California Goes Nuts

According to the following op-ed written by an almond farmer, they&#x27;re paying $1000 per acre-foot for their discount water. That works out to three gallons for a penny. And that&#x27;s 40x what they were paying quite recently.<p>To put that in perspective, if you were paying $1000 per acre-foot for the water in your home, you could flush your toilet 42 times a day for a month and your bill would come to less than $5. Remember that the next time someone tells you to let it mellow.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;op-ed&#x2F;la-oe-gleason-almond-farmer-20150326-story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;op-ed&#x2F;la-oe-gleason-almond-fa...</a>

I never quite got what &quot;it takes x gallons&quot; actually means. Where does the water go? Does it get sucked up by the plant somehow? Does the plant split the water into oxygen&#x2F;hydrogen and those get bound to some other atom? Does it just disappear into the ground and end up as groundwater? Does it just evaporate and rain down somewhere else? Does it end up going to a river and ending up in the ocean as saltwater?<p>(Actual question)

I am going to think twice before buying nuts again...<p>It takes 1 gallon of water to grow 1 almond! How many almonds&#x27; worth of water does it take to:<p>* Flush a toilet: 1.6<p>* Run a dishwasher: 8<p>* Run a garden hose for 2 min: 20<p>* Take 10-min shower: 25<p>* Do a load of laundry: 45<p>How much water per year does it take to (in billions of cubic meters):<p>* produce all of the almonds in California: 3.6<p>* provide water to all Los Angeles homes and businesses: 0.86<p>* provide water to all San Francisco homes and businesses: 0.11

The photography in this article is gorgeous, the material is great, and the presentation is almost flawless. I continue to be impressed with the output on Medium - I wonder how they manage to get outlets like Mother Jones to grace them with such awesome content.

The images of California reservoirs remind me of images of the Aral sea in Uzbekistan which was drained during Soviet times in order to grow cotton in the middle of the Central Asian desert. Humans really are greedy and stupid.

Sounds like the state needs to let the price of water rise naturally according to its increased scarcity. That should raise the price of nuts, which will lower demand and bring water consumption back to equilibrium.<p>Hold the price down on a resource that has its supply drastically cut and we&#x27;ll end up with scarcity.

This is why we should be looking seriously at desalinization for both drinking and irragation water.<p>With proper designs, we should be able to mitigate a lot of the bad side effects while protecting more of the land based ecosystems.

As a fun thought experiment I tried thinking about this issue as if it affected my profession (software development). Imagine if electricity was going scarce. Yet prices are pretty cheap in the kWh such that I don&#x27;t really notice it. I just pay my monthly bill (actually it auto-pays itself) and I go on my merry way. But what if the electricity problem was real such that at a certain point we wouldn&#x27;t have any light. Would I change my profession to &quot;do my part&quot;? Probably not. This is why you can&#x27;t expect almond farmers to stop pumping ground water. This is their livelihood. They have families to support too. They need to pay their rents and buy food and maybe have some fun from time to time. That raises the question...who is going to be first? How does the government even begin to regulate? What a mess.

To put this in another perspective; 1 gallon = 128 ounces. If you&#x27;re supposed to drink 6 to 8 8oz glasses of water a day, for the same amount of water you could either remain well-hydrated for 2 to 3 days or eat a single almond.

meanwhile california residents are lectured about watering lawns

&gt; [H]e’s heard ... that I’m a magazine writer looking into California’s almond boom. He demands to know what my angle is. Am I going to blame almonds for the state’s mounting water woes, like other articles have?<p>&gt; When I assure him I’m after the whole story, he softens.<p>And yet, is not blaming almonds <i>exactly</i> what the author proceeds to do?<p>I&#x27;m not saying they aren&#x27;t to blame, but this seems a bit dishonest.

&quot;Low in carbohydrates and high in monounsaturated fat and protein, these nuts are buoyed by a rising wave of nutritional consensus and diet fads (gluten-free, paleo, low-carb, etc.).&quot;<p>Important point. The dietary fads seem to completely disregard environmental concerns and general impact on the production area.

I&#x27;m curious:<p>How do the following compare in water utilization, in typical preparation? Bonus: since we&#x27;re comparing gallon of water to gallon of caloric beverage, you get to use a dimensionless quantity! Or you can be boring and call it &quot;Gallons of water used per gallon of ____&quot;.<p>-Almond milk<p>-Peanut milk<p>-Soy milk<p>-Cow milk