[HN Gopher] Strawberry case study: What if farmers had to pay fo...
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Strawberry case study: What if farmers had to pay for water?
Author : jgwil2
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-12-29 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| jgwil2 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231229141143/https://www.nytim...
| mooreds wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/29/climate/calif...
| Sirizarry wrote:
| "Water can't be free anywhere" is one of the most dystopian lines
| I've seen this year
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's classic "tragedy of the commons" stuff. Having a "free"
| input sets up incentives for waste since that resource now
| exists outside the influence of market forces.
|
| So it's either putting a price on these resources or careful
| regulation. The latter is not very popular in today's political
| climate.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Related to Jevons Paradox
| acover wrote:
| > Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or
| government policy increases the efficiency with which a
| resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one
| use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in
| demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than
| reduced.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| WalterBright wrote:
| > careful regulation
|
| Has never worked very well. Government bureaucracies are very
| bad at pricing and allocating things appropriately. A case
| study is in the 70's the government decided gas allocations
| for every gas station. The result was a patchwork of gluts
| and shortages across the country.
|
| Reagan ended all that as his first Executive Order, and
| overnight the gluts and shortages vanished along with the gas
| lines.
| ldoughty wrote:
| When I lived in a rural area on septic and well, my electric
| bill was often under $200 in the summer, running AC fairly
| heavily, and taking care of ~6 dense garden beds full of
| veggies for ~6 months... and regularly watering 1 acre of grass
| to keep it from drying too much. We even had a timer to auto-
| water the garden and parts of the lawn... We'd even let it run
| overnight on a few occasions (needing to water, but coming home
| very late)
|
| I hardly considered water a costly resource
|
| On "city" water now in suburbs, I followed a similar pattern
| for grass on a 1/4 acre lot, and heavily watered the lawn one
| month, and I had a $300 water & sewer bill -- on top of my $100
| electric bill.
|
| Water went from being something I hardly considered to
| something I am far more careful about 'wasting'.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| Well.. if your grass would dry out and become yellow without
| watering it, then watering is a luxury. The water in deep
| wells will eventually run out. Why waste it on grass?
| sparrish wrote:
| Because my HOA says I have to maintain a green lawn or I
| get fined.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| No dog in this fight. I moved out of Scottsdale to the
| Great Lakes region a bit back partly because of the water
| issue. So I definitely get the natural inclination to not
| want to have to think about water.
|
| All that said, I mean, if your HOA requires this, is the
| problem with the city charging for water use to upkeep
| the infrastructure required to deliver it? Or is the
| issue really just that your HOA has rules that it
| shouldn't?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea but the discussion is around water usage practices.
| Deciding we have to waste water because HOAs say so is of
| course silly. They need to change.
| jghn wrote:
| > Because my HOA says I have to maintain a green lawn or
| I get fined.
|
| And this is why I don't live somewhere where I'm ruled by
| an HOA
| tekla wrote:
| Any HOA that requires green lawns should be required to
| pay a tax of minimum $100 per lawn per year it oversees.
| Its a stupid wasteful policy
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I would be calculating the fine vs water bill comparison.
|
| Or ripping up the lawn to plant something more sensible.
|
| Or just not living somewhere where an HOA can tell me
| what to do with my own house
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Water went from being something I hardly considered to
| something I am far more careful about 'wasting'._
|
| Water being "free" from a well probably doesn't help with
| aquifer longevity, at least at larger scales.
| pfranz wrote:
| I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Like others have
| said, "Water can't be free anywhere" seems to be inevitable
| at a commercial level--but dystopian on an individual level.
| If you had neighbors in your rural area aggressively pumping
| water out of the ground your well would dry up...and you'd be
| paying "market price" for it.
|
| Just looking at water usage when I owned a house, irrigation
| uses a ridiculous amount of water relative to everything else
| individuals use to live--including laundry, bathing, dishes,
| etc. If memory serves, sewage costs are significantly more
| than the water itself (and sewage as metered off of water
| consumption--so you're likely paying sewage feeds on water
| you're irrigating with).
|
| The actual cost of enough clean drinking water for people is
| very small. Enough that drinking fountains are common and
| people shouldn't need to ration drinking water.
| shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
| > Like others have said, "Water can't be free anywhere"
| seems to be inevitable at a commercial level--but dystopian
| on an individual level.
|
| This is why we need a democracy with human rights being
| protected [1,2].
|
| If not even fundamental things like water (or air) is free,
| you have to ask yourself how did we get here and how do we
| leave?
|
| 1: https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-
| and-s... 2: https://truthout.org/articles/un-declares-
| water-and-sanitati...
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Yep, this is why we need a water price and dividend system.
|
| Whenever you use water it is tracked and you pay the market
| price. All of that is then collected and put into a pot. It
| is then given back equally to everyone.
|
| Everyone is thus incentivized to use less and those that
| use less than the average amount of water - a huge majority
| of people since the heaviest users use so much - will
| receive more money than they spent.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It is then given back equally to everyone.
|
| Use it to fund the government.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I landscaped with native plants that require no water beyond
| the rain.
|
| It saves me a ton on water bills and lawn maintenance time &
| expense. As a bonus, the deer won't eat the native plants.
| ryaneager wrote:
| It's only dystopian if it's in context of people. Water
| shouldn't be free for companies to profit off of but free to
| individuals to sustain life.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The food grown to sustain life requires water.
|
| History also shows us that when the government runs
| collective farms that have no profit, people starve.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Ehhh, that's a rather cynical take on it.
|
| It's obviously about inefficient overuse by businesses. Having
| water for individual people free for basic personal use
| wouldn't be a problem.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Having water for individual people free for basic personal
| use wouldn't be a problem.
|
| Operating the water system to deliver water is expensive. If
| you want to put out a rain barrel and collect rain, it's
| free.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Doesn't help with water treatment or sewage handling
| though.
| notatoad wrote:
| "paying the water bill" is a pretty normal thing for a large
| portion of the world. certainly for most of america.
|
| paying for water is not a dystopia. and taking a totally normal
| part of life and calling it "dystopian" with no further
| explanation is one of the laziest arguments ever.
| josefritz wrote:
| Paying for water when you are poor is a threat to life and
| livelihood that's dystopian. This is the nature of dystopia,
| it mostly affects the impoverished.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Is it not the same for paying for food, as well? I
| generally agree, but water seems an arbitrary line to draw
| when we still have shelter and food to consider.
| JoshGG wrote:
| Dystopian is "water was free so the big farming business pumped
| the aquifer dry and exported the agricultural goods. Now people
| here have no water and the land is a desert".
|
| This stuff is economics 101.
|
| The full quote is:
|
| ""Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll's who in January
| will become the chief executive, said in an interview that he
| "absolutely" sees the region as a model of water pricing that
| could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to
| Portugal. "Water can't be free anywhere, because you can't run
| a sustainable water supply without pricing it," he said. "That
| would apply to the globe." ""
| irrational wrote:
| Where I live it rains for the majority of the year. We could
| put out buckets and easily capture enough to care for our
| needs, but then you have to deal with making sure what we are
| going to ingest is clean and deal with no water pressure and
| hauling water around the house. It is so much easier to pay
| someone else to deal with it. So, water could be free some
| places, but...
| atrus wrote:
| Nothing of what you described is free though? It's going to
| take some sort of resources no matter what.
| ta1243 wrote:
| You don't live in Arizona
| intrasight wrote:
| Water is free. What we pay for is it's delivery and it's
| treatment.
|
| I remember learning in elementary school that you're not
| allowed to charge for water.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| There's a very unambiguously wide gap between water being
| freely available to every person for sustaining life, and water
| being completely free to use in quantities of
| trillions/quadrillions of gallons for profit.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| There's not really. You need water for farming. Farming is
| necessary for survival and farmers sell their produce for
| profit.
|
| The line between small, local, "good" farmers and large
| "evil" corporations is all but clear cut.
| ethanbond wrote:
| You don't need to farm water-intensive crops in deserts,
| especially in the modern era of extremely effective
| logistics. We should be growing crops where they're most
| suitable for, and applying something closer to normal
| pricing dynamics will nudge us closer to that.
|
| Agreed there's not a bright line, but we're clearly at one
| undesirable end of the spectrum.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I agree, but then we're back at exporting produce from
| wherever water is cheap and abundant. Which is a good
| thing and necessary, but it has to be done carefully at
| the industrial scale we're at.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Is it? What about using limited water for crops that don't
| have as much value to survival as other crops? Or wasteful
| locations, etc.
|
| I'm not advocating charging necessarily, but using up a
| limited resource with reckless abandon seems short sighted.
| What am I missing? Is it not a very important resource to
| manage?
| j4yav wrote:
| You can take my Mojave desert almond farm when you pry it from
| my cold dead fingers.
| inamberclad wrote:
| Limited natural resources shouldn't be free for industrial
| exploitation. Unfortunately, money is the best mechanism for
| incorporating these concerns into a product.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Mining rights are expensive.
| kardianos wrote:
| So... Let me tell you about Natural Asset Companies the SEC is
| considering approvnig: https://www.nyse.com/introducing-
| natural-asset-companies
|
| So yes, dystopian. Not a trial run.
| ergl wrote:
| This could be good, but as always the second-order ramifications
| could be troublesome (only big agricultural business would be
| able to afford to have crops, etc, etc).
|
| "Cadillac Desert" is a good read to see how bonkers the water
| system can be (and was devised to be) in the US West, because it
| basically tries to turn the desert into a garden. The only
| problem is that there's just not enough water to do that.
|
| Another good story in the New York times:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groun...
| (which was discussed in HN, as well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306841 )
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Why would only big agricultural business be able to afford to
| have crops? Water use, and thus costs, should scale linearly
| with acreage.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Might there be edge effects? (thinking of There Will Be Blood
| and the famous "Drainage!" scene)
| mcguire wrote:
| From the article:
|
| " _While corporate growers of premium products like
| berries, which are shipped to the shelves of major chains
| like Whole Foods, Safeway and Trader Joe's, can absorb the
| price of Pajaro's water, there is no way farmers of
| commodity crops like cotton, alfalfa and soybeans can make
| the economics work, said David Sanford, the agricultural
| commissioner of the Santa Cruz County, which includes the
| Pajaro Valley._
|
| " _In the years since the price on water was imposed,
| growers of those crops either shifted to high-priced
| berries and lettuces, or simply left the region for cheaper
| pastures._ "
|
| The increased cost could only be handled by shifting to
| higher-margin crops.
|
| On the other hand, anyone growing alfalfa or soybeans in
| the stinking desert deserves whatever happens to them.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| That's not really a big agribusiness vs. small farm thing
| -- it's just not going to make sense to grow those in the
| desert if the farmers have to actually pay the cost of
| the water. Classic case of internalizing the
| externalities.
| shrubble wrote:
| Is California a special case, however?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| California is the most important agricultural state in America,
| so really every other state is a special case. They export
| _nearly_ 2x the next biggest state 24k vs 16k.
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/100812/commodity_...
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The data you linked to doesn't support your claim. Per that
| document, California only exports 50% more than Iowa.
|
| Also, that document only refers to _export value_ and not
| production. Most agricultural production in the US is not
| exported.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| We would increase rainwater storage.
| silon42 wrote:
| Yeah, eventually rivers would dry up.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are lots of well-known ways to slow down rainfall to let
| it seep into the ground, things like terracing and berms.
| California does little of that, so when it does rain, it all
| just washes into the ocean and it's back to drought.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Good news, my California town makes terracing so difficult to
| do that it might as well be illegal. So when it rains there's
| rapid runoff into a creek that makes a beeline for the ocean.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's really not that hard. Well, it takes time and labor.
| Beavers used to be the key to water retention in the
| ecosystem, but we hunted them to near extinction.
| zdragnar wrote:
| You can have some of the ones that live by me. They're
| quite the nuisance, and nobody wants to trap them for pelts
| anymore.
|
| I'm pretty sure the colony that lives by me has been
| exporting them (given the number of babies and new dams
| I've seen) but they're not likely to cross the Rockies on
| their own.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Also, electricity from fossil fuels consumes a lot of water.
|
| U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water
| withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water
| withdrawals in 2015:
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698
| 4death4 wrote:
| Mostly east of the Mississippi, which has no water shortage. If
| you don't use the water in the East, it usually ends up as salt
| water in the ocean.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/t...
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Additionally in certain circumstances it's less disruptive to
| use more water. E.g a nuclear power plant on a river: river
| water in, slightly warmer river water out w/o any or much
| steam generated. The more water 'used' the lower the
| temperature of hot water discharged, so kinder to the local
| ecosystem.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Water used for cooling a power plant either evaporates in a
| cooling tower or gets discharged back into the river.
| intrasight wrote:
| Same with water for farming of course
| jerzmacow wrote:
| With a healthy dose of AG chemicals!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I am an electrical engineer that mainly works on hydro plants
| but also have done some work on natural gas plants. The fact
| that this is so high is shocking to me. I guess the big culprit
| is coal plant cooling towers. The natural gas plants I've
| worked in don't even have cooling towers, any cooling water
| goes right back where it came from.
| alexpotato wrote:
| My favorite example of "wait, they do what for growing fruit??"
| is that they use helicopters to dry cherry trees if there is too
| much rain.
|
| More details here:
| https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/nature/outdoors/fa...
| kvonhorn wrote:
| In California, they hover helicopters over avocado groves in
| the winter to keep the fruit from freezing overnight.
|
| https://www.fairlifts.com/helicopter-services/agricultural/f...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Farmers don't pay for water, it becomes part of the overhead that
| must be covered to make farming an economically worthwhile
| activity. So fruit would cost more, or it would be less
| available, or both.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That seems like it might be a good thing. If we priced it in
| producers would need to find more water efficient ways to make
| the product to be able to be a viable participant in the
| market. If that means growing fruit in a desert isn't viable,
| so be it! Don't grow fruit in the desert!
| bshipp wrote:
| If water was priced appropriately it would incentivize
| hydroponics that captures and recirculates waste water to
| minimize usage.
| ggm wrote:
| In this model of what pay means, nobody making anything pays
| for anything. I know that's a reductive argument but really it
| mistakes the relationship of input costs, fixed costs, declared
| rainfall, and price in the market.
|
| In Australia water has financial value as an asset class and is
| bought and sold, in a futures model as well as at time of use
| (irrigation)
|
| I just think you're wrong on so many levels. Only primary
| mining can be said to not pay for anything in this model and
| they pay rent and royalties and other costs.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Are there any commonly-used units more nonisotropic than the
| acre-foot? (its "unit cube" is 1 furlong x 1 chain x 1 foot)
| riversflow wrote:
| Hmm, water related, there is the "Miner's Inch"
|
| for which the "unit cube"(block?) would be like 1" x 1" x ~2300
| miles by my (fast, bad) calculations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miner%27s_inch
| cobbal wrote:
| Hubble's constant is typically measured in kilometers per
| second per megaparsec, which can be converted to Hertz.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| For that matter, what if farmers had to pay a livable wage?
| Berry-picking is especially rife with social dumping.
|
| It is a hot topic here in Scandinavia, because every season
| farmer will cry "no one wants to work!", and then comes
| testimonies of indentured servitude at its worth, and sweat-shops
| at its best.
|
| Many farmers here "import" Asian rice farmers to pick berries
| these days.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Sounds great until you realize how razor-thin the margins on
| farming are; and that all it takes is one bad year.
| xracy wrote:
| It's wild to me that people see problems like this, and think
| to themselves "Yeah, it's okay that we overwork people for no
| money, but there's no other way to turn a profit for this, so
| this just has to be the way the world works."
|
| This is what governments are for. If the system doesn't pay
| people a livable wage to do the work to support our existence
| (food), then clearly we need to change the system to not be
| based on "maximizing profits".
|
| But instead you justify it by saying the margins are "razor-
| thin", and farmers _have_ to take advantage of people if
| _they_ want to survive. And that justifies this terrible
| behavior. Move who you 're blaming and call them to action,
| instead of just accepting terrible conditions for workers.
|
| Farmers are responding to incentives, gov'ts have built
| subsidies for farmwork in the past, because food _has_ to be
| cheap for people to live.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I challenge you to walk up to the nearest farmer, look at
| their (edit for clarity: accounting) books; and not realize
| that what you are asking, is just as impossible as asking 3
| engineers to write a competitor to Windows.
|
| I know enough about their lives to know that your armchair
| quarterbacking is an absurdity.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I guess that settles it then: modern slavery is a-okay.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Reminder that the median income for the US is $31K per
| year. If they earned only $24K per year, they are doing
| better than 25% of earners.
|
| Welcome to America. Where SV folk would scream slavery if
| they lived as a quarter of the nation does.
| xracy wrote:
| oh, well, I guess since _everyone_ is doing it, that
| makes it okay, and we can 't imagine a better world.
| Let's call it a day, accept our lot in life, and move
| forward.
|
| I _hate_ the sentiment that because things are bad
| somewhere they _should_ be bad elsewhere. Every time I
| bring up benefits that I have that others don 't they
| start by saying "you shouldn't have those" instead of
| saying "I should have those _too_. " It's like we're
| playing a weird game of the prisoner's dilemma, but
| there's not actually any benefit for the person
| defecting.
| alistairSH wrote:
| That's why there needs to be government intervention. No
| single farmer is going to do the right thing because
| market forces are driving them to thin margins and poor
| behavior.
| xracy wrote:
| please reread my comment. You have missed the point of
| it, if you think I'm asking farmers to fix this.
| belorn wrote:
| There are multiple problems, some which are real problem
| with the industry and other that are problem more
| inherent with that kind of farming.
|
| Farmers who do human smuggling and steal labors passports
| in order to force people to work for nothing are a
| problem both about regulation and enforcement (and
| ethics). It the exact same problem in construction,
| cleaning, prostitution, and so on. Those industries can
| exist without human smuggling, and the bad actors only
| serve to make it worse for everyone.
|
| Berry farms in Scandinavia do however have a problem with
| distribution. Most farms are located very far away from
| the consumer, with the distributor taking more than the
| major portion of the profits. The accounting can quickly
| look a lot better when a farming do not need to sell to
| gross distributors for 1/10th of the value of the
| product. Solving cheaper distribution and storage are
| possible, but is more similar to the issue of creating a
| competitor to Windows. Margins for farmers do not need to
| be that thin, but creating storage and distribution
| chains are complex when dealing with such perishable
| goods.
| patcon wrote:
| Isn't the farmer the wrong person to ask? As in, the
| margins are razor-thin because the competitors (merged
| conglomerates operating) are operating vertically-
| integrated at scale, driving prices so low that only
| _they_ can skim enough to profit from participatong in
| the market.
|
| So the farmer has no variables to change because the
| problem is not in _their_ jurisdiction, but rather the
| government 's, no? (i.e. breaking up giant agri-
| businesses, or taxing them and redistributing to
| subsidize small operations)
|
| But I recognize there's also geopolitics of food, so
| there are many layers I don't understand :)
| mcguire wrote:
| One thing to point out: this particular case was the response to
| a crisis.
|
| " _But in the 1980s, disaster struck. Growers over pumped the
| coastal groundwater, allowing saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to
| seep in below their fields, up through the roots of the berry
| crop._ "
|
| It doesn't seem likely that a similar change would happen
| elsewhere without a similar crisis.
| labrador wrote:
| As a life long Californian, when people tell me California is
| running out of water my response that California is running out
| of cheap water.
|
| Calfornia farmers pay $30 to $120 for an acre foot (325,851
| gallons or 1,233 cubic meters) which is ridiculously cheap and is
| wasted growing things like rice (California grows about 20% of
| the rice produced in the U.S. each year.)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| On the private water markets, it used to be more on the order
| of $1000 per foot-acre for agricultural purposes in the US high
| desert. This clears the market so you can still make money in
| agriculture at these prices, you just can't be wasteful.
| labrador wrote:
| > $1000 per foot-acre for agricultural purposes in the US
| high desert
|
| I bet. There aren't many agricultural areas in California
| that could be considered high desert
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