Geez, I’m glad I live in an area where I can wash my car, water my lawn, and top off my pool unencumbered by government regulation.
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I understand, but I can ride a motorcycle almost all year, and from mid April until late October I know it’s not going to rain.
Like everything else, we pay a lot of money for water. Car wash places recycle it. We try to use very little.
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If you live in southern California or the Bay area or most of the West government is the reason you have enough water to have a lawn and wash a car.
I live on the other side of the country in VA, I also have a private well. Water is one of the things we aren’t going wanting for. We’re already 22 inches of rainfall above normal for the year.
Ha ha ha. That reminds me of that old joke with the farmer talking to the preacher. The farmer had taken a terrible piece of land all rutted out and made it into a fine productive field. The preacher admired it and said what a great job the farmer and God had done. The farmer just looked at him and said, yeah but you should have seen it when God had it alone.
Yeah government is the reason you have water but I guess there was no water in the old days before government. (Actually I think the water devoted to farms is having a lot to do with the shortage but that’s what pays the rent.)
Most of the western USA is an arid region, making water availability the limiting factor in the population growth & density. When you fly over the area you look down & you’d say there is plenty of land there, why worry about population growth? But people can’t live on land alone, they need water. The SF Bay Area doesn’t have nearly enough local water to support its population. But it has access to water from snow that falls during the winter on the 10,000 - 14,000 foot tall Sierra Nevada mountains, about 150 miles to the east. Without that, San Jose and San Francisco would both be a couple of small towns, with only rural lands in between.
Well I think at some point they’re going to have to do what Israel does with the desalinization plants. Seems to be plenty of ocean water and some have complained here that the level is rising. Time to start dipping into the bath tub.
Government is the reason there’s water coming out of my tap in Albuquerque (Pasadena, Los Angeles, San Francisco… many of the places I have lived) instead of flowing down the Rio Grande, Colorado (etc.) rivers into the Pacific Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.
You want to blame the farmers? They do use most of the water - it’d be cheaper not to give them water, let the people east of the 100th meridian grow all our food. Try getting Congress to pass that law or Curly to sign it.
Yeah, cause they have some strange magical way of getting water compared to out west. Not. The Ogallala aquifer is what supports farming in the plains and we’re drawing that down pretty fast too. Prior to tapping that aquifer for farmland irrigation, the plains were pretty arid as well. By most estimates, we’ve sucked up around 10% of it and it takes 6000 years to replenish it. It’s easy to see rivers that don’t make it to the ocean anymore but people tend to forget about groundwater you can’t see with the naked eye. Like it’s limitless or something…
Very few Californians from what I hear complain that Calif farmers use too water to grow food. At least not for food that’s grown in Calif & sold in the USA. There are some complaints about farmers using Calif water to grow food that’s then sold outside the USA, such as almonds.
At least not at the expense of all of American tax-payers. I pay less than a penny for a gallon of water in Albuquerque, which includes water pumped over the Continental Divide; my friend in Ithaca pays twice as much for water that comes out of Lake Cayuga. American tax-payers make this possible.
Says who? You think they could support the additional crop load using the current infrastructure? After they build an aquaduct system to tap the great lakes we’ll see what kind of savings that result. I have a prediction for you…
Sez me.
Before WW2 most fruits & vegetables were regionally-sourced; most livestock were pastured. Expensive water subsidies made the dry West cheaper for agriculture and cities, even cheaper than the East, which didn’t need them. Subsidies for corn, soybeans, and wheat made meat and milk cheaper (we eat corn and soybeans mostly as meat and milk). Lots of watered fertile Eastern soil went out of production. If we stopped subsidizing water (get rid of the Colorado River Compact: make us Westerners figure it out and pay for it ourselves) and grain Eastern farming would be profitable enough for farmers to restore their land to production themselves. Eaters would have to pay more for food but tax-payers would save more. Higher prices would mean less exports.
A lot of New Mexicans hanker for the Great Lakes’ water; it’d be theft. I oppose it. But we’re already spending lots to subsidize water for Westerners. Thanks.
Let’s get back on point- you suggested shifting all food production east and thereby eliminate taxpayer subsidized water required to support it. I say you cannot feed everyone off the existing infrastructure used today to farm midwestern land. It would require the same investment being made to make the western lands viable. I see nothing in what you said that refutes that argument.
BTW- the conditions pre WWII are not very representative of what they are today. Free ranging cattle? What’s the population today versus then?
I suggested ending tax-payer subsidy of water for the West (The Bureau of Reclamation serves only the West) and predicted that would mean the end of much of the agricultural production in the West. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
American farmers export about half of what they produce. Without subsidies foreign farmers would become more competitive. Americans throw away about a ⅓ of the food we buy. ‘Baby’ carrots aren’t young carrots but ugly carrots with the ugly parts cut off. Subsidies make all tax-payers pay more for food but in their taxes, not at the store. Without subsidies we’ll pay less in taxes, more at the store; if you believe in a free market you’ll think that this will save money.
For WW2 we told the British to fight, not farm, that we’d feed them. We expanded food production, particularly wheat and beans, to feed lots more people than ourselves. Instead of letting production lapse after the war we subsidized grain production. The surplus grain we found new ways to use. The largest of these was putting cows in feed lots, removing them from pasture. Similar large-scale methods were applied to chickens for eggs and meat. We eat a lot more meat, milk, and eggs, the prices subsidized by the tax-payer.
Lots of Eastern land has gone out of production because it’s cheaper in the West only because of the subsidy.
I remember the '50s: we had 1 pineapple a year when the church had a program to import 1 for everybody who signed up. (There were none in stores.)
Most produce was in the market only seasonally: winter citrus, strawberries for a few months of summer, asparagus briefly. Boy were the blackberries and blueberries we picked wild delicious! (After a drive in the car - let’s keep this on topic.)
Census Bureau says 132M in 1940, 151M in 1950.
I don’t know if cars are bigger because people are bigger. Binge eating might be an innate behavior so when certain foods are available for short periods of time then binge eating the food would be a good idea if there was no way to preserve the food. Speaking as a former U-Pick binge eater.
Melissa , what in the world brought this on ? I see no connection to the thread title.
@RandomTroll mentioned blueberries and blackberries.
I recommended OP lick his car clean with tongue; @ArlHtsMelissa and I are suggesting palate refreshers.
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