Agriculture, Engineering, and Bad Outcomes

[Cedars]

The High Cost of Cheap Salad.

 

I have always thought the idea of channeling water for hundreds of miles to create farms in deserts was a bad idea.

 

"The U.S. government appears poised to turn over the rights to billions of gallons of water to a politically connected group of farmers in California, where most people are being asked to conserve. That's 15 percent of the federally controlled water in California."

 

"A decade ago, the district sued the government after a botched federal project left thousands of acres of cropland tainted by salty, polluted runoff, and caused the death or deformation of thousands of birds."

 

Calif. farmers negotiate U.S. water deal - Environment - MSNBC.com

 

There are many areas in the west where the salts in the soil cause this very same issue, all the way into the local ground water naturally. The government knew that this was an issue here when planning for the project.

 

Here is a good article about what this area was and what it has become:

Al Meyerhoff: For the Birds - The Huffington Post

 

"About two years ago Westlands Water District officials began pushing for a solution that few would have predicted: retire up to 200,000 acres of salt-contaminated cropland, cutting the farming here by a third.

 

Growers want that federal government to pay a fair market price for the land, and the bill could come to half a billion dollars or more. "

 

Transcript below:

Living on Earth: April 25, 2003

 

I would assume the growers believe fair market price is the value of the irrigated land as productive farmland rather than the desert it really is, let alone the nearly sterile environment their particular land use has rendered the land into.

 

Personally, I could go the rest of my life without lettuce and many of the items that are grown in this valley at such a high cost.

 

I think they should shut off the water, offer the farmers fair market value of desert and sterile lands and reclaim this area as the desert marsh it was meant to be.