Id vote to take it a step further and charge agriculture market prices for water regardless of where they sell their crop. Seems like that would largely solve the issue altogether.

I've been long in favor of this and didn't understand why we don't do this, since it's a no-brainer. Then I learned that farmers don't get their water from the faucet. The water comes from their own wells, creeks running over their property etc. They have water rights that in many cases have been in place for 100+ years. Touching those and attacking their livelihood through such big moves would likely lead to more upheaval than any politician is comfortable with.

Well, then why not buy that water from the farmers at a market price?

That's an interesting idea. I wonder how that would work for things like not taking water out of the aquifer. I guess a rate could be negotiated.

55% of the California's allotment of water from the Colorado river goes to farms that grow feed for livestock. That's a considerable amount of non-well water that's being practically given away to allow corporations to profit.

Why subsidize water for agriculture at all. The USA is already the country spending the least on food in the world [0]. And the obesity crisis isn't shouting "well thought out agricultural plans" to me.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-consumer-expendi...

Agriculture subsidies and obesity are orthogonal problems in my view.

the reason why bread in the US is sweet, when compared to Europe is high fructose corn syrup.

US corn farmers are producing so much corn with subsidies, that they dont know what to do with it.

From here you get more subsidies for ethanol gasoline (ethanol extracted from food - corn), and more subsidies for processed food - HFCS being added generously into everything!

Without corn overproduction, the sugar consumption would be much smaller in the US and diabetes problem would not be as severe as it is

They're very much correlated, even though obviously they don't explain anywhere close to all of the obesity problem. A significant amount of food advertising is due to needing to find ways to sell the tremendous surplus of some crops, milk, etc. that the US produces due to these subsidies. Food advertising is known to be effective and is a contributor to obesity.

I don't think mcdonalds advertises because they have a stockpile of corn and nothing to do with it. Food vendors advertise because more purchases mean more profit. The government subsidizes the corn producers basically whether or not they actually sell anything. The entire purpose is to keep them on standby if we ever somehow become completely cut off from the rest of the world.

I'm pretty sure mcdonalds and frito lays would still be advertising even if their input resources quadrupled in price.

Everything is made with corn syrup because it is cheap, because it is an easy use for corn. If we made it easier to turn into other products like beef feed and ethanol, or less profitable to use corn syrup like with a tax, then there would be less corn syrup in food, but anything that doesn't provide an easy use for the oversupply will not work, because it just doesn't meet the desire of the US government to keep an obscene oversupply of corn in the market.

Government doesn't need oversupply.

It is just historically rural regions in the US farmed corn, and it was enough for the US and little bit of export.

But over time agriculture effectiveness has significantly improved due to: fertilizer technology (CF Industries), agricultural equipment (John Deere), seeds technology (Monsanto Bayer Dow Chemical), food processing.

Thanks to that, the yield has significantly improved and amount of corn produced has increased dramatically, even without increasing land

Think of Moore's Law, but applied to food instead of microtransistors

California's water apportionment is stupid as hell, and a perfect example of how 100 year old rules hamstring california in every way, and the "liberal" politicians there do not care to change it.

The way it works is that you have a set quantity of water rights, and even in a drought, your entire water right is fulfilled before the next person in line. This means that the farms on the bottom of the totem pole, which is ordered by seniority and 100 year old connections to grifters, not actual need or value or anything possibly meritocratic, gets whatever they can.

In fact, a huge publicized fight about water rights in california was only so the last group in line, a shitty farming company and group of companies in the literal desert, spent millions screaming about "We are letting all the water into the ocean to protect some dumb smelt" ended up with those smelt, which were the food source to lots of valuable fishing communities in the bay area, dying off and going completely extinct, and that farming community hasn't actually gotten anymore water because their original apportionment was not being fulfilled before, because it's a drought and they are last in line. This was a HUGE talking point all over fox news and it was stupid and meaningless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ