Posted on 06/15/2024 10:50:24 AM PDT by karpov
California is awash in water after record-breaking rains vanquished years of crippling drought. That sounds like great news for farmers. But Ron McIlroy, whose shop here sells equipment for plowing fields, knows otherwise.
“I’ll be lucky if I survive this year,” he said.
Illustrating how broken California’s vast water-delivery system is, many farmers in Central Valley, America’s fruit and vegetable basket, will get just 40% of the federal water they are supposed to this year.
Why? Endangered fish.
The pumps that transport water from wet Northern California to the semiarid south have been drastically slowed to protect threatened migrating smelt, measuring up to 3 inches, and steelhead. That means growers in the U.S.’s richest farming area are having to plant fewer crops even as they are surrounded by water.
The decision by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and California officials, to curtail water to farmers for the silvery fish has ignited an uproar in the southern Central Valley, and threatens to upend this important agriculture region just as it was recovering.
“There’s no reason for it and it’s dangerous for the country,” said Wayne Western, farm manager of Hammonds Ranch, which plans to plant tomatoes, cotton and other crops on only 60% of its 5,000 acres this year, compared with 80% last year. “You don’t know how to plan. You kind of come to a standstill.”
Drought has pummeled California’s farm industry, the nation’s largest, for much of the past decade. University of California researchers estimate drought-related farm losses totaled $7 billion and cost 40,000 jobs in 2014, 2015 and 2022 combined.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Yeah, they’re so angry they may vote for different democrats.
Next up: Sacred unicorns (because, after all, unicorns don't fart).
Why do we grow livestock feed in a desert using massive government subsidies for a handful of multimillionaires?
Weird right.
Is WSJ really pretending this is something new?
Right there is the problem...Corrupt government again.
“Yeah, they’re so angry they may vote for different democrats.”
Actually, no. The farmers/ranchers in the central valley are overwhelmingly conservative. The 8-10 CA Repub reps mostly come from the central valley or the Sierra foothills (where the snow pack that feeds water to the rest of the state is located).
Smuck the felt. Let farmers grow food. Meanwhile, Newscum does nothing, as usual.
Stop shipping produce to Sacramento.
EC
A Fish over Humans is insanity
I don’t blame the fish. Why would tens of millions of people (include millions of illegal immigrants) live in an arid environment and then wonder why there isn’t enough water? Sort of like sub-Saharan Africa.
If it were not the endangered fish it would be something else. There is this marxist urge to cause genocide by famine.
California is well along in its controlled flight into terrain.
Fish are a talking point to justify crushing agriculture.
Billionaire and the Chinese are buying up the best farmland. Why?
The Leftist are trying to make food so expensive that no one other than the wealthy can afford to eat.
We will eat the bugs, own nothing and be happy.
Or else.
That's just not true.
Everyone knows that the millions of EVs that democrats want to force us all to drive won't affect the electric grid because they are powered by rainbows and unicorn farts. Without unicorn farts that would just leave rainbow power, which isn't all that reliable.
Many years ago I spent some time in the San Joaquin Valley. Farmers there told me the top soil is very deep and very rich. If you water it, plants grow like crazy. If you don’t water it, it reverts to the semi desert it was. To give up this potential bounty to protect a bait fish is crazy. But that’s what’s being done and has been done for years.
Be Advised: The agricultural Central Valley — where the big farms are — is solid Republican. It’s the heavily populated, 50-mile-wide strip along the coast plus a few college cities and Sacramento that are pure Democrat/Communist which controls California and which has effectively “outlawed” the state’s pathetic “opposition party”.
Their whole save the planet crap is just crap , what good is the planet without humans
This is what California voted for
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