California
Related: About this forumA Kindom From Dust
An excellent inside look at California agriculture, water use, greed and farm labor. You'll never look at an almond in the same way again.
A Kindom From Dust
"Theres a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earths surface in human history took place here. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry.
He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. The farmer moved the rain. The more water he got, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees."
entire article HERE
BigmanPigman
(51,584 posts)I heard on the local news how much water to takes to grow certain foods. It takes over 1 gallon to grow a single almond. My job every Christmas is to make an old family recipe called and almond cake. There is no flour but it requires 1 pound of almonds. The cake recipe was modified (and not as good) using fewer almonds. When I told my family why it was a sobering moments. The is is a good chart showing how much water is needed for other foods.
http://www.businessinsider.com/amount-of-water-needed-to-grow-one-almond-orange-tomato-2015-4
The River
(2,615 posts)is unsustainable.
Depending on climate change and/or extreme drought years there just won't be any water left to steal and the whole area returns to desert.
Bayard
(22,061 posts)They turned Tulare Lake into desert.