The figures above stand for the number of people who will be out of work, the number of acres of farm land out of production, and the number of dollars that will be lost. Farmers in the Central Valley of California are worrying that the lack of water in the Westlands Water District may simply put many of them out of business for good. Until now, Fresno County was the most productive ag area in the entire world, and most of that loss will occur there.The drought is blamed for federal officials’ decision to turn off all water to farmers from the California Aqueduct.
Oh well, that water was really meant to be sent to Southern California to flush toilets and fill backyard pools. Besides, we can always import food from Mexico.
An article in today’s New York Times which fleshes out the story is here.
Graphic: New York Times
4 comments:
I left my lawn sprinklers on for an especially long time here in Southern California. Someone has to use all the water that farmers aren't getting anymore. This also rinsed out the gutters down the street so they look real nice. The water was really cheap since it's illegal to adjust the price to fit market conditions. Yay!
I am so happy to hear the water will be used to grow grass, an agricultural-type use. Earthworms will thrive and provide feed for robins when they return. We can eat robins, can’t we? Perhaps the government can provide funds to train farm workers to process robins for human consumption.
As for clean gutters, well, that just increases the happiness level of city dwellers, which can’t hurt.
We are still on level 6 water restrictions here - 2 minute showers, no outside watering, no washing cars/gytters/houses etc. With all the floods you would think this wasn't necessary but somehow the runoff is almost complete. They are building machines that extract salt and othe rundesirable minerals from sea water here and recycling sewerage for us to drink that water....and flouridating it too. Yum.
We never wash our gytters here.
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