"October 15, 1954: Hurricane Hazel exacts a death toll in an eight-state area, but brings an end to an extreme drought in North Carolina and Greensboro."
California is now in its 4th year of drought. 12 million trees have died in California's national forests. The price of water and fines for wasting water are going up in California as water becomes more scarse.
The Colorado River no longer runs to the ocean as so much water is pumped off of it the river runs dry before it reaches the coast. Farmers in the California Delta are fighting with farmers to the south over who gets to use the water in the Delta-- who stays in business and who goes broke. The 100 square mile lake in Owens Valley has been pumped dry and is now a dust bowl.
Not only farmers but ordinary citizens and other businesses are at odds with one another over
"riparian rights." Some predict actual water wars as all the best laid plans of central planners crumble under Mother Nature's wrath.
But it's even worse than that. From Think Progress:
"In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.
“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”
The California Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles between the Sierra Nevadas and the California Coast Range, might be the single most productive tract of land in the world. From its soil springs 230 varieties of crops so diverse that their places of botanical origin range from Southeast Asia to Mexico. It produces two thirds of the nation’s produce, and, like Atlas with an almond on his back, 80 percent of the world’s almonds. If you’ve eaten anything made with canned tomatoes, there’s a 94 percent chance that they were planted and picked in the Central Valley."
But there is hope. Maybe not for California but for the rest of us.
"But a lot of the things that California produces in such stunning numbers — tomatoes, lettuce, celery, carrots — can be grown elsewhere. Before the 20th century, the majority of produce consumed in the United States came from small farms that grew a relatively diverse number of crops. Fruit and vegetable production was regional, and varieties were dictated by the climate of those areas.
“There may be reason for the citrus and some of the nuts that are uniquely suited to the Mediterranean climate, but there’s no real reason that you have to produce all the fruits and vegetables. Those were grown other places before California came in,” John Ikerd, professor emeritus of Agricultural & Applied Economics University of Missouri Columbia, told ThinkProgress."
So why did it happen?
"Ikerd, who taught agricultural economics before becoming an advocate for sustainable farming, grew up in rural Missouri, where he estimates that the majority of the food he ate came from within 50 miles of his home. At that time, the Midwest was still covered with small and mid-sized farms growing a diverse portfolio of crops. Ikerd described a tomato cannery in the town where he grew up, built to process the tomatoes grown in the farms from the surrounding area. Orchards, too, were once plentiful throughout the Midwest, growing apples and fruit for markets both local and national.
But the tomato canneries and the orchards that Ikerd remembers have largely disappeared, replaced by fields upon fields of corn and soybeans, commodity crops that government subsidies help make the quickest, fastest way to profit in the Midwest. From 1996 until the most recent version of the Farm Bill, farmers that grew commodity crops like corn and soil were actually prohibited from also growing specialty crops like fruits and vegetables on their land. Anyone who grew a specialty crop on land meant for subsidized commodity crops would have to forfeit their subsidy and pay a penalty equal to the market value of whatever specialty crop they grew, a policy that did little to discourage farmers in the Midwest from becoming large producers of one or two commodity crops. The U.S. government spent almost $84.5 billion dollars subsidizing corn between 1995 and 2012, and a good portion of corn crops does not make it to a plate, instead used as ethanol or feed for livestock.
Of the corn that is intended for consumption, much of it ends up as high fructose corn syrup, which is now so ubiquitous it encourages maximizing the yield of corn at the expense of agricultural diversity. From 2002 to 2012, the amount of land dedicated to growing the nation’s top 25 vegetables fell from 1.9 million acres to 1.8 million. In the same amount of time, corn production grew from 79 million acres to 97 million.
“The deeper people look at it, they’ll see it’s a deeper part of the whole,” Ikerd says. “It’s not just a California drought problem, it’s a problem with our whole food system.”
I encourage you to read the entire article.
But there is good news for Greensboro. Last night a reporter from O.Henry Magazine, there to do a story for their July issue listened in and asked questions as a small group of people met on the grounds of what we hope will someday be the nation's first accredited Aquaponics production and teaching facility where people can actually learn how to build and run Aquaponics systems that produce 6 times as much food per acre while using less than 2% of the water of traditional agriculture.
Guilford County Agricultural Extension Interim Director Karen Neill and Extension Agent John Ivey answered questions about Aquaponics and explained the Ag Service's roll in the project including helping to bring in Aquaponics experts from North Carolina State University.
And we'll not have to worry about the weather as Aquaponics is practiced indoors.
Please, spread the word, get involved, change our city for the better and give your children the world you never had.
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