and reasonable use mean anything, use them now.” This is a long-avoided challenge to what several legal doctrines mean, but I guess people want decisions bad enough to file high stakes suits.

I might write more on either of these, but I don’t have a lot to add:

The Legislative Analyst’s Office doesn’t trust the economic analyses in the AB 32 Scoping Plan:

We conclude that (1) the scoping plan’s overall emissions reductions and purported net economic benefit are highly reliant on one measure—the Pavley regulations, (2) the plan’s evaluation of the costs and savings of some recommended measures is inconsistent and incomplete, (3) Macroeconomic modeling results show a slight net economic benefit to the plan, but ARB failed to demonstrate the analytical rigor of its findings, (4) economic analysis played a limited role in development of scoping plan, and (5) despite its prediction of eventual net economic benefit, the scoping plan fails to lay out an investment pathway to reach its goals for GHG emissions levels in 2020.

A report from a well-regarded fish professor at UC Davis who says that most California fish species are DOOMED. DOOMED! I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of California fish species, but I will say that two of my friends who are out in the field all the time (one river-side, one ocean-side) told me separately and unprompted that wild California salmon will be gone within ten years. Ouch.

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December 12, 2008 · :

Empty reservoirs, fires encroaching on houses, snowless peaks.

These are high drama pictures; you’ll suck in your breath as you click through.

I will say that the slide that said “Hope is not a strategy.” irked me a little. When the Governor declared a state of emergency for the California drought, why didn’t we immediately start to implement the State Drought Plan? Oh yeah. Because there isn’t one and no one contemplates writing one. There are some scattered concepts, like letting ag fend for itself and starting a drought water bank. But really. The state is flailing on this; there is no comprehensive strategy or prioritizing for droughts. Certainly no one thought to write such a thing in the several wet years we had in the early 2000’s.

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December 12, 2008 · :

My take on the ARB Scoping Plan

What did I really think of the Scoping Plan? I skimmed it, really read the sections I was more interested in. I was mildly surprised that they think they can make huge reductions with low-hanging fruit, but I have no gut feeling for the scope of carbon emissions. They ran actual models and will show you their calculations and having no internal way to judge their predictions, I am inclined to believe them. I thought a couple other things.

When the first draft Scoping Plan came out, a predominant theme in the public comments was that the land use section and the agriculture section were too weak. Neither required enough emission reduction, both sectors got off too easy*. I laughed and laughed. Of course they did. That was foreordained. Edward Tufte says that any product looks like the entity that produced it. The California state government wrote the Scoping Plan, and the Scoping Plan looks just like the state government. All the little sectors divided out just like departments, with weak control over land use and agriculture.

The other thing I thought was that the Scoping Plan missed an opportunity. They laid out the reasonable sectors and asked people, hundreds of people, to say what you could do to reduce emissions in each sector. To my knowledge, what they never did was ask for any other kind of thought. If there is more out there, they’ll never hear about it that way.

And there is more out there. A very conspicuous example is that eating less meat and dairy will result in emissions reductions**, especially in California, which is a cattle and dairy state. But that gets no mention in the Scoping Plan. I thought the Air Board should have had a chapter called “Longshots, Crazytalk and Taboo”. They could have said up front that none of them would be mandatory in the first round of the Scoping Plan, so let loose! Who knows what they would have gotten. Who knows what the signal to noise ratio would be. But the cost of holding public meetings is pretty low, so if one or two ideas panned out, it would be worth it. The other thing that could happen is that it could flush some taboo ideas (an advertising campaign to reduce meat consumption) in a non-threatening way. It would have prepared the conversation for next time. But they never prompted people, “tell us something crazy, but might work”, and so no one did. We didn’t hear any new ideas in this round of the Scoping Plan (besides the idea of the plan itself), so I don’t know what is in the hopper for the next round, when the low-hanging fruit is gone.

*There are reasons, of course. Land use and agriculture aren’t point sources for carbon emissions, and Air Board staff wanted quantifiable amounts that they target with regulation. They didn’t feel the very first Scoping Plan could address diffuse, landscape size, hard to measure, hard to control carbon emissions. They thought they could get enough gains in the other sectors to meet their target. They knew the legislature was about to address land use. They figured they could work on the problem for a few years and come back to it in the next Scoping Plan. I’m sure they will.

**California grows feed for dairy and beef cattle. It takes energy at the pumps to move and apply water to the feed crops. It takes gas or diesel to tend and harvest the crops and move the feed. Dairies and CAFO’s are large sources of methane. Moving the meat takes gas or diesel. Reducing the amount of meat in our diet cuts down on all of those emissions very quickly, within a season.

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December 12, 2008 · :

Mitigation and adaptation

In the broadest sense, people talk about two aspects of addressing climate change, mitigation and adaptation.

Mitigation is preventative, trying to shape our society so we put out as little greenhouse gas as possible and avert as much climate change as we can. Mitigation tends towards energy, sprawl and transportation policy. In California, mitigation is being handled by the AB 32 Scoping Plan. The other state agencies pretty much think that the Air Board has got mitigation covered and are now thinking about adaptation.

Adaptation is the acknowledgement that we will suffer from the effects of climate change already underway, so we need to get ready for that. Adaptation will heavily influence water resources, disaster preparedness and response, coastal anything, natural systems like forests and deserts, biodiversity and agriculture. The agencies that address those are now looking fifty years out and guessing what we need to do to be ready for a harsher world. They’re starting to issue reports, saying what they’ll do and what they expect everyone else to do. I’ll tell you about those as they come out.

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Filed under Basic stuff

December 11, 2008 · :

I, for one…

The California Air Resources Board* is likely to approve the AB 32 Scoping Plan today, which makes it as good a day as any to open this blog. You can watch Air Board meetings here.   What does that mean, that the Air Board is adopting the AB32 Scoping Plan?

Well, the Air Board is an executive agency, part of the California EPA. It reports to the governor. The Air Board is a board of political appointees. Actual people sit on this board and decide things. Used to be they decided things about air pollution, but that mission was expanded to include greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide.

AB 32 was a piece of legislation signed in 2006. It gives California until 2020 to cut carbon emissions to 1990 levels. It put the Air Board in charge of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, which pretty much means they’re in charge of everything everywhere. It was a very broad grant of authority to the Air Board. So what will the Air Board do as the boss of everything?

Well, they tell us that in the Scoping Plan. The Air Board just spent two years writing a Scoping Plan. They held meetings and meetings and meetings. They drafted chapters, one for each sector of the economy. They ran models and did calculations and figured out how each sector was going to reduce greenhouse gases and by how much. They released a draft, took public comment, and then released a very similar next draft.

The measures in this first Scoping Plan are pretty much the low hanging fruit. These are measures that are concentrated (kinda like point-sources) and quantifiable. They are efficiency improvements, taking up slack. The Air Board thinks that many of these measures will be profitable for many sectors, have quick pay-back periods. Industry groups aren’t convinced. So how will they make all these emission reductions happen?

Two ways. Once the Scoping Plan is adopted, the Air Board will spend the next five years writing regulations that make the measures in the Scoping Plan law. For every measure in the Scoping Plan, Air Board staff has to craft detailed regulations, setting thresholds and deadlines, defining who does what and who has to spend money to comply. This is where the real battles will be. The Air Board has worked so damn hard, full speed ahead for two whole years to get the general outlines worked out. This gives them the ability to work even harder the next few years, turning those outlines into specific regulations that everyone will hate.

The other intriguing way that the Air Board will reduce carbon emissions is that they are setting up a cap-and-trade system. Do I need to tell you what that is? Just in case. A cap and trade system means that you set a cap, a fixed amount, on all the carbon (or greenhouse gas) emissions in the state. That’s the ‘cap’ part. There is a pool of allowable carbon emissions, and if you are a refinery who wants to emit carbon, you better own some of that pool. You can buy a piece of that pool from the Air Board; they will sell it to you at auction. Or, you could buy some of the right to emit carbon from your buddy, who also bought some at the auction. You could buy it from a stranger. That’s the trade part.

Then you could think to yourself. Self, is it cheaper for me to fix my smokestack so that I don’t emit as much carbon or is it cheaper for me to buy the right to emit more carbon? Or, you might think, I bought a lot of the right to emit carbon at that auction. But if I fixed my smokestack, I could sell some of that ability to emit, recoup the money it cost me to fix my smokestack and MAKE BIG MONEY. Economists (and real people too) think that a cap-and-trade system finds the most cost-efficient way to get from the emissions we have now to the emissions level set by the cap. It may still cost money (or be profitable, depending on how much wasting costs now), but market theory says that all those people making individual decisions about buying and selling emissions rights versus improving their factories is the cheapest way to achieve the emissions reduction.

In the next five years, the Air Board will implement the Scoping Plan, forcing carbon emissions reductions through regulation and through cap-and-trade.  (The cap-and-trade system won’t just be for California.  California is doing it with seven other western states and western Canada.)  In five years, another version of Scoping Plan is due, one that sets the next level of winching down emissions.

So that’s the story for today. The Air Board is about to adopt the AB 32 Scoping Plan. Now you know what that means.

 

 

 

*People call the California Air Resources Board the Air Board, or Aye-Are-Bee, or CARB, one word, interchangeably.

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