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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sdgla who wrote (130958)	2/24/2017 2:10:08 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217669

There's already a dam in virtually every watershed in California. Our recently passed proposition to improve this network will make better use of the storage we have. But the underlying issue is economic. Because 95% of the water used in California is used for farming it's not about having water, but having very cheap water. The recent 4 year year drought which just ended was the driest period in 500 years. Farmers long ago decided it's not economic for them to build additional storage to deal with such an extreme event. Even with this drought now ending, farm water districts are still not willing to pay for additional water storage. If the farmers wanted to pay for more water storage they would. A completely different situation is the West Central Valley which has never had any water rights so this land has traditionally been used for cattle grazing. There are some property owners in the West Central Valley who would like to farm water intensive crops, but they don't want to create a water district to store water because it's more than they'd like to pay. So these would-be nut and fruit farmers have been constantly lobbying Congress for Welfare Water whereby Congress will pay for the water infrastructure for their region and sell them the water at only 8% of the government's cost. Although you'll find this hard to believe, Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress have been wholly disinterested in building a Welfare Water Scheme for the West Central Valley so they can switch from grazing cattle to growing water intensive nut and fruit orchards. One California water project will provide these farmers with more water, but it may still end up costing them more than they want to pay. In Monterey County the Nacimiento Reservoir typically receives far more water than it can hold, it's currenty at 96% of capacity. But the Monterey County San Antonio Reservoir further to the east, which primarily supports farming receives less rain and is rarely more than half full. So the Monterey County Water District is in the process of completing the engineering and EIR for a pipeline from Lake Nacimiento to Lake San Antonio. Excess excess rainfall in the Nacimiento watershed area can then be pumped to Lake San Antonio. - mcwra.co.monterey.ca.us But even the cost of this short pipeline will likely make the water too costly for many of the would be farmers, so they still need to find a wealthy patron to help set them up in the farming business.