Saturday, April 18, 2015

You Don't Get More With Less

Sunrise this morning while I was walking the dogs was fabulous.
The cotton is coming up. The onions are also up. We have been busy tending to the almonds and knocking the caps off the cotton beds. Just another busy Spring week on the farm.

You Actually Get Less with Less
By Paul H. Betancourt
                  The Hippies of the 60’s had a mantra, “More with Less.” Sheryl and I even have a “More with Less Cook Book.” While it makes a pretty good cookbook, that is not the mantra for progress. You usually get less with less.
            I thought the “More with Less” mantra was a thing of the past. But, a few weeks ago I was in Portland for a sustainable cotton conference and one of my new environmental friends went on and on about how we will get ‘more with less.’ These guys haven’t had a new idea in forty years.
Yes, - I am all for conservation. I believe in the careful use of our resources. But, eventually you get less with less. We didn’t get more when our water supplies were cut back to ten percent a few years ago. UC Davis reported 40,000 people lost their jobs that summer. That’s not “More with Less” that’s a lot less.
This foolishness has to stop. We have not been getting more with less water the past two years. We have been getting much less. Tens of thousands of more jobs were lost in the past year as even more acres were fallowed. Food prices are inching up. That is simple economics. If you have less of a product with even demand price will go up.
Farming Is Not An Optional Industry

     This past week I have seen more comments about how the drought will not hurt the California. Let me remind you of what three time Democratic candidate for the Presidency William Jennings Bryant said a century ago-
“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

         Because everyone has to eat, every economy is built upon a strong farming sector. My last year as Fresno Farm Bureau president I heard countless politicians, academics, journalists and regulators say, “If California farmers can’t produce under these rules, we will just import our food.” Really? Do you think foreign producers are going to follow your regulations? Didn’t we have a poisoned imported dog food problem a few years ago? If they can’t even produce safe dog food do you think your food would be any safer?

We Are 25 Years Behind
            In 1992 the Governor’s father, Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown said they built enough canals for the future, but not enough reservoirs. “Additional works were scheduled to be built to increase project yield in an orderly fashion as more water would be needed (starting around 1990).” We are 25 years behind schedule. No wonder we have a problem. We have a water system built for 19 million people and a population of 38 million. Sure we need to conserve. But, there are not enough low flow toilets to solve this problem.

The Cold Hard Number
            As I pointed out in a recent column, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization calculates that it takes 800 gallons of water per day to produce food for one person. In California that means it takes over 30 million acre feet per year to produce enough food for each Californian. This is an irreducible number. You will not get more food with less water- you will get less food.

                  In general you don’t get “More with Less”, you get less. We won’t have progress with less, but by carefully building on the foundation of the past.

Brown, Edmund G. “Pat”, Achieving Consensus on Water Policy in California,
                  Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs, Los Angeles, 1992.

Howitt, Richard, et al., Measuring the Employment Impact of Water Reductions,
                  www.ewccalifornia.org/.../MeasuringEmploymentImpacts-092909.pdf


Jennings, William Bryant, Cross of Gold Speech, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/

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