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I’m mulling posts, but not finishing them. No doubt I’ll write them all in an un-paced blast. This is why I’m not one of those bloggers pulling down the big dollars. In the queue:

1. I don’t think a water market is the end-all, because I am not convinced I support an economically efficient distribution of water. Surprisingly, some of Yglesias’s commenters got that right.
2. Three years of drought has revealed our brittle our water system is, physically, socially and legally.
3. More on limited response capacity at the water district level, mostly self-inflicted by the decision to keep rates low. I blame motherfucking Howard Jarvis. For just about everything.
4. I owe you government documents! Obscure ones! But I don’t have any in my sights. I am betraying the theme of the blog and the banner. I must do better.

I should also say that I would like for California’s cities to start growing a noticeable chunk of their own produce.  That should be part of a good future for California agriculture.

Man. It’ll BE the future by the time I get this last piece up on the future of CA agriculture. But it is half-written and might get finished on my flight. Which means that it will wait for a few days until I get back to where I can post it. Mostly, I just want to say that I’m not abandoning the theme or the blog. Have a good weekend!

Farmers go broke and abandon land as they individually retreat from high fuel costs and scarce water. We can assume the marginal lands go first, unless mortgage decisions or loans for tractors turn out to be more important than soils or water. Individual growers bear the brunt of the pain. Land doesn’t get joined into wildlife refuges. Untended, the random parcels scattered among active farmland becomes banks for weeds and invasive species. Some of it becomes sprawl.

People confront high prices at the register in unmodified spikes, followed by gluts from other countries. Higher quality dairy products and organic produce aren’t supported, so a large market for those doesn’t develop. The cheap-food ethic continues and a race to the bottom in other countries strips their environment and feeds us instead of their own peoples. Besides that, though, California urban dwellers won’t notice very much. They’ll absorb what is left of California production and other regions will switch to truck crops and cattle to fill the rest of the country’s demand.

California meat and dairy will shrink as well. Internalizing the costs of confined-animal-feeding-operations will become too high. In the near future, dairies are facing the costs of controlling the nitrate they leak into groundwater, disposing of cow shit, rising costs of feed crops from climate irregularities, and building emissions controls. One or the combination of these will force them out of business. California raised meat will be in smaller herds on pasture, perhaps in the foothills of mountain ranges.

If the state defaults to augmenting built storage, pieces of environmental laws will yield, or become irrelevant when salmon and smelt are gone. Depending on how fast it all happens, there will be continued conflict within California about construction fixes. It’ll be a shame if the pointless ones get built, but continued rancor is another real cost.

Many islands in the Delta will go out of commission as levees fail. A few people will die in those floods. The west side of the San Joaquin will go out of commission from salt build-up, but not before becoming too toxic to recover as arid grasslands in decades. A few growers will kill themselves. Fuck if I know what’ll happen in Imperial or Coachella. I never pay attention to them. Since I’m guessing, I’ll predict that San Diego and LA will suck their water away. This leaves major ag production in the Sac Valley and the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, which is a decent place for it.

The people who will be hurt first and most will be agricultural laborers, mostly of Mexican descent. They already are. Their established communities and small towns will disintegrate. I do not know where they’ll go after they leave Great Valley agriculture. I assume it will be rough for them, as they are already poor.

This, for California, is not a vision of complete collapse. We’ll have enough water for some continued industrialized agriculture. The interior valleys will continue to be places people drive through. CA will produce less food overall and much less meat. Farms will consolidate further. Cities mostly won’t notice, except in food prices.

At Gristmill, Tom Lawasky relays a question from Fred Kirschenmann:

[L]et’s assume that ten years from now oil will be $300 a barrel, that we only have half the fresh water resources available that we have today for our food and agriculture system and that we have twice the severe weather events. What kind of agriculture should we be designing to put on the landscape that enables farmers to thrive, invites a new generation of farmers to enter farming and that restores the economic health of our rural communities?

Anyone care to take a shot at an answer? I’m all ears.

OK. I’ll take a shot at this. The thing is, he only gave the easy version. I want to pile on a little before I start, because there are other problems that he doesn’t mention. I think they also set the stage. This is only for California. I assume some of it transfers to industrialized agriculture more broadly, but I don’t know how other systems east of the Sierras work.

First:
The standard quote in CA is that the average age of a California grower is 57. No one knows where recruitment will come from. I overheard two lifelong ag guys comparing notes; their children laugh at the prospect of farming or an ag life. They were saddened. My understanding from reading the comments to the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Ag Vision process is that barriers to entry are very high when land and experience isn’t passed down through families. A grower warned us that land in the Sac Valley is consolidating under foreign firms at growers retire out; he warns that the foreign owners have no emotional ties to environmental stewardship here. (All of this is plausible hearsay to me. I can’t vouch better than that.)

I posit that people are leaving the sector because large conventional farms are horrible places to be (especially if they are very water-efficient). Hot, ugly, brutal, stripped of cover, sterile except for rows of identical plants. No one with economic choice would be there long. I think extant farmers acclimated to this slowly. But people who haven’t grown used to it don’t want to spend their lives in that.

Second:
Chemical inputs to farming are increasingly expensive.

Third:
There will be less water, but that’s just the beginning of it. We will also need places to put new larger floods, and we are eying historical sinks. That’s a fair amount of farmland to be occasionally inundated. I am starting to worry as much about capacity to apply water as the amount of water available. If you cannot put enough water on a field (because a district cannot keep all of its canals full in a heat wave when everyone takes water, or your equipment (looking at you, drip irrigation) is flow limited) a scorching two days can kill your crop. Doesn’t matter if you have enough water for the rest of the season in that case.

Fourth:
I did not need this, but we’re starting to hear from the plant physiologists. Too much carbon in the atmosphere inhibits nitrogen uptake, which means that plants don’t form proteins as well. I was like, so? Does that mean we switch to different crop varieties that have more protein in them, so I don’t starve to death before lunch? And the professor was like, yeah, that’ll matter for the eaters. It’ll matter more that plants won’t grow well, so yields will weaken. Frick.

Fifth:
There is bad news on the food safety front, but I don’t follow that much. I do know that growers have come to think of things like providing shelter to animals or re-using treated urban wastewater as posing an unacceptable risk of contamination from e. coli. A recall and popular fear of a crop can wipe them out in a year or two. That risk makes them unwilling to consider using their land for supplementary purposes, like habitat.

Those are the driving forces I see. To be fair, I suppose I should put up a list of positive drivers (although most likely I won’t get to it). That would be headed by the amazing ag science base we have here, the decent lead time, and potential from the state climate change plan. I’ll post an unplanned and a planned scenario today.

Friends, after a day of seminars by several researchers, I feel pretty comfortable telling you that we do not know what effects climate change will have on evapotranspiration. ET is the part of water that goes through the plant (transpiration) or evaporates off the plant surface or dirt. It is a huge part of the water balance, so if you are hoping to know how much water will be in rivers or in groundwater in a few decades, you’d sure like to be able to put a good number for ET into your model. The verdict was that several things will matter:

The growing season will be warmer, and therefore shorter, so crops might use less water from start to finish.
When CO₂ is readily available, plants do not need to open their stomata so much to take it in, so less water escapes. Transpiration goes down.
But it will be hotter, so plants will need more water.
If the growing season is short enough, growers might add a second or third crop into rotation, raising the amount of water needed for that acreage.

Basically we don’t know, and we definitely don’t know well enough to settle on a number to put in the big water models.

***

I have to say, after seeing presentation after presentation, my doubts about the usefulness of large scale models have returned. I do understand that you have to make assumptions to be able to do calculations, or that you dump all your unexplained phenomena into a closure term. But seeing them presented in model after model (because of course the researchers were ethical enough to present them) made me remember that they aren’t remotely close to real life. Then researchers agreed that they have to refine those terms. A part of me just thinks they should skip the model part and present their gut opinions. I think those might be just as good.

***

Finally, I got to hear a presentation about super high tech laser ET measurements. This guy! I saw these stories about fancy-dancy laser measurement of ET in the news a couple weeks ago. I didn’t pay it much mind. Hmmm, I thought. “It looks like another tool, like soil moisture probes. That could be useful, I suppose.” Then I moved on to contemplating lunch. But that was before I saw pictures, with neato telescope-looking gadgets that shoot lasers a couple kilometers to a receiver and then figure out the water content in the air by refraction or optics or physics or science or something. They can do a good job getting moisture in the air for the transect, but it is expensive to get your fancy-dancy lasers out to the field. BUT GET THIS!

They’re working on calibrating the transects from the lasers to satellite thermal imaging. The satellites come over every couple weeks and take pictures at 30m resolution, but the fancy-dancy lasers can refine that. If those can be calibrated, the Landsat images can cover a lot of ground and the fancy-dancy lasers can improve the resolution and then we’ll know everything about ET everywhere! It’ll be great!

I’m reading my January copy of the Natural Hazards Observer; if you aren’t subscribed to the Natural Hazards Observer, I don’t know why not. In a summary of the International Disaster and Risk conference 2008, the author wrote:

An anticipated outcome of the conference was to be “100 Ideas for Action” generated by the panels or from the experience of the assembled participants. The organizers did seek innovative ideas, but in this ambitious goal the meeting was not entirely successful. As acknowledged at the final session, many of the resulting videoed comments and even more of the solicited “new ideas” were conventional statements of positive intent.

Oh hell yes. This is all we get, all the time. Fucking platitudes. You feel like a grinch resenting statements of positive intent, but when you talk to bureaucrats you hear generic crap about working together and educating the public every single time. And they need more funding. Or, because it is our duty and our desire, we want to bring the public into our decision making. But in some ways, laypeople are the worst. They have just enough information to tell you the basics of your field. I swear, if you ask the broad public what to do in water, I guarantee you will hear one of two themes. If it is agriculture, you get the echoes of Cadillac Desert. If it is urban, you will hear that we should switch to pervious concrete. I’m not quite sure why pervious concrete has captured people’s attention so, but you can count on that recommendation. I love me some concrete, but that is not a new idea.

I’m not sure where to go for new thought. My friend suggests more demanding facilitation at meetings. I have to confess that I want to put a list of the platitudes that we always hear up on the wall, and if someone offers one, we point to it and cut him or her off. We know. Bigger pies, power of collaboration, efficiency, the children are our future. We know. But I am afraid that bureaucrats are so cowed they are afraid to say more than the platitudes that satisfied people last time. I read the comments to newspaper stories hoping that some crackpot will present such a skewed view that it will trigger something new. It is a pretty punishing search. I’ve said before that I’ve enjoyed the transcriptions of public comments for other processes. They aren’t dense, but there is some signal in that noise. I think my best sources for thought right now are the trade journals: Western Farm Press, the Journal of Light Construction, the Natural Hazard Observer or university presentations.*

My favorite recent thought came out of watching testimony to the Blue Ribbon Delta panel. That day, a county supervisor or city councilperson or someone stood up to say that it wasn’t the Delta that was broken, it was the rest of the state. Now that was an interesting prospect. The Delta in its current configuration, sinking peat islands behind shaky levees, is the priority. The remainder of California should act as a vassal state to support the farming lifestyles of a few thousand people farming in an untenable physical circumstance. The purpose of Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to accumulate money to hold back the rising seas in the Delta. I had never seen it like that before, but I got a lot of mileage out of that concept that day. It was way better than hearing another round of conventional statements of positive intent.

*I know you will die of jealousy –I am spending all day tomorrow at seminars on climate change and evapotranspiration. If I can, I will live-blog it for you. Now that is some riveting reading.

Dr. Moser’s talk yesterday was remarkable, for her direct, realistic and authoritative claims about how to change people’s behavior on climate change. If you are interested in that stuff, her powerpoint presentation is clear and gives links to the research behind her talk.

At the end of her talk, someone in the audience raised the issue of population pressures. I’ve now seen this happen a few times. A scientist presents his or her research to the convention and at the end, someone in the audience brings up the elephant in the room. Everyone gets quiet and intent, because it is obviously crucial and no one official can bring it up. I’ve seen a panel sit silent until one guy took the mike and openly laughed at the prospect of answering that question. When there is an answer, it is usually about brown people in a different country and the solution is to educate the ladies. This is nice because obviously we should be on that path anyway and it will coincidentally solve population problems somewhere else. The other not-very-responsive answer is to mention overconsumption and say that we should have kids but ride our bikes too!

Dr. Moser yesterday acknowledged that the topic is taboo, and discussed the experience of solving policy problems without mentioning taboo topics. She talked about being on the climate change adaptation team, where no one ever mentions development. She talked about the fact that everyone automatically takes a growth economy as the baseline, without acknowledging that we are nearing the physical limits of our landscape and ecology. (We should be transitioning to a steady state economy, living off annual yields.) She did not mention meat and diet, another huge taboo. She did not offer a behavioral prescription for addressing California’s population. But she said to be brave and raise the topic. So here goes.

California has 39 million people in it. Our arbitrary planning horizon is 2050. In 2050, California is projected to have 60 million people in it. Growth in California is primarily from births (deaths and immigration are roughly even, pg 3). Obviously we value high individual autonomy in decisions as personal as procreation. But here’s something you might not know. A little under half the births in California are from unintended pregnancies (“women got pregnant sooner than they wanted, had not wanted to get pregnant then or in the future, or weren’t sure what they wanted”). Those are live births, not pregnancies.

Most people who do work on this stuff talk about the effects of unintended children on the parents. Here, I am going to speak to the resource costs of that population increase. I’d like to give you some equivalencies.

California has, roughly, 550,000 live births a year.

Of those, roughly, 46% were unintended. You know where this is going.

Every year, this state adds 253,000 kids whose parents did not want them then.

253,000 people is more than the City of Modesto, added every single year. If they follow usual urban water use patterns (which maybe they wouldn’t as young children, but the delay is likely only 15 years or so), that many people would use 63,000 acrefeet of water a year. That is the size of most medium-sized dams in the state (although not the yield of every dam in the state, because dams have a dead pool).  Every single year. For kids whose parents didn’t want to have them at that point.

If you project out to 2050*, the size gets staggering. By 2050, the difference from not having any unwanted children would be about 9 million people. In 2050, I am sure that water managers would be very grateful if they only have to supply water to 50 million people instead of 60 million people. The difference is the population of the Bay Area plus the San Fernando Valley. It is twenty city of Fresnos. Now you are talking water volumes roughly on the order of Oroville Dam, or California’s share of the Colorado River, or what you could get if agriculture shrinks by a third. Addressing population directly is non-trivial.

When you are talking about climate change and emissions, the story is even starker. Every person consumes water and every person causes greenhouse gas emissions, but greenhouse gas emissions have a cumulative effect that matter over time. Greenhouse gases emitted now hurt us more than greenhouse gases emitted in five years. In the year 2050, delayed emissions means less sea level rise, slightly cooler nights, slightly larger snowpacks. Averted people would reduce emissions, but even postponed people would help.

This stuff gets brought up awkwardly at meetings, then we all retreat. But controlling population has profound implications for California’s resource use and climate. We should face it head on.

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The problem with talking about intentional population control is that everyone points and calls you Hitler. Worse, people use it as a vehicle for their nativist sentiments and say the problem is the unwashed brown hordes swarming the border. For the record, both are bullshit. (If you are inspired to leave some racist comment about immigration, please return to the Public Policy Institute of California report, first paragraph.  Birth rate, not immigration, accounts for population growth in California.)

My hope is to avoid some of that by pointing out the scale of the problem of unintended births. As a first cut, simply getting people’s reproduction in line with their own desires would halve our projected population increase. That should not require state coercion. A state policy and real resources* dedicated to that would be beneficial all around.

You could go even farther, and without saying that anyone shouldn’t have children, create policies that delay desired children. Remember, a year or two of delayed emissions are valuable to us. Flattening the growth curve matters at any discrete point in the future. I was more optimistic about his option until I saw the PPIC report and this CDC report saying that mean maternal age at first birth is already pretty high. But you could target programs at communities in which women have children young. You could use the solution everyone offers for less-developed-countries, and educate the ladies. Forgiving student loans for Latina women who haven’t given birth by age 25 might bring their age at first birth up to the general population’s.

My point is that there are non-coercive options and a role for the state (like making birth control free and ubiquitous). The choice isn’t between doing nothing and firing up the sterilization chambers based on eugenics. There are also large environmental costs from maintaining the taboo on openly discussing population. We should be braver. We should bring it up and keep bringing it up.

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