OT Just how bad is the drought? Just curious OT

It's killing the economy of ski towns...including my own.

TGT - what were you on today? I was doing Whodunnit with an LA partner.
It was crazy - climbing in just a long sleeve shirt!

In the short term, is JB right to request a 20% decrease in water use?

Does it matter where the water came from? Or where it would go if it weren't used to irrigate lawns or golf courses?

People are leaving California

Build a canal from BC to California, let's suck the Canadians' water,

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.

What are the total projected needs and available for say ten years out? To what degree will the waste water recovery projects make up for projected losses / shortfalls? Are there any other measures projected to contribute to making up for possible inadequacies?

What are the energy reguirements of these projects, such as desalination plants? Where is this energy expected to come from?

Paul , how sweet was Monitor Pass on that last stretch heading down to 395 ? Long sweeping curves ... beautiful riding .

The Christmas flood of 1964 was a major flood that took place in the Pacific Northwest and California between December 18, 1964 and January 7, 1965, spanning the Christmas holiday.

Considered a 100-year flood, it was the worst flood in recorded history on nearly every major stream and river in coastal Northern California and one of the worst to affect the Willamette River in Oregon. It also had an impact on parts of southwest Washington, Idaho, and Nevada.

To grow crops or even just to keep trees alive, everyone will be pumping groundwater. The water table will drop quickly and many pumps will run dry. Wealthier farmers who could afford to drill deeper wells in the recent past, will be able to continue pumping while their neighbors go dry.

The Sacramento Daily Union reported that 1/3 of the taxable property in the state of
California was lost, and also estimated that ¼ of all cattle were drowned (200,000). One house in eight was destroyed and 7/8 of all houses were damaged. The loss of all property was between $50 and $100 million (Brewer, 1966, p246). This sum corresponds to an average loss of between $100 and $200 for every person in the state. (The loss of cattle by flood, and the record drought year that followed, ended the early California cattle industry, and the cattle-based ranchero society (Jelinek, 1998/1999).
Brewer writes, on January 19, 1862:
“The great central valley of the state is under water – the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys -- a region 250 to 300 miles long and an average of at least twenty miles wide, or probably three to three and a half millions of acres! Although much of it is not cultivated, yet a part of it is the garden of the state. Thousands of farms are entirely under water – cattle starving and drowning. All the roads in the middle of the state are impassable; so all mails are cut off. We have had no “‘Overland” for some weeks, so I can report no new arrivals... The telegraph also does not work clear through, but news has been coming for the last two days. In the Sacramento Valley for some distance the tops of the poles are under water. The entire valley was a lake extending from the mountains on one side to the coast range hills on the other. Steamers ran back over the ranches fourteen miles from the river, carrying stock, etc, to the hills.”
Remember Judge Field? He was responsible for support for Whitney and Brewer’s investigations. His home, although located on one of the higher areas of Sacramento, was filled with two feet of mud after the food waters subsided.

For a week the tides at the Golden Gate did not flood, rather there was continuous and forceful ebb of brown fresh water 18-20 feet deep pouring out above the salt water. A sea captain reported that his heavily laden ship foundered in the Gulf of the Farallons off of San Francisco, due to the layer of fresh water. Fresh-water fish were caught in San Francisco Bay for several months after the peaks of the flood. These events have not happened since. (Ellis 1936)

Agriculture now uses approximately 80 percent of California's developed water supply, but produces less than 2.5 percent of California's income.
Alfalfa, the biggest water user of any California crop, soaks up almost a quarter of the state's irrigation water. Yet alfalfa -- harvested mostly for hay to feed dairy livestock -- is a low-value crop that accounts for only 4 percent of state farming revenues. An alfalfa farm using 240 acre feet of water generates $60,000 in sales, while a semiconductor plant using the same amount of water generates 5,000 times that amount, or $300 million. (And while such a farm could function with as few as two workers, the semiconductor plant would employ 2,000.)
In short, California devotes 20 percent of its developed water supply to a crop that generates less than one-tenth of one percent of the state's economy. Given the degraded state of California's rivers and growing demands for water for higher value agricultural crops and urban areas, is this an efficient use of a precious resource?
Alfalfa covers more of California's land than any other kind of produce. About 26% is grown in the state's parched southern deserts, and despite the existence of demonstrated techniques for achieving high crop yields with water-saving methods -- such as drip irrigation and bedded alfalfa
    most California growers use inefficient irrigation techniques such as flooding.
Excessive water use isn't the only cost associated with alfalfa crops. Seventy percent of the state's alfalfa feeds California's largest agricultural industry: its dairy cows. Dairy farms in the Central Valley alone produce as much waste as a city of 21 million; illegal manure waste from dairies is believed to threaten the drinking water of 65 percent of Californians. In total, 7,000 gallons of water go into keeping a single cow alive for a single day, yielding a daily return of about 30 cents. Wasteful subsidies worsen this problem by increasing dairy demand for alfalfa.
Although alfalfa does yield some environmental benefits -- maintaining soil health, providing some wildlife habitat and preventing erosion through its extensive root systems -- current production levels are unsustainable, contributing to the destruction of ecosystems all over the state.
Even a modest reduction in production would result in tremendous water savings.

There are probably a billion people in the world that have never peed into a basin of clean water like we do several times a day.

For perspective, California would have to experience heavy rain and snowfall every other day from now until May to get the state back to its average annual precipitation totals, according to the Department of Water Resources.

Nothing to worry about here.

The local water company says they have plenty for this year, and probably next year, too.

All of our water comes from the local ( San Bernardino ) mountains.

But to be honest what worries me far more is the fire season... last year's never ended, which means it only gets worse from here.

I'm from BC and for the last 30 years we have had summer watering restrictions even though we have more water than you. I have no pity for California right now. Waste not want not.

Is the problem with almonds that they are being planted on acreage that wasn't previously farmed, and thus increasing water use, or that almonds use more water than other crops that were previously planted there (which doesn't make too much sense, I'd think trees used less water).

water is already vastly overallocated in this state, and water conservation by residential users isnt going to do anything more than scrape the tip of that iceberg.

a significant cut in usage would move the city much closer to a situation where the city moves away from needing distant water sources.

Barker Dam had water in it on my last visit to Jtree. Your welcome LA.

Meanwhile, the nightly news tells you to quit flushing yr toilet.

I wouldn't be so quick to assign a California (western U.S.) drought to global warming or even climate change. Drought IS THE NORM here. It has been for a long time. Global warming might induce climate change here in California but projection models have been fuzzy on what sort of change... warmer, wetter winters, perhaps. Warmer drier winters not as likely but either way the projections are not solid.

Cattle rancher John Dofflemyer certainly sees it as exporting water abroad - he resents the fact hay is sent overseas.

which is most of California's 4.4 million acre-feet per year from the Colorado river, the desert farmers are unaffected by the reality of most. $20 per acre foot is the delivered price that grows the alfalfa.

"Late last year, Governor Brown was crowing about all the new housing starts, after a few years of almost no new houses being built in California. Where the f*#k did he think they were going to get water? From like a flying unicorn, or something? Maybe he thought Jesus would bring us water for all those new houses. Or Obama."

Remember I mentioned living in Fontana? In '77, there were 24,000 people living there. Then the Big Drought Of '77 hit, so we conserved water. Let the yellow mellow, and all that. Now, Fontana has a population over 200,000! . . . Today, after 35+ years of finding new ways to conserve water, I'm out of new things to do. This current drought will not alter my water use at all, because after a lifetime of cutting back, I'm through trying. . . . I'll . . . keep planting avocados . ... I'll be re-planting the lawn this year, too. The dogs like it ( and they miss it now that it's gone ), its monetary cost will be small, and besides, grass in the desert has the Presidential Stamp Of Approval.

The orange groves were here before the suburbs. Why should the latecomers usurp the rights of those that were here first? Just because you outnumber the farmers?

Everyone knows water conservation efforts never work. Just another one of Jerry's pipe dreams. Can one of you smart anti-science types explain this graph to me... it has numbers and lines and stuff on it, so it is very confusing...

All farm land should be converted to suburbia... resistance is futile.

Someone in government needs to have the balls to stand up to K.B. Homes and the rest, and say "the god damn boat is full here, go build somewhere else". And it should have been done forty years ago. Until then, I'll follow their lead, and keep planting avocados ( 40 new trees in 2013! More than that are planned for 2014 ).

Everyone knows water conservation efforts never work. Just another one of Jerry's pipe dreams. Can one of you smart anti-science types explain this graph to me... it has numbers and lines and stuff on it, so it is very confusing...

Anybody that actually makes a living, or

Gasp!

a profit at it.

What is "commercial" and "corporate" agriculture?

There's no way we can use the water from the Sierras here, or water from the Colorado River either, because water will not flow up-hill.

#1: From Bear Creek in the San Bernardino Mountains, via a 100+-year-old gravity-fed system of pipes and flumes delivering water directly to the groves. This system serves my neighborhood. This system pre-dates the government, and is privately run to this day.

#2: From a well on the grover's property.

So what you are saying is a system that captures water off of public land, which would otherwise drain down into public aquifers.
From a well on private property, that accesses water that is NOT below the owner's property, but sucks water in from farther out.
Both are subsidized systems.

A subsidy is a form of financial or in kind support

Tell me where the government subsidised anything.

Water Demand
Since 2001, the annual water demand has been reduced 30% through an aggressive water conservation effort by the community

Do better research, and you'll see how wrong your post is.

There's no way we can use the water from the Sierras here, or water from the Colorado River either, because water will not flow up-hill.

Generalizing about farming in this way is not helpful. You can't get rid of agriculture, so we better figure out how to make it profitable without subsidies -- either financial or environmental.

you might want to call me a irrational market niche

California drought: Feds say farmers won't get any Central Valley Project water this year

Friday's announcement followed a similar one last month in which state officials announced that there would be zero deliveries from the State Water Project to cities and farms.

The Santa Clara Valley Water District, which has asked 1.8 million people to cut water use 10 percent, will consider expanding that to 20 percent on Tuesday, spokesman Marty Grimes said.

1. Dude, the WHOLE POINT is small-scale and local. The WHOLE POINT is we don't "scale-up" and become just another mega-corp. The WHOLE POINT is we can feed people just fine and do so without direct (I say for your benefit) subsidies or charging an arm and a leg.

2. I don't grow "speciality" crops. I grow food. I feed people. Regular ordinary working people. They are not rich, they don't give a fuk about "organic" anything, but they do care if something tastes better. Or around here that they can actually get fresh food without driving down the hill. I would say at least 80% of our customers have very limited or fixed incomes. Some of our stuff is more expensive but some of it is actually cheaper than local stores or even, as I mentioned, Costco.

The whole mindset that you need to have 10% of farms producing 90% of the food is the problem. The idea of "get big or get out" in ag is the root of all evil in agriculture. All of it!

A relatively small farm like me, if it's efficient, can feed thousands of people.

So in a nutshell, you are completely wrong. Small-scale ag scales perfectly well! It's just that you need to stop thinking of monolithic farms and start realizing that spreading the load out over more but smaller farms is more secure, provides a better base for competition, provides fresher produce and is far more environmentally sound even without organic production.

now that there is a statewide public irrigation infrastructure in place, we could try to create the kind of small-hold farmscape that was once typical of, say, indiana in the late 19th century. i would personally be all in favor. but i'm not holding my breath.

How would you determine what size farm was a family farm?