If the farmer had simply supported more democrats, he could be like his neighbor with a field full of heavy trees with nuts in them.
The current drought is the excuse why those trees are parched, not the reason. Federal and state regulations, busting dams, and political games are the reasons why those fields aren’t producing. Worst is if a farmer happens to be along the corridor for the proposed high speed rail project; those farmers were the first to find their water allocations gone.
Payola for water; it is how the game is played in the central valley.
California’s Two Droughts
An affluent society didn’t bother to add to the inherited system of canals and reservoirs that made it thrive....Californians have not built a major reservoir since the New Melones Dam more than 30 years ago. As the state subsequently added almost 20 million people, it assumed that it was exempt from creating any more “unnatural” Sierra lakes and canals to store precious water during California’s rarer wet and snow-filled years.
Then, short-sightedness soon became conceit. Green utopians went further and demanded that an ailing three-inch bait fish in the San Francisco delta receive more fresh oxygenated water. In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.
Others had even grander ideas of having salmon again in their central rivers, as they recalled fishing stories of their ancestors from when the state population was a fifth of its present size and farming a fraction of its present acreage. So they too sued to divert even more water to the sea in hopes of having game fish swim from the Pacific Ocean up to arid Fresno County on their way to the supposedly ancestral Sierra spawning grounds.
Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs, California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if this were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir — amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.
The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.
In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.
Yes. I think many people here don't realize how much this supposed drought is a "man-created catastrophe," as the Goricle would say, because there are ways around it but none of them have been used.
Even before the drought, CA had decided to starve out the farmers. I spent about a third of my life in CA but now am back East. However, I went to CA regularly and did an extended trip through the Valley about 4 years ago with my mother who was still living in CA (and is now with the saints). She pointed out billboards put up by the farmers asking for more water. Next to them on the highway were bizarre eco-anarchist signs.
I guess California believes that the eco-anarchists will some how come up with the money to make up for the almond crop. I feel terrible about things in CA. People on FR hate CA and NY, but both of them are great places that have been invaded by horrible politics supported by well meaning but stupid people. I don't know what can be done about that.