This particular policy will have an exceedingly small effect on the overall water situation in the West, and in the Southwest in particular. To know why, and to know what might actually work, we have to know how we got to this point.

A Brief History of Water in the West

In the early- to mid-19th century, much of the American West, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, was referred to as the Great American Desert. This was a little bit derisive, from the Easterners, but large swathes of the American West are either literal desert (both hot and cold: “Desert” refers to precipitation, not temperature), semi-desert or simply very arid. 

Throughout the known history of the American Southwest in particular, there are comparatively few large-scale pre-Columbian settlements, for the very basic reason that this area is not naturally well suited for such. This is not, of course, to say that people didn’t live here; the communities just tended to be smaller and/or nomadic, at least inland. There are exceptions, though. 

The coastal peoples of Southern California, including the Tongva and Chumash, were sedentary due in large part to the availability of seafood; they did not practice much or any agriculture, as it was neither necessary nor sensible in the environment. The Hohokam crafted wildly complex irrigation to create a home in what is now Phoenix, Arizona; some of their canals, a thousand years old, were paved with concrete and are still in use today. The Hohokam culture fizzled out and dispersed, probably, just a few decades before Columbus’s arrival, owing (also probably) to climate change that made the Phoenix area incompatible with life. The Ancestral Pueblans, who lived in parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, experienced a boom time for their cities, which turned out to be a cycle of wet weather. The climate changed; the Ancestral Puebloan people moved to somewhere wetter.

Barren landscape in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo by Sean Pavone, Shutterstock.

The American West, excepting the Pacific Northwest, has a very bad combination of precipitation factors for sustaining human life. The first is simply that it doesn’t rain very much; Los Angeles receives, averaged over the past 100 years, somewhere just north of 14 inches of rain per year. New York City gets between 40 and 50 inches per year. Phoenix gets less than 10. 

The other big problem is that, unlike in the East and Midwest, which have reasonably consistent rain (or snow) regardless of month, the West experiences long periods of absolutely zero rain, followed by a few weeks of rain that can be incredibly intense. So, even those annual precipitation numbers are misleading for, say, agriculture, which needs consistent water. It also means that the West is very prone to extreme floods, as waterways that lie dry for 10 months suddenly get the equivalent of the Mississippi River’s cubic-feet-per-second (CFS) flow all at once. 

From Colorado to southern California, Oklahoma to North Dakota, people have always lived in the West. But very rarely have they lived in one dense place without moving around, and the few times that has happened have not ended well. 

Westward Migration and Consequential Irrigation

The modern history of the West starts, really, with the Mormons, who were repeatedly kicked westward until they landed in Utah, which no other white people seem to have wanted. The Mormons turned out to be excellent at irrigation, first damming a small stream in what’s now Salt Lake City called City Creek, in 1847. By the turn of the century, the federal government had decided that the West could be tamed and made to provide in ways it never really had before. In 1902, Congress passed the Reclamation Act, which was designed to turn inhospitable and economically ignored parts of the United States into profitable members of the Union. Basically, the idea was that the government would sell lots of land in the West, and use that money to pay for irrigation projects in the West, which would make the West a nicer place to live, which would entice more people to live in the West. 

This, along with some historically wet years in the 1880s that caused the deserts to bloom, worked. (There was a popular, despite being quickly debunked, theory called “rain follows the plow” that posited that if you tried farming desert land, it would rain. It was sort of “if you build it, they will come,” but really, really wrong.) Huge populations flowed out of the east, south and midwest into lands formerly thought of as uninhabitable, enticed by cheap land and free water. That’s right, the water would be heavily subsidized by the government, in an effort to better tempt farmers. (We’ll revisit this later.)

Out of the Reclamation Act, the Bureau of Reclamation was formed to do all this irrigation building, and its major weapon was the dam. It dammed everything that could conceivably be dammed and plenty of things that shouldn’t have been. This obviously had untold destructive effects on the environment, but it created economies out of whole cloth. Many of these economies, including farming in the desert, were shortsighted, unsustainable and very expensive.  

An abandoned house in Kansas, 1941, after the Dust Bowl. Photo courtesy of the Everett Collection.

When the Colorado River was dammed repeatedly, the Mountain states demanded that, to approve huge and pricey projects such as the Hoover Dam, they’d need to get water for themselves. So they got water rights, but most of Colorado is too high in elevation, too cold and too dry to make sense for farming. It happened anyway, and Colorado (along with the Dakotas) became major producers of…cotton and alfalfa. There was already a surplus of these crops, so it made no macro-economic sense, and cotton in particular is a very thirsty crop, so it made no geographic sense. But it made micro-economic sense, in that you could move to Colorado, get cheap land and free water to grow whatever you could. To help prop you up, the government would guarantee prices for your crops. On an individual level, great. On any kind of broad scope, pure folly. This led to the Dust Bowl: inexperienced farmers using wild amounts of free imported water on land that couldn’t handle it. Eventually, it turned to dust, and farmers turned further to the West.

Who Has the Right to Water?

In California, the Central Valley was once, as Marc Reisner writes in his seminal book Cadillac Desert, a sort of Serengeti of North America: a massive grassland ecosystem in inland California, seasonal marsh in the north and desert grasslands in the south, home to millions of birds, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more. It has been almost entirely destroyed and is now the most valuable agricultural land in the country. 

The Bureau of Reclamation dammed every possible river to move water to southern and inland California. The Central Valley Project arose during the New Deal to move water from Northern California, especially the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, to the Central Valley. Farmers and engineers also discovered a massive aquifer underneath the Central Valley, the remnants of an ancient sea. They started to drain it at extraordinary rates, and the aquifer was not refilled, because the water that might have, eventually, refilled it was also being rerouted to farms. 

The Shasta Dam, one of the first major facilities built for the Central Valley Project. Photo by Wirestock Creators, Shutterstock.

The federal government has also issued gigantic subsidies to farmers in the Central Valley, in the form of incredibly cheap water and in crop subsidies. This has enabled the Central Valley to grow confusing crops for a desert environment, including almonds, citrus, avocados, pistachios and stone fruits, all of which need a lot of water. Farmers never needed to try to work with the landscape; they could overpower it through brute force and lots of federal cash.

Another major issue is the eager sloppiness, and sometimes, illegality, of the water rights systems. 

Originally, subsidized water was only supposed to be available to individual holdings of 160 acres, which was believed to be plenty to make a living in California. Farmers quickly blew past that, and enforcement was basically abandoned. That led to mass consolidation, with a prime example being the Westlands Water District, in which a few hundred incredibly rich farmers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying to receive vast amounts of cheap, imported water to run wildly profitable farms in the desert.

RELATED: California Wants to Pay Farmers to Not Farm This Year

Those in charge of allocating the water also, almost right from the beginning of these projects, have overestimated the amount of water that’s actually available. “The water agencies have promised, sometimes, five times more water than exists in California in contracts and with water rights claims,” says Carolee Krieger, executive director of the California Water Impact Network, or C-WIN, a non-profit advocacy group that fights for the sustainable use of California’s water. “We call this paper water.” Sometimes, a project will pass, with states signing off, based on an estimate that’s way off, or that becomes way off due to the realities of construction. Over-promised water leads those with water rights to take far more than they should, leaving less for everyone else and destroying ecosystems in the process. 

California’s Central Valley is the most extreme example, but there are agricultural operations all over the West that arose from the same zeal. Legislators and bureaucrats from, or obsessed with, Western states demanded water rights in order to pass water reclamation projects, and then demanded federal aid to keep the operations running on redirected water viable. 

The Central Arizona Project delivers water from the Colorado River to Tucson and Phoenix, and also to farmland in surrounding counties. The Columbia Basin Project delivers water from the Columbia River hundreds of feet over mountains to feed into Grand Coulee Dam, to feed farms in eastern Washington state. There are dozens of these projects, some of which benefited (albeit greatly) just a few farmers.

An Uncertain Future

In Los Angeles, the water restrictions have attracted criticism, and likely will meet with non-compliance. Some of the reasoning for this criticism is absolutely valid. About 80 percent of California’s water is used to irrigate the desert and grow water-intensive crops, while only about 10 percent goes to municipal use. (The remainder is used by industry.) Lawns in Los Angeles are bad for the environment, but they are not the reason why Southern California is running out of water.

The western states have repeatedly and continuously neglected to take action which could allow for the sensible use of water. Los Angeles has truly awful stormwater catchment systems, for example. Billions of gallons of water in Los Angeles County flow into the Pacific Ocean every year, picking up all kinds of pollution on the way. Programs to fix this problem have been proposed, passed, and then lapsed into bureaucratic stasis where nothing actually gets done.

Fields of drought. Photo by Nature1000, Shutterstock.

There’s also the not insignificant problem of evaporation. Most of the reservoirs and canals in the West are open-air, due to cost or earthquake issues. But they’re also in the desert. Millions of acre-feet of water (the amount of water needed to cover one acre with one foot of water) evaporate each year. 

In essence, how we got to this point is due to a few different key factors. One is climate change; this has happened before, which isn’t to take anything away from its anthropogenic causes or severity this time around. The West is hotter and drier each year. Another is the rampant cash grab of water over the past 10 years: All the available sources of water, be they the Colorado River, the Tulare Aquifer underneath the Central Valley, or the Owens River (which was stolen by Los Angeles, as depicted, a little loosely, in the movie Chinatown), have been dammed, directed and drained beyond all possibility of sustainability. Federal funding provided unlimited cheap water, power, and land, which was and continues to be used recklessly. 

I asked Krieger what happens if the Central Valley groundwater, which farmers are now pumping relentlessly to make up for the lack of subsidized water coming from the Colorado River projects, just…dries up. “Well, that’s what we’re all about to find out,” she said. We’re about to find out a lot of things.”

The post The Past, Present and Future of the West’s Water Woes appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But there are many other numbers involved here. A new study, led by Dania Francis of the University of Massachusetts Boston, analyzed USDA data to attempt to figure out the monetary value lost as a result of, largely, racist institutions and weird legal obstacles.

Francis looked into USDA census data ranging from 1922 to 1997, aiming to find, according to Reuters, the present-day value of all the acreage of land that was lost. The figure she arrived at is $326 billion, but even that, Francis acknowledges, is a very conservative estimate of even merely the monetary damage done to these Black farmers. 

RELATED: The CSA’s Roots in Black History

In an article for the New Republic, Francis and co-authors note that the value of the lost farmland doesn’t account for the fact that farmland is, as Bill Gates well knows, an incredibly good investment. “Developers have turned some of this land, like in Hilton Head, South Carolina, into incredibly expensive residential and commercial properties,” they write.

The current USDA, run by Tom Vilsack, has at least acknowledged the USDA’s centuries-long history of discrimination against Black farmers, although attempts to actually right the wrongs of the past have not been especially successful, with payments stalled owing to lawsuits from right-wing groups.

The post Study Finds Black Farmers Have Lost $326 Billion in Land appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Apparently, agricultural equipment has joined that list. CNN’s Olexsandr Fylyppov and Tim Lister report that Russian troops in the city of Melitopol, which has been under attack for weeks, have stolen around $5 million worth of agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership. Melitopol’s Museum of Local History was also, according to the New York Times, hit by looters, who stole a valuable collection of Scythian gold dated to more than 2,000 years ago.

RELATED: Honoring the Ukrainian Roots of American Wheat

According to CNN, 27 pieces of agricultural equipment were stolen, including combine harvesters and tractors. Russian military looters have, according to various reports, shipped stolen goods over land to friendly countries, notably Belarus. These particular agricultural items from Melitopol were shipped to Chechnya, but as with John Deere equipment worldwide, these were equipped with remote lock mechanisms that rendered them inoperable. 

Eastern Europe is known to be home to hackers who can make some use of remote-locked equipment, although, as earlier reports pegged the best-known hackers as Ukrainian, it’s not clear that the looters will have too much luck in recruitment. At worst, from the point of view of the looters, they may be able to strip the machinery of parts to be sold separately.

The post Russian Troops Reportedly Loot $5 Million of Farm Equipment, Only to Find It Remotely Locked appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Fertilizer prices, according to Bloomberg, have increased by 43 percent by some metrics, and fertilizer has become increasingly difficult to find for farmers in many different parts of the world. The shortage has pushed many to look to liquid animal manure as a substitute, but prices for manure have also been pushed to inaccessible levels. With increased prices and decreased access to fertilizer, the effects will spiral outwards: Farmers won’t be able to plant or yield as much, and food prices will increase.

The shortage of fertilizer has a few different causes; fertilizer prices are closely linked to energy costs, especially natural gas and coal. Those fuels are used both to power the energy-hungry production of fertilizer, and they are also used as ingredients in the final product. The rising costs of energy inputs caused a whole bunch of different effects, such as China stopping the export of fertilizer out of a concern for its domestic farmers back in October. China is one of the biggest exporters of fertilizer and fertilizer components like urea and phosphate.

[RELATED: Farmers Struggle to Keep Up With the Rising Costs of Fertilizer]

The other biggest exporters of fertilizers and fertilizer components are Russia and Belarus. Due to the war in Ukraine disrupting supply chains, as well as the many trade sanctions and bans levied by other countries on Russian exports, the flow of fertilizers, already tight, tightened further.

For many farmers, prices have doubled, tripled or simply aren’t relevant given that there’s no fertilizer to be had. In response, the market in and around manure, which includes animal waste, spreading equipment and transportation, has become a massive market, as long as there’s manure to sell. Reuters reports shortages in manure, which previously was fairly undesirable: It’s more expensive to transport and harder to apply than commercial fertilizers.

Because fertilizer sales are very global, with countries such as China and Russia shipping worldwide, the effects of the shortage will be felt all over. In markets where farming runs at lower margins than it does in, say, the United States, these increased prices will simply mean that farmers can’t farm, which in turn means very bad news for the cost of food.

The post Manure Supplies Running Low as Global Fertilizer Crisis Brews appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The current contract for the dockworkers union is set to expire on July 1, but talks to hammer out a new structure will begin on May 12, reports Laura Curtis at Bloomberg. The union’s expected demands are nothing unexpected: less investment in automation, wages and benefits. Though what’s unusual about this situation is just how much leverage the workers have.

Over the course of the pandemic, workers have processed goods at some of the country’s most important ports. Those include the US’s two busiest ports: the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, as well as the Northwest Seaport Alliance near Seattle and the Port of Oakland. During the past two years, the value of containers brought into these ports has skyrocketed, though not in always beneficial ways to the agricultural industry. The workers at these ports are more vital than ever to the trade and economy of this country.

[RELATED: Supply Chain Crunches Are Affecting Every Corner of Agriculture]

As for agriculture, conditions have gotten thornier. A study from economists at the University of California, Davis and the University of Connecticut found that dramatic inefficiencies have hurt American farmers. The pandemic caused the value of goods imported from Asia to the US to increase to such a degree that it was often more profitable for shippers to send back empty containers to Asia as quickly as possible, rather than loading up with American goods.

Until the pandemic, roughly 40 percent of shipping containers leaving ports in California were loaded with agricultural goods. Empty containers heading back to Asia were a huge and under-discussed problem; the authors of that study suggest that it led to as much as $2.1 billion in lost export sales for American agriculture.

As for the workers who are about to discuss their next contract, there’s been a reasonable amount of saber-rattling, as the union understands its excellent bargaining position and wants to secure as much as possible for its members. The union has demonstrated in the past it is also not afraid to strike; in 2014, workers in a contract negotiation caused billions of dollars in losses due to slowdowns they caused. 

American legislators and lobbyists, including the agribusiness-leaning American Farm Bureau, have pushed legislation to help ease the shipping backlogs that currently exist. (At the time of writing, the House and Senate were working together to reconcile the two different versions of the bill that each chamber passed.) But none of that will matter very much if the dockworkers decide to strike.

The post How Would a Potential Dockworkers’ Strike Affect Agriculture? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The vast majority of the USDA’s funding is mandatory, meaning that it reflects ongoing programs that don’t have to be re-upped each year; SNAP, for example, is a mandatory program. The total proposed funding for the 2023 budget isn’t very different from 2022’s, but there is an increase of about $4.2 billion, or around 17 percent, in discretionary funding. In general, there aren’t any huge shakeups for the USDA, but some changes in emphasis and, notably, some decisions that haven’t changed can tell us about President Biden’s vision.

There are significant new proposals in the budget for climate action, including $1 billion for climate-smart and conservation efforts, more funding for climate monitoring and more money for education and encouragement of the use of climate action through the 10 USDA “Climate Hubs.” 

[RELATED: Biden Bets the Farm on Climate]

The SNAP budget, easily the largest in the USDA, is proposed to increase to $111 billion from $105.8 billion. SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program, is an incredibly efficient program both for those who use it and for the economy as a whole; despite this, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has, according to Politico’s reporting, refused to extend some of the universal nutrition assistance programs that were created during the worst of the pandemic.

The proposal also includes, according to DTN Progressive Farmer, $44 billion for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to help smaller processing facilities, in a sort of attempt to lessen the control of the major meat processors over the industry. There are some extra bits of funding for minority farmers (heirs’ land resolutions, for example), rural communities (the expansion of rural broadband) and Indigenous communities (funding for research, education and grants). 

Outside of agriculture, Biden’s budget proposal includes increased military funding, increased funding for police and a new increased tax on the ultra-wealthy.

The post Biden Administration Releases 2023 Budget Proposal appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There is a wide variety of aquaculture operations, ranging from meticulously ethical to environment-destroying, slave-labor-using chaos farms. It’s a very complex topic; some environmentalists rail against the realities or possibilities of pollution, excess fertilizer leading to algae blooms, escaped animals that out-compete local species and high energy use. Some activists point out the many labor violations that occur around the world (please be careful where you buy your shrimp!). 

The realities of aquaculture don’t always line up with the possibilities, which is why so many are against it, but those possibilities are intriguing. Theoretically, fish farming could ease bycatch and overfishing issues, have lower feed requirements by yield than land animals and could, in the case of bivalves, actually clean the water. That this doesn’t currently happen on a large-scale basis doesn’t mean that it couldn’t. 

President Joe Biden, so far in his tenure, hasn’t said or done much about aquaculture, but a highly publicized letter to the president pleaded with him to establish more rules and permits for offshore aquaculture. That letter was signed—just to add to the confusion of who supports what—by sustainable seafood pioneer Taylor Shellfish Farms and some respected scientists, as well as Cargill and Red Lobster, which mostly want more aquaculture so they can sell more and buy for less, respectively. 

In any case, this particular study takes a closer look at the climate effects of farming three types of marine products: seaweed, bivalves and fish. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here! Seaweed, for example, can serve as an effective carbon sink, but the whole thing with storing carbon dioxide is that the storage medium—the seaweed—has to actually go somewhere. On land, carbon storage is done in the soil or in plants themselves. If seaweed is acting as that storage medium, well, what do you do with it? The seaweed, write the researchers, could be actively or passively sunk, but what are the effects of that seaweed on ocean floor ecosystems? More research, they say, would be needed.

[RELATED: The Future of Ocean Farming]

Overall, the researchers find that fish farming is, of the three categories, the hardest to optimize for climate-related goals. Fish feed, which is often made from wild-caught fish in the first place, is a major problem, as is the location of offshore fish farms and the emissions (such as diesel fuel) for getting out there. Bivalves, as filter feeders that clean water, are pretty low-impact; the work left to be done on them is mostly in packaging and transportation, at least in the United States, where labor laws are comparatively strict. 

One of the biggest issues actually takes place off the farm entirely: transportation. Some very high-value fish, such as tuna and salmon, are farmed, and those fish must be transported very quickly to their freshness-demanding markets. Rapid transportation via air is not ideal, climate-wise. 

The researchers have a list of six major suggestions, including farming some categories together (like fish and seaweed or bivalves and seaweed), fixing all the infrastructure and transportation issues (good luck with that, especially amidst our worsening supply chain issues), and effectively monitoring the carbon output of all the many different types of aquaculture operations. “Unsurprisingly,” they write, “there is not a single silver bullet solution that works in all sectors and situations.”

The post Where to Look for Climate- and Environment-Friendly Seafood appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This particular strain of bird flu can, unlike many others, actually spread from bird to human; the CDC says that infection is rare, but that approximately 60 percent of people infected have not survived. It’s of significantly more concern to the poultry industry. H5N1 is stable in wild bird populations, but it has the ability to sweep through commercial operations, either killing or causing the preventative culling of millions of birds.

There are several ongoing H5N1 outbreaks going on right now; perhaps the worst is in the United Kingdom, which has been called “unprecedented” and perhaps the most damaging outbreak on record. It’s affecting wild populations, with some migratory species that are already threatened and getting wiped out in the UK, in Israel and the Netherlands. Also in the Netherlands, H5N1 has been detected at some poultry operations, and hundreds of thousands of birds have been culled as a preventative measure.

So far, it’s only been found in scattered wild birds in the Carolinas, but that isn’t necessarily of much comfort. North Carolina is one of the top poultry-producing states in the entire country, and the Southeast is home to all of the major chicken states. So far, the USDA has suggested minimizing contact with wild birds and double-checking biosecurity measures at commercial or backyard operations.

The post Bird Flu Is Back in the US appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Citrus greening disease is a bacterial infection spread by an invasive insect, the Asian citrus psyllid, which seems to have arrived on American soil via trading ports. It was first found in Florida in 2005, and it has since been found in the other important citrus-growing states, most notably California and Texas. In Florida, though, it’s been particularly destructive.

Citrus greening disease spreads quickly, and it results in unsellable citrus; the fruit grows small, never ripens and becomes bitter, along with developing unappetizing lesions. It’s generally assumed that fruit from an infected tree is not fit for sale. Worse, it also causes the tree to drop leaves and sometimes die. 

[RELATED: Researchers Find Possible Answer to Citrus Greening]

Florida, over the past decade, has been aggressive in attempting to stamp out the disease. That even led to lawsuits for the destruction of unaffected trees. The state’s rules required that any tree within 1,900 feet of an infected tree be destroyed, regardless of whether that tree was infected. That led to tens of thousands of citrus trees being cut down by the state government, some of which were backyard trees, but some of which were in commercial groves. (Some homeowners sued the state, and they will receive about $700 per destroyed healthy tree.)

Scientists and researchers have been attempting to find some kind of cure for citrus greening disease, and while there are some promising leads, there currently is no cure yet. As a result, the USDA says that Florida’s orange harvest for this winter is now projected at 44.5 million boxes (each box contains 90 pounds of oranges). That would be the lowest since the 1944/1945 season, and maybe even worse, that would actually place Florida below California for orange production. Florida traditionally tends to produce oranges for the juice market, while California’s are more for fresh eating, although both states produce a wide variety.

The post Florida Forecasted to Have Smallest Orange Crop Since 1945 appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Scientists and researchers have been working on all kinds of ways to minimize fertilizer use to just what’s needed, and one of the main prongs of those attempts is to more precisely measure the levels of fertilizer in fields. Once we know exactly how much is present, it’s easier to not overdo it. One promising advancement was just announced by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and it relies on sensors attached to planes.

The new system uses hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy sensors in the form of the ASD FieldSpec 4, a palm-sized device that can collect image data on an incredibly precise, granular basis. These devices pick up imaging data far more detailed than what the human eye can see. That includes, apparently, nitrogen levels in plant leaves.

The researchers used the hyperspectral sensors to measure plant leaves at different levels of photosynthesis, which is correlated with how well fertilized the plants are. They then created an algorithm that can take that hyperspectral data and churn out results of nitrogen levels. 

This system is sensitive enough that the researchers actually attached the sensors to planes flying 500 meters above cornfields in Illinois, and by flying back and forth only three times, they found that they could pick up an astounding amount of data. The researchers went into the field to do on-the-ground nitrogen tests to compare with and found that the plane system gave about 85 percent accuracy, which is close enough to on-the-ground testing that the researchers say the planes could replace it. And, of course, it’s much more efficient to fly a plane over a field than to go out and take hundreds of soil samples for nitrogen analysis. 

The next step for the researchers is to try to get their algorithm to be used with satellites equipped with hyperspectral sensors; both the United States and India are working on this sort of thing.

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