Posted on 02/09/2014 12:05:15 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Much like the polar vortex spiked demand and prices for natural gas in the eastern U.S., another weather phenomenon — a severe drought — is threatening cattle and milk production and food crops in the West.
It’s a threat that can last for months and year, and parched conditions have already driven up prices on milk and cattle futures.
“The hardest hit section of California is the Central Valley — ‘the supermarket to the world’ — and [it’s becoming] increasingly clear the region won’t see relief from the devastating drought anytime soon,” said Kevin Kerr, editor of CommodityConfidential.com. “Retail prices for many key agricultural commodities could jump.”
That means consumers may see higher prices for everything from beef and milk to wheat, nuts and vegetables, and it’ll take time for supplies to replenish.
Drought conditions cover more than 37% of the 48 contiguous states, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor . MDA Weather Services said about 67% of California alone is currently experiencing extreme or exceptional drought conditions.
The state’s Gov. Edmund “Jerry” Brown, Jr. declared a drought State of Emergency on Jan. 17, calling on California’s residents to voluntarily cut water consumption by 20%.
The state is “already taking steps to limit water usage, so it is likely that irrigation supplies will be limited as well,” said Kyle Tapley, senior agricultural meteorologist of weather services at MDA Information Systems LLC....
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Central Cal. is being hammered with the “Pineapple Express” maybe up to 10 inches by Monday; its a start.
Classic "Pineapple Express" a narrow stream of moisture laden air (atmospheric river) that explodes in rainfall when it hits the rising elevation of the North American land mass. So Cal had one in 1969 that caused wide spread flooding. A week or two of this and flooding will be in the news.
San Saba River, Texas - Through wasteful water use and unregulated pumping, irrigators are transforming a vibrant, pristine river into a dried-up riverbed... Excessive pumping for agricultural irrigation has been diverting the river’s flow into a canal (where 30 percent or more is lost due to evaporation and leaks). Moreover, some irrigators place extremely shallow wells next to the river to pull water from the river under the guise of groundwater wells. This unregulated pumping in the last twelve years has almost dried up over 50 miles of the river for an average of five months of the year. This hurts downstream ranchers who need water, damages the river ecosystem, and negatively impacts the Austin chain of lakes.
Other endangered rivers:
Black River, Birmingham, AL - caused by coal mine pollution
Boundary, MN - mining
Catawba River, NC - coal ash mining pollution
Colorado River - wasteful management
Flint River, GA - over pumped
Kootenai River, ID - coal mining
Little Plover River, WI - excessive water use
Merced River, CA - raising the spillway height
Niobrara River, SD - dams causing high levels of sediment will cause more home and crop disasters during floods
Rough & Ready Creek, OR - nickle mining
San Saba River, TX - over pumping
There used to be live human beings who would monitor the river flow near me but now it is monitored by computers miles away in Austin. The last big flood we had left someone's kitchen cabinets on our deck. The next day, they decided to open more gates at the dam which, duuuuh, brought down more water. I called to complain and was told I had no idea what I was talking about. Like they didn't announce gates were being opened at such and such time and shortly after that I could see with my own eyes the water rising into people's houses. Nope, some idiot hours away sitting in a cubicle looking at his computer knows more. They can't understand that this much water [--------------------------] dumped into into this wide a river [---] isn't going to cause flooding.
Ok, I step down off my soap box.
..... Much of the state of California is pretty much a desert and dry type land that once was used quite effectively for farmland by using water brought in from other areas to irrigate what many once considered to be the Bread Basket of America. Unfortunately, much of that Bread Basket is now at or near dust bowl conditions mostly brought about by the diverting of the much needed water that was once needed to produce crops. California already has an irrigation infrastructure already in place and used until these laws were put into effect. Unfortunately some of it is falling into disrepair and may be unusable until refurbished. ... All that is really needed is to begin running water once again through the system to help alleviate much of the plight of our farmers.
... The link below is a rather simplistic view of the plight affecting the California farmers today but gives the reader a very basic idea as to what is going on. If you do a search ... you can find much more on the subject.
“There is water wasted all across the country. Take Las Vegas that is trying to turn a dry desert into green golf courses and lush lawns.”
My wife grew up in Las Vegas. With the passing of her parents, we now go back only for HS reunions every five years. When she was born, there were no more than ten or twenty thousand people in Clark County, now there are a couple of million. She grew up out on the far west side. Now the city boundary is five times that distance from the center of town. She hates to go back because there just isn’t anything there to connect her to the place where she grew up. BTW the humidity in the area is up substantially because of the golf course watering. The other thing that they do is air condition millions of cubic feet of indoor space and they get no electricity from Boulder Dam. All Vegas electricity comes from fossil fueled power plants.
Now that’s funny! Wine? Lord knows a nation can’t live without that! Should I need any I’ll just get it right here in Texas.
“A week or two of this and flooding will be in the news.”
The “good news” is that it will be over within 24 hours and there is no precipitation in the forecast for the next ten days. Sierras have received 2 to 4 ft of new snow. Every little bit helps.
“Theres nothing you grow in California that can’t be grown in other area’s of the US.”
Oh really? Then why haven’t enterprising farmers gotten into the business. You are way off base if you think that there are areas of this country that can compete with California. If it were really true, it would have already been done. You simply can’t dry farm produce.
What is more interesting is that you seemingly are hopeful that your fellow citizens in California will somehow suffer. Sad that you think that way.
Ah the Four Seasons. Lucky you.
We get an occasional tornado, particularly in nearby Maryland. Did have one bounce right over our neighborhood shopping center, and continued on to Maryland where it killed two sisters at the Un. of Md and injured their father who was down the street from them. We missed it by 15 minutes after we left the National Archives in our shuttle bus. It hit where we had just passed. Twisted trees off their stumps and kept bouncing until it hit the building the two sisters where in, then jumped again and hit their father’s building. Very tragic.
“Actually, CA undercut a lot of farmers elsewhere with pricing based on an unsustainable resource model. It would be good to have farming a little less centralized (e.g., where it’s easier to get Americans to provide the labor) and to pay a bit more for it.”
I guess by “undercut” you mean that we can produce at lower total cost. As far as farm labor is concerned, good luck getting “Americans” to provide the labor. When I was growing up California had a “guest worker program” which allowed Mexican nationals to come here to work in the fields and go home when the season ended. It’s back breaking work, but they cane and they did it anyway.
Anyhow the local Blacks told the government that those were
“their jobs” and so the program was cancelled. But you know what, the Blacks didn’t show up to pick anything because it was too damned hard, especially when they already had a fully-developed welfare scam going and having to do stoop labor cut into their sex, drug and drinking protocols.
When you look at Heartland farming, it’s all large-scale stuff like corn and wheat and other staple crops that a don’t a) require irrigation and b) are harvested by mechanized means. And if they ever did find a way to grow row crops, they’d have to import labor to tend to them, because there aren’t any people there who would do the work. So be my guest and see what you can do. And if you are successful, you had better be prepared to welcome the Hispanic worker.
Loved the Redwood forests and Giant Sequoias. Sleep in one park with the Redwood trees. Awesome. So were the two giant skunks who kept us pinned down in our sleeping backs for an hour. They were licking the grease off the in-ground BBQ grill.
Never got to LA. The fog was so thick (Aug. 1971), that we could not see the off-ramps, and at 75 miles an hour, we weren’t going to slow down. Headed to Nevada and camped out at Lake Mead (of course it rained, as did it at Mesa Verde and crossing the Mojave Desert).
California is a beautiful state. Unfortunately commies, liberals and illegals have wrecked it. If the Martians ever invade, I know where to send them for target practice.
Just image, as John Lennon would say, a Hollywood-free California. S.F. free of commies and weirdos, and Oakland as a giant swimming pool. Just the thought of it is refreshing.
Oh back to reality. I have to go to O’Malley’s Marxist Maryland tonight for a dinner. I got out of the “Free State” when the gettin’ out was good. Today, it is a prison for the sane, hardworking people who can’t get out, and here in Virginia, we’ve got another Clinton thug as our new Governor.
There ought to be a law that if you are a Democrat from New York or California, or Chicago, you cannot leave your stay to move elsewhere.
They are like the Black Plague - wherever they go the bring death and destruction of body and soul, and taxes that suck the very lifeblood out of your hard work.
Rahm Emanuel now of Chicago Mayoralship, was in my congregation. I only saw him when he made his grand entrance to some affair. He worked the crowds like a pickpocket at a convention, or a prostitute at Sailors Ball.
Little rat should have become a ballerina. He would look great in a pink Tutu.
“Oh really? Then why haven’t enterprising farmers gotten into the business. You are way off base if you think that there are areas of this country that can compete with California. “
Hate to bust your bubble but we were farming here in the midwest long before y’all were farming in the west. Name one thing grown out there that can’t be grown else where?
let me add it’s also very foolish of you to think everybody else is dry land farming. Y’all really are full of yourselves!
My limited understanding of the issue is that there are basically two areas where farmers’ water is being cut back.
The affected areas are primarily in the San Joaquin Valley, the lower Central Valley.
The east side of the SJ Valley has traditionally been irrigated by locally owned and run irrigation districts controlling the runoff from the Sierras in their areas. The amount of water available has been significantly reduced by the drought. Not a lot of it ever went to the Delta, to my understanding, which may not be entirely correct.
The west side of the SF Valley has been irrigated a lot more recently by large state and federal projects bringing water from Northern CA, especially the Sacramento River Valley. A lot of this water has been cut off to maintain flows in the Sacramento drainage and Delta, for the benefit of various fish species.
The problem is that drought reduces the amount of water available for distribution in the system, which means competing priorities come into play. The volume of water used by farmers is quite astonishing when compared to that by cities.
It is also entirely reasonable to point out that farmers who are able to farm where they do only because of immense government projects sound a little hollow when they turn around and start demanding less government interference.
What I’m interested in is the acreage of farmland actually idled, and why. How much is due to the lack of water entering the system, how much to prioritizing cities, how much to flow maintained by court order through the Delta to protect the fish?
Most of the actual farming began back when there was plenty of water - if not in the wells then in the mountains as snow-pack.
Let’s face it folks, we humans are - with rare exceptions - incredibly short-sighted. We’re famous for starting something (like huge farms full of fruit trees.) Then when conditions change and the fruit doesn’t grow we try our damndest to change the conditions back to what drew us into the area in the first place. Look just a few hundred miles south and east of California where the Anasazi indians built mud brick cities under cliffs. Last time I looked, mud required water at some point so they must have had some. Then the water went away and eventually so did the Anasazi.
The world is famous for ghost towns that were built to extract a single resource. Well, water is a resource too and cities like L.A. can also become ghost towns. That fate can be staved off for awhile if enough people embrace desalinization but Mother Nature will have her way in the end.
I don’t know why they aren’t doing desalinization for fix their water problems.
Desalinization will work but since it would be difficult to get desalinated Ocean water to the farms, then in CA the desalinated water will have to be used by the coastal population areas while the current water flowing from the interior of the state can either be used for central state agriculture or be allowed to run it’s natural course to the Pacific. This cannot happen until desalinated water delivered to the coast is cheaper than current sources.
“let me add it’s also very foolish of you to think everybody else is dry land farming.”
As they say, “show me proof of what you say!” The truth still is that California ( provided that we can continue to have sufficient water for irrigation) is far more productive than is the Midwest, Y’all! With all our political problems (and it’s a unmitigated mess, no question), we are still the largest economy in the country by a wide margin. I am sure it’s not as good as it once was, but we are probably still in the top ten world economies, which is probably “upsetting” to you but still the truth.
At the risk of misinterpretation, I think what 9Year is referring to here as an "unsustainable resource model" is the water, not the labor.
We have fairly good information about the long-term history of water availability in CA. It tends to be cycles of megadroughts and megafloods.
http://cepsym.org/Sympro2009/Malamud-Roam.pdf
Conditions since 1850 appear to have been unusually stable. (Possibly due to the early stages of AGW caused by the Industrial Revolution. / s)
Within the last 2000 years there have been several severe droughts lasting decades or even more than a century. There are lakes in the High Sierra, hundreds of feet deep, that dried out sufficiently for entire forests to grow in their beds. For all we know we're in the early years of such a drought now.
Note that this has nothing at all necessarily to do with AGW, though if it turns out to be so it will no doubt be spun that way.
In a megadrought, all available water resources in CA, including even eventually groundwater, would be unable to sustain the present population and agriculture.
Desal could do it, but boy would it cost a lot! Doing so would be a political and ecological issue, not an engineering one, though.
It should also be noted that other areas, such as the Midwest, East and South, are also potentially subject to extended droughts.
In another part of the world, in the last few thousand years, for instance, it appears there have been several long (as in multiple decades), severe droughts in the Amazon, which essentially dried out and mostly burned. That would get the enviros into a twist!
The issue here is normalcy bias. We assume that the world we are used to, based on our very short time span of attention, is "normal." It very well may not be.
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