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California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground

by TawnyaRiddle Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California is sinking—and fast.

While the state’s drought-induced sinking is well known, new details highlight just how severe it has become and how little the government has done to monitor it.

Last summer, scientists recorded the worst sinking in at least 50 years. This summer, all-time records are expected across the state as thousands of miles of land in the Central Valley and elsewhere sink.

But the extent of the problem and how much it will cost taxpayers to fix are part of the mystery of the state’s unfolding drought. No agency is tracking the sinking statewide, little public money has been put toward studying it and California allows agriculture businesses to keep crucial parts of their operations secret.

The cause is known: People are pulling unsustainable amounts of water out of underground aquifers, primarily for food production. With the water sucked out to irrigate crops, a practice that has accelerated during the drought, tens of thousands of square miles are deflating like a leaky air mattress, inch by inch.

Groundwater now supplies about 60 percent of the state’s water, with the vast majority of that going to agriculture. Tens of thousands of groundwater pumps run day and night, sucking up about 5 percent of the state’s total electricity, according to a Reveal analysis of the increased pumping resulting from the historic drought. That’s an increase of 40 percent over normal years – or enough electricity to power every home in San Francisco for three years.

The sinking is starting to destroy bridges, crack irrigation canals and twist highways across the state, according to the US Geological Survey.

Two bridges in Fresno County—an area that produces about 15 percent of the world’s almonds—have sunk so much that they are nearly underwater and will cost millions to rebuild. Nearby, an elementary school is slowly descending into a miles-long sinkhole that will make it susceptible to future flooding.

Private businesses are on the hook, too. One canal system is facing more than $60 million in repairs because one of its dams is sinking. And public and private water wells are being bent and disfigured like crumpled drinking straws as the earth collapses around them—costing $500,000 or more to replace.

The sinking has a technical name: subsidence. It occurs when aquifers are drained of water and the land collapses down where the water used to be.

The last comprehensive survey of sinking was in the 1970s, and a publicly funded monitoring system fell into disrepair the following decade. Even the government’s scientists are in the dark.

“We don’t know how bad it is because we’re not looking everywhere,” said Michelle Sneed, a hydrologist with the geological survey. “It’s frustrating, I’ll tell you that. There is a lot of work I want to do.”

Some places in the state are sinking more than a foot per year. The last time it was this bad, it cost the state more than a billion dollars to fix.

Joseph Poland of the US Geological Survey used a utility pole to document where a farmer would have been standing in 1925 and 1955 and where Poland was then standing in 1977 after land in the San Joaquin Valley had sunk nearly 30 feet. US Geological Survey

In the 1920s, farmers began transforming desert lands into verdant crop fields by pumping groundwater to the surface. At the time, these farmers were not just head and shoulders above their modern-day counterparts—they were actually as much as three stories above them. But then the land started to sink.

In the 1930s, scientists first noticed the land was sinking. At the time, the cause was a mystery. A legendary hydrologist, Joseph Poland, was assigned to solve the puzzle starting in the 1940s.

He realized that underneath the sinking land, groundwater was being pumped rapidly to irrigate crops. It created massive sinkholes that stretched for miles in every direction. In the farming community of Mendota, the land sunk about 30 feet between 1925 and 1977.

The sinkhole is so vast that it is essentially impossible for residents to see that they are standing in one. Poland used a utility pole to build a temporary monument to show them just how much the land had sunk.

The sinking, which peaked in the late 1960s, wreaked havoc on the state’s rapidly expanding infrastructure, damaging highways, bridges and irrigation canals. One estimate by the California Water Foundation put the price tag at $1.3 billion for just some of the repairs during that time.

The sinking did not slow until the 1970s, after California had completed its massive canal system—the most expensive public works project in state history. It delivered water from wetter parts of the state to farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere, relieving their reliance on groundwater. The problem was fixed—at least for a while.

In 2012, Sneed, the hard-charging geological survey scientist, received a startling report. Land was subsiding along the San Joaquin River at a rate worse than during the 1987-92 drought. It was nearing the historic rates of sinking recorded by Poland in the late 1960s. She couldn’t believe it.

“Is this even real?” she asked. “We hadn’t seen rates of subsidence like that in a long time.”

She and others began assembling what little public data was available. They got funding to analyze satellite data for parts of the San Joaquin Valley. They discovered that in one of the worst observed areas, around the town of El Nido (Spanish for “The Nest”), land was sinking at a rate of about 1 foot per year in 2012.

“It’s incredible,” Sneed said, expelling a puff of air as if she still couldn’t believe it. “We looked away for a long time. And when we looked back, whoa—it had gotten real bad.”

The El Nido subsidence bowl was sinking so fast that the satellite couldn’t keep pace.

No one has monitored it since. But Sneed and others contacted by Reveal said they expect it now could be sinking by 2 feet per year. That would be an all-time record.

Chris White, general manager of the Central California Irrigation District, said that last year, a farmer near El Nido sent him a photo of a gas pipe that had protruded more than 18 inches from the ground in less than a year as the land sank around it.

White said Californians now might have the opportunity to witness firsthand the devastation Poland chronicled in the 1960s.

“There is that potential,” he said.

Sneed is practically begging to expand her limited research. A hodgepodge of about 350 ground-elevation monitors—many leftover from the 1960s—are all she and other researchers have to track tens of thousands of miles that are sinking. This includes vineyards in Sonoma and Napa counties, areas around Paso Robles and Santa Barbara, and agricultural regions encircling Los Angeles, all which have shown signs of sinking, according to a California Department of Water Resources report.

To draw awareness to the problem, Sneed replicated Poland’s 1977 photo. Her photo captures the early stages of today’s worsening subsidence problem, she said. But she and others expect that it will get much worse.

US Geological Survey scientist Michelle Sneed shows where a farmer would have been standing in 1988, before a six-year drought triggered sinking in California’s San Joaquin Valley. It also shows how sinking accelerated in 2008. US Geological Survey

Many businesses and state agencies appear to be unaware of the problem.

Sneed and her boss at the US Geological Survey, Claudia Faunt, have tried reaching out to various government agencies and private businesses to warn them and inquire about the extent of damage being done to infrastructure.

“We tried calling the railroads to ask them about it,” Faunt said. “But they didn’t know about subsidence. They told us they just fixed the railroads and categorized it as repair.”

Thousands of miles of highways snaking through the state also are being damaged, she said.

“They go to repair the roads, but they don’t even know it’s subsidence that is causing all the problems,” Faunt said. “They are having to fix a lot because of groundwater depletion.”

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation said the agency does not track costs related to subsidence and was not aware of any current bridge repairs resulting from it.

But Faunt pointed to the Russell Avenue bridge that crosses the Outside Canal in the Central Valley. It sank during two previous droughts—one in the late 1970s and then again between 1987 and 1992. Now with the current sinking, the 60-year-old bridge is almost totally submerged by canal water.

Down the road about a mile, Russell Avenue crosses another irrigation canal, the Delta-Mendota Canal. That bridge is sinking, too, and now is partially submerged in water. Plans to replace it are estimated to cost $2.5 million, according to an estimate by the Central California Irrigation District.

The wall of a canal (left) cracks as the earth around it sinks. The top of a well (right) is pushed up and out of the ground as the ground around it sinks. US Geological Survey

The bridge is part of an $80 million list of public and private repairs already needed near the El Nido subsidence bowl because of sinking, White said.

Last year, the state passed its first law attempting to regulate groundwater, but farmers won’t be required to meet goals until 2040 at the earliest. And the information on who is pumping what will be kept private.

The Russell Avenue bridge once passed more than 2 feet above the water, but it has been sinking as a result of groundwater pumping and now is nearly submerged in the canal. US Geological Survey

“A doomsayer would say we will run out of water,” said Matt Hurley, general manager of the Angiola Water District, near Bakersfield. “But I don’t believe we’re heading there. We’ve been given a good opportunity with the sustainability law.”

But Devin Galloway, a scientist with the geological survey, sees devastation of a historic proportion returning to California. He says that even if farmers stopped pumping groundwater immediately, the damage already done to aquifers now drained to record-low levels will trigger sinking that will last for years, even decades.

“This could be a very long process. Even if the water levels recover, things could continue to subside,” he said. “This is a consequence of the overuse of groundwater.”

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California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

by WilmaR93bxwinuf Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The United States remains one of the globe’s most carnivorous nations, but things have changed subtly in recent decades. While our consumption of chicken has skyrocketed, we’re eating much less red meat.

Carolyn Perot

Overall per capita meat consumption has fallen nearly 10 percent since the 2007-‘8 financial meltdown; and as we cut back on quantity, we’re more likely to pay up for animals raised outside and not dosed with all manner of drugs.

Meanwhile, though, the meat industry lurches on, consolidating operations and stuffing its factory-scale facilities ever tighter with animals, as the organization Food and Water Watch shows in a recently updated map:

See the interactive version of this map here. Food and Water Watch

The charts below show the big picture. Note that the overall number of animals kept on US farms is leveling off, and in the case of beef cattle and meat chickens (broilers), actually dropping a bit. But the number of animals stuffed into each facility remains steadily on the rise for beef and dairy cows, hogs, and egg-laying hens. The number of meat chickens per site has plateaued—at the stunning level of more than 100,000 birds.

Among the many ecological problems you create when you concentrate so many animals in one place is massive loads of manure. How much?

These factory-farmed livestock produced 369 million tons of manure in 2012, about 13 times as much as the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population. This 13.8 billion cubic feet of manure is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium 133 times.

When humans live together in large numbers, as in cities, we’ve learned to treat our waste before sending it downstream. The meat industry faces no such requirement, and instead collects manure in large outdoor cesspools (known, picturesquely, as “lagoons”) before being spread on surrounding farmland. Some individual counties churn out much more waste than large metropolises. Here’s Food and Water Watch on the nation’s most dairy- and hog-centric counties:

Recycling manure as farm fertilizer is an ecologically sound idea in the abstract—but when animals are concentrated in such numbers, they produce much more waste than surrounding landscapes can healthily absorb. As a result, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus leach into streams and rivers, feeding algae blooms and fouling drinking water. Then there are bacterial nasties. “Six of the 150 pathogens found in animal manure are responsible for 90 percent of human food- and water-borne diseases: Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli 0157:H7, Cryptosporidium and Giardia,” Food and Water Watch reports.

Air, too, is a problem, as anyone who’s ever gotten close to a teeming cow, pig, or chicken facility can testify. Thousands of people, of course, are forced to live near them or work on them, and it’s no picnic. “Overexposure to hydrogen sulfide a pungent gas emanating from lagoons can cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, respiratory failure, hypoxia and even death,” Food and Water Watch states. “Workers in factory farm facilities experience high levels of asthma-like symptoms, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.”

And these counties tended to be bunched together in great manure-churning clusters. Note, for example, how most industrial-scale hog production takes place in the Midwest and in eastern North Carolina:

While Big Chicken has chosen to alight largely upon the southeast, the Mississippi Delta, and California’s Central Valley:

So why are these large facilities humming even as US eaters cut back? Globally, demand for meat continues to rise, and the dark-red spots on the maps above have emerged as key production nodes in an increasingly globalized meat market. US meat exports have tripled in value since 1997 (USDA numbers), and the industry wants more, as evidenced by its push to support the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with Asia.

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

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Google’s New Diversity Stats Are Only Slightly Less Embarrassing Than They Were Last Year

by GilbertBrisbane Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Around this time last year, Google shocked Silicon Valley by voluntarily releasing statistics on the diversity of its workforce. The move helped shame other large tech companies into doing the same, and the picture that emerged wasn’t pretty: In most cases, only 10 percent of the companies’ overall employees were black or Latino, compared to 27 percent in the US workforce as a whole. For its own part, Google admitted that “we’re miles from where we want to be,” and pledged to do more to cultivate minority and female tech talent.

Now Google has an update: Its 2015 diversity stats, released yesterday, show that it has moved inches, not miles, toward a workforce that reflects America. The representation of female techies ticked up by 1 percentage point (from 17 to 18 percent), Asians gained 1 point, and whites, though still the majority, slipped by 1 point. Otherwise, the numbers are unchanged:

Google

“With an organization our size, year-on-year growth and meaningful change is going to take time,” Nancy Lee, Google’s vice president of people operations, told the Guardian. Last year, Google spent $115 million on diversity initiatives and dispatched its own engineers to historically black colleges and universities to teach introductory computer science courses and help graduating students prepare for job searches. But unlike Intel, another big tech company that has prioritized diversity, Google has not set firm goals for diversifying its talent pool.

“While every company cannot match Intel’s ambitious plan, they can set concrete, measurable goals, targets, and timetables,” said a statement from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who last year played a key role in convincing Google and other companies to disclose their diversity stats. “If they don’t measure it, they don’t mean it.”

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Google’s New Diversity Stats Are Only Slightly Less Embarrassing Than They Were Last Year

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California Farmers Have Agreed to Water Cuts. What Exactly Does That Mean?

by OrvilleRuc Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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As California endures its fourth year of grueling drought, officials are getting more serious about mandatory water cuts. Gov. Jerry Brown imposed the state’s first-ever water restrictions last month, ordering cities and towns to cut water by 25 percent. But the vast majority of water in California goes not to homes and businesses but to farms, which so far have suffered minimal cuts.

On Friday, the state’s Water Board approved a deal with farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in which some farmers will voluntarily reduce water use by 25 percent in exchange for assurances that they won’t suffer reductions later in the growing season. “We’re in a drought unprecedented in our times,” said Board Chair Felicia Marcus on Friday. “The action we’re announcing today is definitely unusual, but we are in unusual times.”

Here’s a primer on how farms are using water now, who holds rights to it, and what restrictions may come next.

How much water do California farms use? Farms consume about 80 percent of the state’s water supply, and use it to grow half of the fruits and veggies that are produced in the United States. Almonds and alfalfa (cattle feed) use more than 15 percent of the state’s water.

What are water rights? Water rights enable individuals, city water agencies, irrigation districts, and corporations to divert water directly from rivers or streams for free. The rights are based on a very old seniority system: “Senior” water rights holders are the first to get water and the last to suffer from cuts. There are two primary types of these senior holders: Those who started using the water before 1914 (when the water permit system was put in place), and “riparians,” who own property directly adjacent to streams or rivers. Water rights often, but don’t always, transfer with property sales.

Who are senior water rights holders? Senior water rights holders are the corporations, individuals, or entities who either staked out the water before 1914, when the state started requiring permits and applications for water; those who live directly adjacent to a river or stream; or those who have bought property with senior water rights. This system made sense in the era of pioneers settling the Wild West: As the Associated Press recently put it, “Establishing an early right to California water was as simple as going ahead and diverting it. Paperwork came later. San Francisco got the Sierra Nevada water that turned its sand dunes into lush gardens by tacking a handwritten notice to a tree in 1902.” Today, there are thousands of senior water rights holders; most of them are corporations, many of which are farms. The holders include utilities company Pacific Gas and Electric, the San Francisco water agency, a number of rural irrigation districts, and Star Trek actor and rancher William Shatner.

What water cuts were announced Friday, and what’s coming next? The Water Board announced that it would accept a voluntary deal in which riparians in the 6,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (shown in the map below) would reduce their water use by 25 percent, or fallow 25 percent of their land. In exchange, the Water Board promised them that they wouldn’t suffer cuts in the coming year. There are about 1,000 water holders in the area who could be candidates for the deal, which will be enforced by a combination of a complaint system, satellite imagery, and spot checks.

In addition, the Board will announce mandatory curtailments to other senior water holders next week for the first time since the 1970s. The Board is still figuring out the location and percentage of these cuts.

So before Friday’s cuts, farmers were just using as much water as they wanted? Well, not exactly. Farmers with “junior” (post-1914) rights in the San Joaquin and Sacramento River basins, home of the normally fertile Central Valley, were ordered to stop using the river’s water a month ago. But the regulations are enforced by the honor system and reported complaints; so far, only a fifth of junior water holders in the area have confirmed that they are complying.

The Department of Water Resources has also made substantial cuts to the state’s two major water projects—a system of aqueducts, dams, and canals across the state that distributes water from water-rich Northern California to the water-poor Central Valley. Growers who use water from the Central Valley Water Project are only receiving 20 percent of their allocated water, and farmers of the State Water Project aren’t receiving any at all.

All of this has led more and more farmers to rely almost exclusively on groundwater, but it’s undeniable that the drought has led to less farming overall: Last year, five percent of irrigated cropland went out of production, and officials expect that number to rise this year.

What is groundwater, and how much of it are farmers using? Groundwater is the water that trickles down through the earth’s surface over the centuries, collecting in large underwater aquifers. It’s a savings account of sorts—good to have when it’s dry but difficult to refill—and it wasn’t regulated until last year, when Gov. Brown ordered local water agencies to come up with management plans. The water agencies are still in the process of implementing those plans, and in the meantime, no one knows exactly how much groundwater is being used. We do know this: Groundwater usually makes up about 40 percent of the state’s total freshwater usage, but lately, the state has been running on it. It made up 65 percent of freshwater use last year, and may make up as much as 75 percent this year. As a result of overpumping, the land is sinking—as much as a foot a year in some areas—and officials are worried that the changing landscape threatens the structural integrity of infrastructure like bridges, roads and train tracks.

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California Farmers Have Agreed to Water Cuts. What Exactly Does That Mean?

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You Won’t Find Many White Dudes at This Tech Startup Competition

by BHWJeannabk Posted on May 8, 2015

Mother Jones

The tech startup world is notorious for its lack of women and non-Asian minorities, as anyone who has attended the TechCrunch Disrupt pitch-a-thon (or seen Mike Judge’s spoof of it) can attest. But it’s not like the best concepts are always invented by tech bros.

There are plenty of great startups led by women, blacks, and Latinos—they just don’t get as much attention from investors and the press, diversity advocates say. To prove it, on Wednesday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. held his own San Francisco tech conference, PUSHTech 2020, in which none of the 10 startups competing for a $10,000 prize was led by a white guy.

“This gonna be real hard to man-in-the-middle this device,” proclaimed contestant Marcus Eagan, cofounder of Nodal Industries, referring to a common hacker exploit. A panel of judges from Cisco Ventures, Google for Entrepreneurs, Intel Capital, and other VC firms listened intently as he flipped through slides detailing his invention: a secure way to connect home computers with corporate networks.

Eagan, a 25-year-old black dude with wireless glasses and a fanny pack, came up with his idea after consulting for Target in the wake of a $160 million data breach. “Target wishes they were using Nodal,” said Eagan, who says he’s already sold versions to employees of the US Army Cyber Brigade, HP, and IBM. “The home network poses the greatest threat to the corporate network in 2015. Everybody works from home—or they don’t have a job.”

Few of the contenders pitched products aimed exclusively at minority groups—though several put a more inclusive flavor in the mix. Take the black-owned startup Oneva, an online referral site for background-checked nannies and babysitters. For her presentation, CEO Anita Darden Gardyne used a photo of Claire Huxtable from The Cosby Show as an example of a busy professional mom and a photo of Alice, the white nanny from The Brady Bunch, as a caregiver; the Oakland-based company’s other marketing materials use a similar approach. “That’s the world in which we live,” Gardyne told me. “So for me, those images just came naturally.”

The 10 contestants were chosen from a pool of 80 applicants by several groups that incubate diverse tech talent. Many minority-led startups have the requisite business savvy and tech chops but lack the angel-investor connections young companies need to get off the ground, says Wayne Sutton, the co-founder of BuildUp, which promotes “underrepresented entrepreneurs.” By bringing these businesses into the fold, he hopes to sustain and expand upon Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation. “Why do we keep seeing chat apps or photo share apps or emoji apps? Because the people working on those don’t have the same problems,” he told me. “That’s why we need funding for the people who solve problems and come from different backgrounds.”

Illustrating Sutton’s case for diversity was the competition’s winner: eHarvestHub, a website that uses sophisticated product tracking technology to help small farmers sell directly to large grocers and other retail outlets without a middlemen. Founder Alvaro Ramirez grew up in Nicaragua, where his father lost his small coffee farm to larger competitors. “It was like, nobody helps the little guy,” he says. eHarvestHub is already working with eight small farms, including the Bay Area’s well-known Frog Hollow Farm, and projects $200 million in revenue within five years.

I ran into Ramirez at the end of the conference during a drinks-and-soul-food reception at Yelp headquarters. We were standing next to a Sony PlayStation and several large bouncy balls covered in crocheted yarn. He was excited by all the money and advice that seemed to be pouring in—and just to be in the digs of such a well-known tech company. “This is what you know your future needs to look like,” he said. “So it’s cool to come out here and experience that.”

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You Won’t Find Many White Dudes at This Tech Startup Competition

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Washington State Is So Screwed

by ThaddeusChifley Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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California’s been getting all the attention, but it isn’t the only agriculture-centric western state dealing with brutal drought. Washington, a major producer of wheat and wine grapes and the source of nearly 70 percent of US apples grown for fresh consumption, also endured an usually warm and snow-bereft winter.

The state’s Department of Ecology has declared “drought emergencies” in 24 of the state’s 62 watersheds, an area comprising 44 percent of the state. Here’s more from the agency’s advisory:

Snowpack statewide has declined to 24 percent of normal, worse than when the last statewide drought was declared in 2005. Snowpack is like a frozen reservoir for river basins, in a typical year accumulating over the winter and slowly melting through the spring and summer providing a water supply for rivers and streams. This year run-off from snowmelt for the period April through September is projected to be the lowest on record in the past 64 years.

The drought regions include apple-heavy areas like Yakima Valley and the Okanogan region. Given that warmer winters—and thus less snow—are consistent with the predictions of climate change models, the Washington drought delivers yet more reason to consider expanding fruit and vegetable production somewhere far from the west coast. That’s an idea I’ve called de-Californication (see here and here). But we’ll need a new term to encompass the northwest. De-westernization? Doesn’t have quite the same ring.

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Washington State Is So Screwed

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There’s a Place That’s Nearly Perfect for Growing Food. It’s Not California.

by ShaunLadprsnu Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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California is by far the dominant US produce-growing state—source of (large PDF) 81 percent of US-grown carrots, 95 percent of broccoli, 86 percent of cauliflower, 74 percent of raspberries, 91 percent of strawberries, etc.

But all three of its main veggie growing regions—the Imperial Valley, the Central Valley, and the Salinas Valley—face serious short- and long-term water challenges. As I recently argued in a New York Times debate, it’s time to “de-Californify” the nation’s supply of fruits and vegetable supply, to make it more diversified, resilient, and ready for a changing climate.

Here are maps of US fruit and vegetable production:

USDA

USDA

Now check out this map depicting average annual precipitation. The data are old—1961 to 1990—and weather patterns have changed since then as the climate has warmed over the decades. But the overall trends depicted still hold sway: The West tends to be arid, the East tends to get plenty of rain and snow, and the Midwest lands, well, somewhere in the middle. So the map remains a good proxy for understanding where water tends to fall and where it doesn’t, though the precipitation levels depicted for California look downright Londonesque compared to the state’s current parched condition.

Not only is California gripped in its worst drought in at least 1,200 years, but climate models and the fossil record suggest that its 21st-century precipitation levels could be significantly lower than the 20th-century norm, when California emerged as a fruit-and-vegetable behemoth.

So here’s an idea that could take pressure off California. In my Times piece, I looked to the Corn Belt states of the Midwest as a prime candidate for a veggie revival: Just about a quarter million acres (a veritable rounding error in that region’s base of farmland) from corn and soy to veggies could have a huge impact on regional supply, a 2010 Iowa State University study found.

Now my gaze is heading south and east, to acres now occupied by cotton—a crop burdened by a brutal past in the South (slavery, sharecropping) and a troubled present (a plague of herbicide-tolerant weeds):

Let’s leave aside all of the cotton growing on the arid side of the map. (The drought is already squeezing out production of the fluffy fiber in California; as for the Texas panhandle, cotton production there relies heavily on water from the fast-depleting Ogallala Aquifer—not a great long-term strategy.)

What I’m eyeing are those cotton acres on the water-rich right side of the map—the Mississippi Delta states Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Louisiana, along with the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia to the east. According to the USDA, mid-Southern and Southeastern states planted more than 4 million acres of cotton in 2014. This is what’s left of the old—and let’s face it, infamous—Cotton Belt that stocked the globe’s textile factories during the 19th-century boom that delivered the Industrial Revolution (a story told in Sven Beckert’s fantastic 2014 book Empire of Cotton).

Decades of low prices have already put a squeeze on Southern cotton acres, and the fiber has recently slumped anew in global trading. Why not transition at least some acres into crops with a robust domestic market? I bounced my idea of a Cotton Belt fruit-and-vegetable renaissance off a few experts to see if it was nuts. Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, called it “noncrazy.” He pointed out that, as in most other parts of the United States, small-scale farms that sell directly to consumers are “already gearing up down there,” and added that the region “seems ripe for entrepreneurial companies to come in, buy land, grow farmers, introduce a whole new vegetable supply chain on a bigger scale, especially with California’s woes.”

I’m not talking about a fantasy in which everyone eats from within 20 miles (although such locavore networks, which have thrived nationwide over the last two decades, certainly add diversification and resilience to the overall food system). I’m simply pushing a more regionalized, widely distributed scheme for filling our salad and fruit bowls, one less dependent on California and its overtaxed water resources.

Scott Marlow, executive director of North Carolina-based RAFI USA, a farmer advocacy organization, also said the idea make sense—with caveats. One is credit. Marlow says that most farmers who still plant cotton are large enough that they rely on loans to start the growing season—and bankers understand and are used to cotton, but may find vegetables too exotic and risky. For such farmers, “if the banker won’t lend for it, they are not doing it,” he said. Reforms in the latest farm bill made it easier for “specialty crop” (i.e., fruit and vegetable) farmers to get good crop insurance, and that, in turn, made it easier to get loans, he said. But those changes take time to sink in.

He added that the South’s high levels of precipitation can actually be a liability compared to California’s aridity, because “rain spreads diseases through splash erosion, ruins product, screws up harvest, reduces product quality.” California farmers, who meet their watering needs through controlled irrigation, don’t have those problems.

But rain troubles can be addressed through low-tech means like high tunnels, which are already being adapted by Southern produce farmers to extend the growing season, but also to protect sensitive crops from rain, Marlow said. Black plastic mulch, another widely adapted practice, also helps keep crops healthy in rainy periods, he added. The South’s farmers have demonstrated the ability to innovate, he said, but “there have to be markets, there has to be risk management, and there has to be access to credit.”

Converting swaths of Dixie country to vegetables won’t be a fast or easy process. But if California’s water troubles drag on, as it appears they will, broccoli may yet emerge as the heir apparent to doddering King Cotton.

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There’s a Place That’s Nearly Perfect for Growing Food. It’s Not California.

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Here’s The Real Problem With Almonds

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Almonds: crunchy, delicious, and…the center of a nefarious plot to suck California dry? They certainly have used up a lot of ink lately—partly inspired by our reporting over the past year. California’s drought-stricken Central Valley churns out 80 percent of the globe’s almonds, and since each nut takes a gallon of water to produce, they account for close to 10 percent of the state’s annual agricultural water use—or more than what the entire population of Los Angeles and San Francisco use in a year.

As Grist’s Nathanael Johnson put it, almonds have become a scapegoat of sorts—”the poster-nut for human wastefulness in California’s drought.” Or, as Alissa Walker put it in Gizmodo, “You know, ALMONDS, THE DEVIL’S NUT.” It’s not surprising that the almond backlash has inspired a backlash of its own. California agriculture is vast and complex, and its water woes can’t hang entirely on any one commodity, not even one as charismatic as the devil’s nut almond.

And as many have pointed out, almonds have a lot going for them—they’re nutritious, they taste good, and they’re hugely profitable for California. In 2014, almonds brought in a whopping $11 billion to the state’s economy. Plus, other foods—namely, animal products—use a whole lot more water per ounce than almonds.

So almonds must be worth all the water they require, right? Not so fast. Before you jump to any conclusions, consider the following five facts:

1. Most of our almonds end up overseas. Almonds are the second-thirstiest crop in California—behind alfalfa, a superfood of sorts for cows that sucks up 15 percent of the state’s irrigation water. Gizmodo‘s Walker—along with many others—wants to shift the focus from almonds to the ubiquitous feed crop, wondering, “Why are we using more and more of our water to grow hay?” Especially since alfalfa is a relatively low-value crop—about a quarter of the per-acre value of almonds—and about a fifth of it is exported.

It should be noted, though, that we export far more almonds than alfalfa: About two thirds of California’s almond and pistachio crops are sent overseas—a de facto export of California’s overtapped water resources.

2. While alfalfa fields are shrinking, almond fields are expanding—in a big way. The drought is already pushing California farmers out of high-water, low-value crops like alfalfa and cotton, and into almonds and two other pricey nuts, pistachios and walnuts. This year, California acreage devoted to alfalfa is expected to shrink 11 percent; and cotton acres look set to dwindle to their lowest level since the 1920s.

Meanwhile, the market is pushing almonds and other nuts in the opposite direction. At a recent confab in California’s nut-rich, water-challenged San Joaquin County, Stuart Resnick, chief of Paramount Farms, by far the state’s largest nut grower, explained why in a speech, as documented by an account in the trade journal Western Farm Press. Almonds, he said, deliver farmers an average net return of $1,431 per acre. Pistachios, another fast-expanding nut hotly promoted by the Paramount farming empire, net even more: $3,519 per acre.

Given that Paramount reportedly manages 50,000 acres of combined almonds and pistachios, it’s safe to say there’s big profits in growing those nuts. And the company, which also buys and processes nuts from other farmers and sells them under the Wonderful brand, plans to expand by fifty percent in the next five years. Currently the company farms 30,000 acres on its own and buys pistachios from farms occupying another 100,000 acres. By 2020, the company’s “goal is 150,000 partner acres, 33,000 Paramount acres,” which would be a 40 percent jump in just five years. And that’s on top of the 118 percent expansion in pistachio acres over the past decade, according to figures Resnick delivered at the conference.

3. Unlike other crops, almonds always require a lot of water—even during drought. Annual crops like cotton, alfalfa and veggies are flexible—farmers can fallow them in dry years. That’s not so for nuts, which need to be watered every year, drought or no, or the trees die, wiping out farmers’ investments.

Already, strains are showing. Back in 2013, a team led by US Geological Survey hydrologist Michelle Sneed discovered that a 1,200-square-mile swath of the southern Central Valley—a landmass more than twice the size of Los Angeles—had been sinking by as much as 11 inches per year, because the water table had fallen from excessive pumping. In an interview last year, Sneed told me the ongoing exodus from annual crops and pasture to nuts likely played a big role.

4. Some nut growers are advocating against water regulation—during the worst drought in California’s history. “I’ve been smiling all the way to the bank,” one pistachio grower told the audience at the Paramount event, according to the Western Farm Press account. As for water, that’s apparently a political problem, not an ecological one, for Paramount. “Pistachios are valued at $40,000 an acre,” Bill Phillimore, executive vice president of Paramount Farming, reportedly told the crowd. “How much are you spending in the political arena to preserve that asset?” Apparently, he meant: protect it from pesky regulators questioning your water use. He “urged growers to contribute three quarters of a cent on every pound of pistachios sold to a water advocacy effort,” Western Farm Press reported.

5. Mostly, it’s not small-scale farmers that are getting rich off the almond boom. With their surging overseas sales, almonds and pistachios have drawn in massive financial players hungry for a piece of the action. As we reported last year, Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, an investment owned by the Canadian insurance and financial services giant Manulife Financial, owns at least 24,000 acres of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts, making it California’s second-largest nut grower. TIAA-CREF, a large retirement and investment fund that owns 37,000 acres of California farmland, and boasts that it’s one of the globe’s top five almond producers.

Then there’s Terrapin Fabbri Management, a private equity firm that “manages more than $100 million of farm assets on behalf of institutional investors and high net worth clients” and says it’s “focused on capitalizing on the increasing global demand for California’s agricultural output.” In a piece late last year, The Economist pointed out that Terrapin had “bought a dairy company and some vineyards and tomato fields in California, and converted all to grow almonds, whose price has soared as the Chinese have gone nuts for them.” The magazine added that “such conversions require up-front capital”—e.g., to drop wells—”and the ability to survive without returns for years.” Those aren’t privileges many small-scale farmers enjoy.

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Here’s The Real Problem With Almonds

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Marco Rubio Is Running for President. Read These 7 Stories About Him Now.

by KianWatling9965 Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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That makes three: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has told donors that he will mount a presidential bid. He is scheduled to officially announce his candidacy Monday evening in Miami with a speech on the steps of the Freedom Tower, the historic landmark where the US government processed Cuban refugees in the 1960s.

The first-term Florida senator was considered one of his party’s brightest rising stars until a doomed immigration reform push in 2013 eroded his support among conservatives. Rubio has since worked his way back to prominence, casting himself as a leading foreign policy hawk. His candidacy is not a surprise at this point, but it does set up a political soap opera, given that Rubio will be challenging another establishment-minded Florida Republican—Jeb Bush—who was once seen as Rubio’s mentor. Bush’s expected (official) entry into the race will likely diminish Rubio’s chances.

Here are some of the best Mother Jones stories on Rubio.

Meet the billionaire car dealer who could be Rubio’s Sheldon Adelson.
His presidential bid could revive interest in a number of past scandals—some of which have not been resolved.
Rubio was once his party’s leading advocate of immigration reform. Then he retreated.
He used to believe in climate science. What happened?
His ideas on how to beat ISIS are a little odd.
Will Rubio be the candidate of Silicon Valley?
Our original Rubio cheat sheet from 2012, when he was considered a potential Romney running mate.

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Marco Rubio Is Running for President. Read These 7 Stories About Him Now.

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

by JoannWreford Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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When most of us think of Mexican food, we visualize tacos, burritos, and chiles rellenos. But we should probably add cucumbers, squash, melons, and berries to the list—more or less the whole supermarket produce aisle, in fact. The United States imports more than a quarter of the fresh fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables we consume. And a huge portion of that foreign-grown bounty—69 percent of vegetables and 37 percent of fruit—comes from our neighbor to the south.

Not surprisingly, as I’ve shown before, labor conditions on Mexico’s large export-oriented farms tend to be dismal: subpar housing, inadequate sanitation, poverty wages, and often, labor arrangements that approach slavery. But this week, workers in Baja California, a major ag-producing state just south of California, are standing up. Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “Thousands of laborers in the San Quintín Valley 200 miles south of San Diego went on strike Tuesday, leaving the fields and greenhouses full of produce that is now on the verge of rotting.”

In addition to the work stoppage, striking workers shut down 55 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway, a key thoroughfare for moving goods from Baja California to points north, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada (in Spanish) reported after the strike started on March 17.

The blockade has been lifted, at least temporarily. But the “road remains hard to traverse as rogue groups stop and, at times, attack truck drivers,” the LA Times reports. And the strike itself continues. The uprising is starting to affect US supply chains. An executive for the organic-produce titan Del Cabo Produce, which grows vegetables south of the San Quintín Valley but needs to traverse it to reach its US customers, told the Times that the clash is “creating a lot of logistical problems…We’re having to cut orders.” And “Costco reported that organic strawberries are in short supply because about 80% of the production this time of year comes from Baja California,” the Times added. The US trade publication Produce News downplayed the strike’s impact, calling it “minor.”

Meanwhile, the strike’s organizers plan to launch a campaign to get US consumers to boycott products grown in the region, mainly tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, inspired by the successful ’70s-era actions of the California-based United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, La Jornada reported Tuesday. And current UFW president Arturo Rodriguez has issued a statement of solidarity with the San Quintín strikers.

Such cross-border organizing is critical, because the people who work on Mexico’s export-focused farms tend to be from the same places as the people who work on the vast California and Florida operations that supply the bulk of our domestically grown produce: the largely indigenous states of southern Mexico. And the final market for the crops they tend and harvest is also the same: US supermarkets and restaurants.

In a stunning four-part series last year, LA Times reporter Richard Marosi documented the harsh conditions that prevail on the Mexican farms that churn out our food. He found:

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.
Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.
Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.
Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences, and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.
Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

As for their counterparts to the north, migrant-reliant US farms tend to treat workers harshly as well, as the excellent 2014 documentary Food Chains demonstrates. The trailer, below, is a good crash course on what it’s like to be at the bottom of the US food system. In honor of National Farm Worker Awareness Week, the producers are making it available for $0.99 on iTunes. And here‘s an interview with the film’s director, Sanjay Rawal, by Mother Jones‘ Maddie Oatman.

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

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