The irony is that with current incentives, it's a self-reinforcing cycle. Nuts have a huge return on investment, so nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water, so they plant more trees, etc etc.

What’s also ironic is that people can grow nut trees in arid land at a smallholder scale. Folks in the permies.com forum talk about chucking nuts randomly, and the ones that survive to grow on their own are more drought-tolerant.

If you are not trying to force greater yield in order to squeeze out profit, the nut trees can do well to yield enough for people to have their fair share.

When done as part of a practice that involves diversifying crops, the entire smallhold is far more resilient to any number of external pressure, including climate, pests, market crashes, etc.

Distributed nut farming is cool, and would solve my dilemma as a voracious nut eater. I cut out almonds for the amount of water they suck up in California, but probably every nut is problematic.

Too bad resilience against future problems loses to maximizing profits, so all the resources are capital-efficiently extracted from one location before moving on. Even if I buy local, it’s likely that it’s farmed at a damaging scale. I’m guessing that sustainable farming, crop rotations, etc have fewer externalities.

> nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water

(x) doubt

If they actually can pay for "very expensive water" i.e. water at the rates that residential/commercial users pay, then fair play to them. But from what I heard, they are only profitable by paying near-zero (orders of magnitudes less than other users).

Allow me to rephrase in a way that is more accurate but not substantially more insightful: "Nuts tend to be far more profitable than other crops, allowing nut farmers to expand their operations as escalating water prices squeeze out lower-margin water users."

What's the rough residential rate in AZ? Here in Seattle (obviously a MUCH different situation wrt water availability) I pay $6.96 per CCF (748.052 US gal, 3400 L). Even if every tree used an entire CCF over a season, that'd still be trivial compared to the amount of nuts you'd get (I assume)

California farmers use 40 trillion litres of water per year. At your rate that would be roughly 80 billion dollars a year or so. California's entire agriculture sector is worth around 50 billion a year dollars. So just the cost of water would be way more than all their earnings. And then you have to pay for equipment, pay for workers etc.

Agriculture water != Water you consume in a home. Even Desalinated it's at most 1/10th that price. And there are usually brackish sources that are even cheaper to recycle into farms.

The issue isn't the cost of water, it's that "free" water drives everything else (or imported water - the United States major export often seems to be exporting it's water in the form of crops, food, etc...)

I think their water privileges are not going away.

After Covid and all the disruption of international trade, self-sufficiency in food production will be considered more important than before.

With privileges come responsibilities; like forgoing the profit motive for an activity that must be so heavily subsidized by gov't influence.

In a normal year 40 % of the food the US grows ends up in the garbage, Canada is even higher at 50 %.

Almonds in California are reported to use about 2.6 billion liters of water and the industry is worth about $5 billion. So still not viable at $6.96/CCF, but maybe more viable than the average for Californian crops.

It's been almost 20 years but when I lived in Phoenix (and had a lawn) my water bill was about $25 a month. Now in the PNW, using a similar amount of water, my water bill is about $100 a month.

Water is heavily subsidized in AZ. There is little incentive to conserve it.

Are you actually spending that much on water though? Or water and sewer? Sewer is a lot (~$18 per CCF, iirc) more expensive. Farmers wouldn't have to pay that. Don't disagree about water in the SW being stupidly subsidized of course.

Yes sewer is a lot but I was paying for sewer in both places. Maybe Phoenix wasn't bothering to put any money away for future repairs.

Wouldn't surprise me. I also think Seattle's sewer fees are probably relatively high because of the upgrades they've had to do to the whole system to avoid dumping so much untreated waste straight into the sound.

I don't think the price you pay has everything to do with the cost of the water, but the distribution, servicing, cleaning of human-consumable quality water. The one price I do know for DeSalinated (among the most expensive) was $0.45/m^3 or 1000 liters (Hyflux 10 year commit, industrial quantity). The problem, of course, being that you need to be near the ocean.