Monthly Archives: June 2015

My usual objection to appropriative water rights is that I think seniority is a fucking stupid way to allocate water (and its corresponding wealth). I don’t understand why a farmer should get more water now because his grandfather claimed it a century ago. As between current users of water, having better grandparents doesn’t seem like it should make someone more worthy of having water.

That said, if farmers do want to claim the benefits from their grandparents, they should also own the downsides. There are several types of damage caused by farming that are now “legacy problems”. One of the persistent difficulties of cleaning up nitrates in groundwater, for example, is that current farmers claim that the excess nitrates were applied by previous generations and are not a result of the practices of modern farming. It would not be fair to make contemporary farmers pay for the practices of their predecessors. Soil salinity build-up and subsidence are another two examples.

Seems like the principle of inheriting from farming predecessors should be consistent. If it is right to get the benefits of a water claim staked by a farming predecessor, then it is also right to be on the hook to clean up that farmer’s mess. If it isn’t right to have to pay to clean up the nitrates, subsidence and saltification of previous generations of farmers, then it also isn’t right to get the benefits of their water rights. It isn’t consistent to take legacy benefits but shirk legacy costs.

I propose to start assessing contemporary farmers for the costs to clean up nitrates, subsidence and saltifications. When they howl about fairness, we can say that we’ll drop that assessment if they drop any takings claims for a water rights system overhaul. The environment will end up bearing the costs of polluted groundwater and soil, but t’was ever thus.

The title gave me great hope, but this post about saving our precious groundwater didn’t go anywhere useful.

Any regulation works best when those being regulated agree with the premises and objectives of the regulation. If most of the population thinks that the regulation is unnecessary because, for example, they are doing fine and their wells still produce lots of clean water, the regulation is doomed to ineffectiveness and may generate more government resentment than anything.

A key hurdle in making SGMA effective, then, will be giving the water users greater motivation by making transparent the ultimate consequences of ignoring the laws of groundwater nature.

His conclusion is to explain long-term self-interest to people overdrafting groundwater? They already know. They don’t fucking care. If things don’t get better, either the neighbor’s pump or buying scarce water will send them out of business long before deep aquifer salinization is a problem. They are hoping that the drought will end and they’ll get surface water within a year. Either way, they plant. If the drought continues, the bank might as well foreclose on a newly planted orchard as on idled land. If the drought ends, that newly planted orchard will be valuable.

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The PPIC writes that farmers themselves need sustainable groundwater management.

Despite the seemingly generous timeline for compliance, the law’s goals will be challenging to meet. By June 2017, groundwater users in each basin need to designate a local groundwater sustainability agency that will be responsible for local oversight. And by January 2020, these agencies need to start implementing their sustainability plans. In most places, getting this preparatory work done will require significant additional technical analysis to understand how the basins’ supply and demand work. It will also require coming to agreement on how to collectively manage what has largely been considered an individual resource, with each user able to pump as much as he or she can put to beneficial use.

I don’t think they can do it. It is a truism that the reconciliation of overlying acreage and sustainable groundwater yield should be determined by the locals themselves, but Lois Henry gives us a good look at how that is playing out.

I had thought Kern was ahead of the curve, having created the Kern Groundwater Authority back in 2012, two years before the state legislation was passed.

But things have stagnated.

Debates over how to account for water use and recharge continue to go round and round. Members of the Authority still haven’t even agreed on the structure of the Authority. Nor the level of authority of the Authority.

These people know they are going to be allocating substantial real losses and they have spent two years positioning themselves. They’re arguing the size of the losses; they’re debating the structure so it is most favorable to themselves; they’re minimizing the authority so it can be bucked when the hurting starts. They can’t do it, because doing it is going to fucking suck. The board member that suggests a mediator is exactly right, and of course it shouldn’t be a mediator from his own firm. But a mediator is their best hope. When all is said and done, they may wish in retrospect that the big bad legislature had done this hard work for them. At least an outsider would be to blame.

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The Legislature should put more weight on the pro-management side of the balance. The PPIC writes:

The groundwater law was not widely embraced by the farm community; indeed, not a single legislator from the San Joaquin Valley voted in favor of it. Yet California farming needs to strengthen groundwater management to support the growing investments in highly valuable fruit and nut orchards and vineyards, which must be watered each year.

Look, drying up the wells of poor towns hasn’t been convincing. Subsidence that is breaking canals and making canals run backward hasn’t been convincing. Farmers’ wells drying up each other’s wells hasn’t been convincing. Solid predictions of future problems hasn’t been convincing. They gotta WANT stable groundwater more than they don’t want to do the allocations.

A moratorium on planting permanent crops in overdrafted basins would be a good push for that. “Sure you can plant your vines, as soon as you show your Regional Board that groundwater levels in your basin are not declining.” (Not even, ‘can handle the demand from your orchard without declining’. For starters, stable groundwater levels would be enough.) The drive for sustainable groundwater management must come from them, not from other people who understand their long term self-interest, and this moratorium would change their incentives substantially.

I have been somewhat baffled at Governor Brown’s reluctance to challenge agriculture during the drought. The crass explanation is that he has been bought by the Resnicks, but he isn’t running for anything again and I’d like to give him more credit than that. He may genuinely believe that whatever “the market” produces should determine what California ag should look like. Recently I have been wondering if Governor Brown’s picture of California agriculture is being distorted by his visits to Colusa.

Returning to his roots, the governor and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, spent the long Memorial Day weekend in a small cabin he had built on 2,700 acres of isolated family-owned property in Colusa County.

Colusa, in eastern Sacramento Valley, follows the rule that towns along the 99 are (or were once) charming and maybe have charming remnants of a main street. This is not coincidence; the towns along the 99 are the oldest of ag towns and were founded under the original rules of the Reclamation Act: small farmers, holdings of 160 acres, one-farmer one-vote (not voting by acreage). The farms are nice-looking, smaller orchards might have greenery under old walnuts, a couple goats, old water towers. Towns along the 5 are visually unappealing and so is the large-scale agribusiness there. The large-scale agriculture can have great efficiency and tremendous production, but visiting them, it is very clear that these are biological factories. There is no life between the rows (good for irrigation efficiency!), no quainte barns, clean hard lines as far as the eye can see.

If old-style farming is what Governor Brown thinks of when he thinks of ag, I remind him that it was created by the original rules of the Homestead Act and the Reclamation Act and will have to be intermittently reinforced by government rules. Large players like hedge funds are buying and consolidating lands for almonds. Wealthier farmers are paying for deeper wells and sending smaller farmers out of business. Having attractive small ag is a choice that must be made repeatedly, with new rules to combat capital consolidation, not a default.

The extent of California agriculture must also be a choice. This article deftly illustrates that there is more arable land than irrigation water, comparing land conversion to induced traffic demand.

At the same time, given the size of the state, we will always have more land available to bring into production than we will have water to put on it.

This paradox – that enough water will never be enough – means that efforts to increase supply of water or reduce demand for water will ultimately lead to more agricultural lands being brought into production, more water available for cities to grow, and more water to remain in streams to ensure a healthy environment. But, eventually, we will face a new drought, and water supplies will again be inadequate to meet the new, higher levels of demand.

Further, market demand for tree nuts (and increasingly, meat and dairy) is insatiable. I have been called a bigot for specifying that our almonds are going to China and India’s growing middle classes, but the fact that they are China and India is specifically relevant. Some smaller country’s new taste for tree nuts might eventually top out, but relative to our land and water supplies, China and India’s vast demand will absorb any quantity that California could supply. Since tree nut suppliers have shown themselves willing to use all available groundwater at any drilling or pumping costs, there is no effective limiting factor. If we don’t want indefinitely expanding tree nuts in the state, there must ultimately be a choice independent from land availability, groundwater sustainability or market demand. I suggest we choose that now, while there are still resources to preserve.

For the first time in ages, I am seeing new kinds of writing about water.

Here are a couple lovely and relatable essays on residential water conservation:

First person stories like this are tremendously influential.

I find the reaction described here extreme, but it is certainly among the experiences people are having now. One of my reactions is that it is the job of local water managers to prevent this just surely as the manager should be targeting the top 15% of users in the district.

New ways of thinking through water use:

I thought this insight was brilliant (using convenient numbers to compare annual precip (80MAF) to a household budget ($80K)).

A detailed explanation of supply chain water use for bagged lettuce. Very clear about why it is hard to make comparisons.

More on East Porterville:

This is completely gorgeous storytelling. I do have one quibble. This anecdote sounds like a translation problem to me.

But for every Bill Wiggins, there is a horror story about another house just a block over there, where the landlord threatened to evict the family if they asked for county assistance.

If a house does not have potable water, the county is required to red-tape it. Just like people aren’t allowed to drink water out of a personal well if the arsenic concentration is too high, the state doesn’t allow people to live in houses with no water. I have no knowledge of this landlord, but it is possible that he was trying to tell his tenants that if they tell the county they don’t have drinking water, the house will get red-taped, not that he personally would evict them. The law has created a real problems, but the arguments on both sides are sound. Perhaps the solution is that if people live within half an hour of a water drop-off point, during droughts the red-taping policy doesn’t hold.

I have a bunch of stuff to write for you, but I’ll warm up with a trivial gripe. I always dislike the term “water wars”.

This quick post links to the impressive NY Times article on the groundwater race to the bottom with the catchphrase “Water wars.”

Let’s examine the brutal armed conflicts in the article. The majority of the farmers rue that they have no legal remedy based on groundwater law and they can therefore do nothing but spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on drilling their own wells. Others have gone to the manager of their democratically run water district to try to negotiate shared solutions. Some of these warriors feel that the situation is so drastic that they are considering a legal remedy based on nuisance. These are people that might have the entire value of their ag land wiped out and there is nothing warlike about their behavior. Towns in the Central Valley have seen their drinking supplies eliminated by neighboring wells and no one has taken up arms.

Is it the alliteration? Are we stuck with this stupid phrase forever?