HAY! DOUBT ABOUT THE DROUGHT?

Making hay and burning up water in the desert sun – Shipping Rice and Hay (and lots of water) to Japan – Does it make sense? Is it sustainable? All this while California water officials cry drought

By Patrick Porgans and Lloyd G. Carter

In 2009, the last year of the so-called Great California Drought, some strange things happened: Growers had a “hay day” in the Imperial Valley desert; Sacramento Valley growers produced a near record amount of rice, and down south, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Met), the largest urban water supplier in the nation, experienced record-breaking water sales. All of this despite repeated mainstream media accounts in 2009 of an economy-wrecking “dust bowl” drought.

The two things that hay and rice have in common are that both of them consume a great deal of water for their dollar value and they produce very little net income.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the California rice harvest in 2009 was up nine percent from the previous year and near the record crop of 2004.

According to the rice growers’ publication, the minimum amount of water required to grow a crop of rice is about 42 inches; however, unavoidable losses due to percolation and tailwater outflows can add to this amount so that the amount of water consumed (or evaporated) can but can be up to as much as 100 inches per acre, depending on the soil. That appears to be enough water to drown the tallest person on earth.

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. According to records obtained from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California that is equal to the annual average water it supplied to all of its 19 million customers.

In 2008, University of California Davis data show California exported 52 percent of its rice production, much of it to Japan. http://farm.ewg.org/top_recips.php?fips=06000&progcode=rice&regionname=California . Furthermore, for every pound of rice exported, about 250 gallons of “virtual” or “embedded” water used in growing and processing that rice leaves along with it, according to “Water Footprints of Nations,” a 2004 study from the Netherlands for UNESCO (The report spawned the Web site www.waterfootprint.com .)

The rice harvest should be of great consolation to the chairman of the California State Water Resources Control Board, Charles Hoppin, who is also a rice grower, vice-chairman of the Rice Growers Cooperative, and immediate past chairman of the California Rice Industry Association.

Chairman Hoppin, in a March speech in Yuma, Arizona, complained the regulatory community, including much of his staff, doesn't know or understand the issues facing agriculture and "doesn't give a rat's ..."

According to the Environmental Working Group, rice subsidies in California totalled $2.4 billion from 1995-2009. In that period the single largest recipient of subsidies was the Farmers’ Rice Cooperative of Sacramento, California, totalling $146,174,297.

Unfortunately, USDA has not provided recipient detail for rice cooperatives. Farm recipients of USDA subsidies in California totalled $9,123,000,000 in from 1995-2009.

According to EWG, “Washington paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009, but to characterize the programs as either a "big government" bailout or another form of welfare would be manifestly unfair – to bailouts and welfare.” http://farm.ewg.org/summary.php

Hey! And where is that Imperial Valley water-gulping hay (and Sudan grass) going? According to writer Melinda Burns, much of it also going to Japan:
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 and feed 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. Container ships from Japan unload electronics and other goods in the Port of Long Beach, and the farmers fill up the containers with hay for the trip back across the Pacific. Since the containers would otherwise return empty, it ends up costing less to ship hay from Long Beach to Japan than to California’s Central Valley. Water is cheap for [Imperial] valley farmers . . . it costs only $100 to irrigate an acre of hay in the desert for a year.

It should be remembered that California agriculture now consumes 75-80 percent of the state’s available surface water supplies.

Although 2009 crop estimates are not in yet, according to USDA’s annual reports, the data reveals that agricultural revenues generated in California have been rising since 2000, and that include the first two years of the so-called drought. In 2008, total gross farm revenues exceeded $36 billion; although that appears to be a significant sum of money (net farm income is far, far less), it represents less than two percent of the $1.88 trillion Gross Domestic Product generated in the Golden State in that same year.

According to a report by the Peter H. Gleick, with the Pacific Institute, “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.” http://www.miller-mccune.com/business-economics/trading-virtual-water-3650/
 

Jobs and Water: According to the Pacific Institute’s report, “…there is a huge disparity in the number of jobs that 1,000 acre-feet of water produces in different sectors of California’s economy. The use of 1,000 acre-feet of water produces 9,000 jobs in the semiconductor industry, 2,500 jobs in commercial offices, 35 jobs in grape and wine production, and 3 jobs growing cotton [one job for growing rice]. Overall, 1,000 acre-feet of water produces 22,000 jobs in California’s industrial sector, 6,600 jobs in the commercial sector, and 12 jobs in the agricultural sector.”

Are the taxpayers, who have poured billions of dollars into California’s water infrastructure, getting a good return on their money? Is this type of use of the public’s water resources sustainable? In the past several decades tens-of-billions of dollars have been expended on government water projects. Between 2000 and 2006 California issued almost $20 billion in General Obligation bonds, for water- and water-related purposes, with interest payments will costs the public more than $30 billion in repayment from the state’s deficit-ridden General Fund.

Taxpayers may want to remember this when California’s “water lords” try to float another $11 billion water bond ($22 billion by the time it is paid off) in the 2012 election.
Lloyd G. Carter has a website, www.lloydgcarter.com , Patrick Porgans www.planetarysolutionaries.org