Well we are going to have to make drastic steps. Unfortunately for all of you we grow a significant amount of your food.
what makes economic sense to farmers may be becoming an environmental problem.
In the Imperial Valley of California, a region drier than part of the Sahara Desert, farmers have found a lucrative market abroad for a crop they grow with Colorado River water: They export bales of hay to land-poor Japan.
Since the mid-1980s, this arid border region of California has been supplying hay for Japan's dairy cows and black-haired cattle, the kind that get daily massages, are fed beer and produce the most tender Kobe beef....
... the growing state debate over water allocation should take into account the exports of crops such as hay and rice -- two of the most water-intensive crops in the West -- because they take a toll on local rivers and reservoirs.
"This is water that is literally being shipped away," said Patrick Woodall, research director at Food and Water Watch, an international consumer advocacy group with headquarters in Washington, D.C. "There's a kind of insanity about this. Exporting water in the form of crops is giving water away from thirsty communities and infringing on their ability to deal with water scarcity. This is a place where some savings could be made now, and it's just not being discussed."
Now, estimates of hay exports from California range from 1.5 to 7 percent of the state's total hay production. In 2008, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, California exported between 617,000 and 765,000 tons of hay, some of it originally brought in from other western states. Most of it was shipped to Japan. A minimum of 450,000 acre-feet of water was required to grow the exported hay - roughly what the city of San Diego uses in two years.
In 2008, the U.C. Davis data show, California exported 52 percent of its rice production, much of it to Japan. The California Rice Commission, a trade group representing 2,500 rice farmers, estimates that rice uses 2.2 million acre-feet of irrigation water yearly, about 2.6 percent of the state's total water supply. Rice exports, then, soaked up about 1.1 million acre-feet of water in 2008, or enough water to supply the city of Los Angeles for a year and eight months.
By another estimate, with every pound of rice that leaves the U.S., about 250 gallons of "virtual" or "embedded" water used in growing and processing rice leaves along with it,
Exporting all of that to Asia made a lot of California farmers rich...
Growing water intensive crops for export in a desert?
Problematic during a drought?
Who'da thunk it?
Uno
