Other stuff on the internet.

I loved this slideshow of agriculture around the world, which I looked at long and hard (not least because it loads painfully slowly). I tried to guess the crop and country before I read the caption. I could tell the dairyman was in a first world country because of all the capital in the shot (the nice clean buildings and fences), but wasn’t sure where until I looked at the hills in the background. Oh, home. Absolutely, without question.

Picture 4 blew my mind. Those furrows/beds were machine dug, right? It reminded me of my irrigation professor’s statement that nothing would be more useful to African agriculture then laser leveling.

Looks a fair amount like coastal Central California. Americans should wear more color. Start ’em early.

The picture of the lettuce harvesters reminded me of my perennial internet debates. Sen. McCain once infuriated people by saying that Americans wouldn’t pick lettuce for $50/hour. I don’t agree with Sen. McCain on just about anything, so I should be warned. But I agreed with him here. After spending a summer in fields doing irrigation system evaluations and seeing how hard the laborers worked, I believe that anyone with any alternative (a minimum wage job stocking shelves indoors, for example) wouldn’t do farm labor. I also believe that people who didn’t do manual labor growing up couldn’t pick at a speed that growers would pay for. That picture of lettuce pickers reinforced my take on this stupid, pointless question that I should learn to ignore.

All the pictures are fantastic, but the last one that stuck with me was of the Afghani herders driving their goats. Such beautiful goats! Then, right there, graffiti-ed onto the rock, an American surveying station in ugly orange paint. What did the Americans start there? Can they finish it? Did the Afghani’s want the reminder? What did the locals write in response (coincidence that the response is in green, color of Islam)? In that picture, they’re going along their daily business, not bothering anyone, with the beautiful goats and ugly reminders of imperialism.

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Another amazing photo series on the food families around the world eat in a week.

Gene Logsdon has been writing about driving animals, and what a big part of life it used to be.

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An interesting take on the Resnicks, from before the drought politicized them in water circles. I stumbled on this by accident as I was looking for beekeeping information, and was surprised to see them in other conflicts. Hard to believe there’s life outside Water, but sometimes it pierces my blinders.

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Couple interesting pieces in the SF Chron today. A hay farmer holds out against turning a Delta island to a wetland. My take-away is that we shouldn’t have made contracts to maintain levees in perpetuity for free. Like water rights, it was too much to offer.

Also, an interesting read about a Californian cotton grower who doesn’t want his cotton subsidies. He’d rather compete on quality. Next Farm Bill reauthorization is in 2013? First year of Pres. Obama’s second and final term? Interesting thought.

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Alex Breitler pointed us to a new site, put up by South San Joaquin and Oakdale irrigation districts to argue against a Biological Opinion for preserving steelhead on the Stanislaus River.

I like the site. It looks like the authentic work of the people who posted it, not smarmy bullshit by paid-for PR firms. You can tell. This is good, because now I can get a feel for what SSJID and OID actually think. I’m glad they put it out for public analysis.

That said, their argument is wrong on two fronts. First, they say that the Biological Opinion is flawed because it will drain New Melones reservoir 13 times over the next eighty years. But keeping the reservoir full isn’t the goal of the Biological Opinion; just because the reservoir empties doesn’t mean that the Biological Opinion won’t achieve what it is trying to do, which is give the best chance to steelhead. I’d be real interested in seeing that report. I’ve seen similar DWR reports, of state reservoirs going dry about 20 times in the next century. I wonder whether the New Melones/Stanislaus modeling included climate change, which will make the problem much worse (less water, plus you have to release more cold water to cool off warmer rivers). Anyways, the report’s results sound roughly right to me, and point to much more active reservoir operations in the future than we’re used to.

The real problem with their argument is in the last two bullet points. They’re essentially saying that once the reservoir is empty, the river will run dry and it will be terrible for steelhead. That, they claim, is the flaw of the Biological Opinion: “The implementation of the BO could kill the very fish it attempts to save…”. This is true. Once there’s no water left to send down the river, there’s no water left. But holding that water behind the reservoir will also dry up the river, making it terrible for steelhead. Every year the rules laid out in the Biological Opinion draw the reservoir down to almost nothing is another season that the Biological Opinion did exactly what it was written to do, keep water in the river and save the steelhead. I can’t tell from the write-up on their site, but that looks like it might be 22 years in the next 80 years. (Or maybe the 13 years of complete drawdown come out of those 22 years; I can’t tell.)

So far as I can see from the write-up on their site, the problem isn’t that the Biological Opinion is flawed. The problem is that it is likely the right thing to do for steelhead, and that will direct water into the Stanislaus and away from SSJID and OID’s growers. Also, it looks like there isn’t enough (cold) water in the system even if it all went to steelhead. I do love seeing growers and districts take such an active interest in invasive species, stewards of the land that they are.