pasture

In a typical year the California agricultural industry uses about 34 million acre-feet of water or more than 80% of the developed water consumed by urban and agricultural users in the state. Between 30% and 50% of that water is used to grow four low value, water-intensive crops: cotton, rice, alfalfa and irrigated pasture.

Letters to the Editor
Fresno Bee
July 27, 2007

Dear Sir or Madam,

The U.S. Department of Agriculture gets my inept federal bureaucracy of the month award for writing subsidy checks to 172,801 dead farmers totaling $1.1 billion dollars during the period from 1999 to 2005. This gives new meaning to the term “buying the farm.”

All the sordid details are available in a report from the Government Accountability Office located at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071137t.pdf.