http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080125/ap_on_re_us/farming...Bv46kcEeJKu42TRH2ocA

This doesn't make sense to me. Food prices are already rising from higher gas prices. Corn is being grown for fuel instead of food and now these guys are going to cut production to make a profit on their water allotments.
Now watch, if they pass laws to stop this, it will affect other farmers who never would do something like this. You know what I mean?
Its the few making trouble for the many.

Yes, I saw that article yesterday, and just about dropped my bag of cookies.

I know the people in Southern California need water, but since growers there supply the rest of America with a huge percentage of our fresh vegetables during the winter, you can bet this is going to have a serious effect on prices at the grocery store.

Here is another story link, older, that illustrates how serious the water problem is.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20071102-10...a-watershortage.html

What caught my eye in the above article was this..."Prices for consumers likely wouldn't change because cuts in supply can be replaced by imports."

But I don't want to eat winter vegies grown in Mexico or Central America. They have few inspections there, and many farmers there grow their crops in human poop. That's part of the reason why I think "Country of Origin" labeling is so important. Besides anything imported has to be shipped further, so how is that not going to cause a rise in prices?

It seems to be a complicated issue, and I am afraid its one that more and more of us are going to have to face. Atlanta is running out of water too.

The water shortage in So. CA seems to be primarily due to the fact that a federal judge said they couldn't pump water out of the Sacramento River because it was endangering smelt.

But I don't eat near as many smelt as I do vegetables...

We need to figure out what to do.

I don't know how these guys can sleep at night after selling out their country for a buck. The reason they have an allotment of water in the first place is so they can grow crops. If they aren't growing crops, their allotment should be reduced accordingly.
It sounds like they are opening the door for more regulations and farmers don't need any more hurdles. Growing food crops is enough work without having to play leap frog to get it done.
I hope they nip this in the bud before it becomes a big headache for farmers everywhere.

I've got a sister down in L.A. and I sure want her to have drinking water, but from a farmers' point of view, I absolutely agree with you.

Where I live, farmers have to stand in line to get irrigation rights, and they sometimes have to wait for years. The damn state has their nose in everything that concerns water; to the point that if you want to put in a pond for irrigation, the state will tax you on the rainwater you collect, tell you if you can put the pond in, and then try to tell you whether you can or can't irrigate out of it.

Water, of course, is what can make or break a farmer, and its already regulated to the hilt. If the jerks selling their irrigation water aren't carefull, every farmer in America will have to fill out a form in triplicate every time they need to turn on the irrigation pump.

The CA farmers are doing it because of greed. From the articles I've seen those farmers don't really give a damn whether the people in L.A. have the water or not. They are doing it because it's simply more profitable and less work to sell their water allotment than grow something.

After I've had a while to think about farmers selling their water allotment in CA, I know why I am so bothered by it.

The farmers growing annual crops realistically reason that perhaps the water should go to all the growers with expensive perennial crops; primarily nuts, oranges and grape vines, because those vines and trees are going to die unless they get the water they need. I'd love to think the water sale bit was so altruistic, but it's not.

The vast majority of those who have decided to sell their water allotment are the California rice growers. They are going to get a nice, big fat subsidy check for rice, whether they grow the rice or not. Now they are going to get another big, fat check for selling their annual water allotment. So the rice farmers are going to make more money sitting on their butts doing absolutely nothing, than the average American makes in three years of working 40 hours a week.

I don’t know when farming became such a racket, but they've taken what used to be an honorable profession and turned it into a den of thieves.

Farming became a racket when FDR started handing out subsidies.

At any rate, other then rice farming, there is no need for 9/10ths of the water that's used in irrigation in California. It's just cheaper to waste 90% then install more efficient irrigation systems like drip.