“Rain! Rain! That is the prayerful cry….”
Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1934:
Archive of posts filed under the agriculture category.
The decline in California’s cotton acreage
In his keynote at last week’s Law of the Colorado River conference in Las Vegas, Metropolitan Water District General Manager Jeff Kightlinger pointed out something that’s not gotten a lot of attention in discussions of California’s drought – the extraordinary decline in that state’s acreage of cotton. Cotton’s gotten a bad rap in irrigation circles, because …
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A note on alfalfa export data
There’s a letter to the editor in the latest High Country News (it’s in the paper edition, can’t link yet) that repeats a California water myth that’s just flat wrong – the California Supergiant Alfalfa Water Use Export Myth. Alfalfa alone is using more water than all the other water uses combined, and most of …
Note to self: invest my next $31.8 million in Palo Verde real estate
All the cool kids seem to be buying up real estate in the Palo Verde Irrigation District. First it was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has upped its stake in the Colorado River farming valley to 22,000 acres. Now comes news that Almarai, a dairy company, bought 1,790 acres to grow food …
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New Mexico’s population history, now with added sheeply goodness
In response to my cattle v. people post earlier today, Tom Swetnam asked if I had data for sheep: @jfleck I have been looking for a graph like that! Do you have sheep numbers? Multiple times cows in early decades, I think. — Tom Swetnam (@Tom_Swetnam) January 10, 2016 USDA’s data only go back …
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New Mexico population (cattle v. people) through history
Lauren Villagran’s story in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the impact of the Boxing Day blizzard on New Mexico dairies is a reminder of the single most important trend in New Mexico agriculture in the last few decades – the remarkable growth of the state’s dairy industry. Some numbers on that below, but it reminded me …
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Global hunger, declining
Another indicator of the resilience of California agriculture
Despite drought, the value of California cropland land has risen 5.4 percent this year, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture survey data. No doubt my economist friends can help me here with an explanation of what this says about how the market is pricing questions about uncertainty, water supply and risk. Looks like …
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A Colorado River water use I can get behind: Palisade peaches
I assume this bluff above Palisade, Colorado, explains the name: Those are peach trees in the foreground, irrigated by water from the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, which first turned water in 1904 onto what a friend calls “as fertile a swath of God’s green earth as there is in the West.” The district’s water now …
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Regulatory arbitrage and Arizona’s growing nuts
“Regulatory arbitrage” is the business practice of shifting one’s operations to exploit differences in regulatory regimes. This often involves a geographical change, such as moving a factory to a place where environmental regulations are less stringent. That seems to be what’s going on in southeastern Arizona, where California nut farmers are moving into the San …
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