California Could Be the Next Saudi Arabia

California's Imperial Valley: a desert in bloom. Thomas Barrat/Shutterstock


In the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia embarked upon a bold project: It began to transform large swaths of desert landscape into wheat farms.

Now, "desert agriculture" isn't quite the oxymoron it might sound like. These arid zones offer ample sunlight and cool nights, and harbor few crop-chomping insects, fungal diseases, or weed species. As long as you can strategically add water and fertilizer, you'll generate bin-busting crops. And that's exactly what Saudi Arabia did. As this Bloomberg News piece shows, the oil-producing behemoth grew so much wheat for about two decades that "its exports could feed Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Yemen."


But starting in the mid-2000s, Saudi wheat production began to taper off. Soon after, it plunged. This year and from now on, the country will produce virtually no wheat, and instead rely on global markets for the staple grain. What happened?

In short, to irrigate its wheat-growing binge, the nation tapped aquifers that "haven't been filled since the last Ice Age," Bloomberg reports. And in doing so, it essentially drained them dry in the span of two decades.

In an April 2015 piece, the Center for Investigative Reporting's Nathan Halverson brought more details. He writes that the first sign of Saudi agriculture's water crisis began in the early 2000s,when long-established desert springs—ones that had "bubbled up for thousands of years from a massive aquifer system that lay underneath Saudi Arabia"—began to dry up. It had been "one of the world's largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie." Here's Halverson:

In the historic town of Tayma, which was built atop a desert oasis mentioned several times in the Old Testament, researchers in 2011 found "most wells exsiccated." That's academic speak for "bone dry." The once-verdant Tayma oasis that had sustained human life for millennia—archaeologists have found stone tablets there dating back 2,500 years—was drained in one generation.

In the meantime, farmers' wells, too, began to go dry, and they had to drill them ever-deeper to keep the water flowing. By 2012, fully four-fifths of the ancient aquifer had vanished; and the Saudi government had begun to reconsider its make-the-desert-bloom ambitions, which have now turned to dust.

It's impossible to know when California's aquifers will go dry, because no one has invested in the research required to gauge just how much water is left.

Here in the United States, we've followed a similar strategy for fruit, vegetable, and nut production, concentrating it in arid regions of California, irrigated by diverting river water over great distances, and, like the Saudis, tapping massive ancient aquifers. But climate change means less snow to feed rivers and thus to water farms—and more reliance on those underwater reserves. In California's vast Central Valley, a major site of US food production, fully half of wells are at or below historic lows, according to the US Geological Survey. It's impossible to know when the region's aquifers will go dry, because no one has invested in the research required to gauge just how much water is left.

But the trend is clear. In large swaths of the region, the land is sinking at rates up to 11 inches per year as underground water vanishes, USGS reports. The raiding of the region's water reserve is part of a decades-long trend, USGS makes clear, made worse, but not caused, by the current drought.

Two other California regions are significant suppliers to the national food market: the Salinas Valley, known as the "salad bowl of the world"; and the Imperial Valley, which specializes in fresh winter produce. They, too, face severe long-term water trouble.

Unlike their Saudi peers, US policymakers don't have the luxury of waiting until the water runs out and then simply shifting to a reliance on imports—our population is more than ten times larger. One idea for what to do instead: Enact policies that boost vegetable production in other, more water-rich regions, including the Midwest and South—a process I have dubbed de-Californiacation. To bolster themselves, they may want to ponder what's scribbled on the ruins of a vanished desert kingdom, as imagined by the Romantic poet Shelley: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/11/california-saudi-arabia-fruits-and-vegetables

Quill, turn your lawn sprinkler off!

Yes...serious business. Big time fines for using sprinklers these days.

We have a huge weather system moving in right now. We'll see how productive it is.

Is it true that the Jews took over area's of land which the Arabs considered was incapable of producing food because it was mostly desert and scrub?

The Jews took this land and with hard work and dedication made it bloom.

The Arabs could have done the same, but they were too fcuking idle.

Now it's producing food they want it back!

nicko wrote:Is it true that the Jews took over area's of land which the Arabs considered was incapable of producing food because it was mostly desert and scrub?

The Jews took this land and with hard work and dedication made it bloom.

The Arabs could have done the same,  but they were too fcuking idle.

when?

originally Israeli, no the Arabs were still in central Asia.
and that was the time of Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians.
Both Babylonians and Egyptians have stuff that still impresses us today.

nicko wrote:Is it true that the Jews took over area's of land which the Arabs considered was incapable of producing food because it was mostly desert and scrub?

The Jews took this land and with hard work and dedication made it bloom.

The Arabs could have done the same,  but they were too fcuking idle.

Good grief, never met anyone who still believes that old story.  Talke for example the Jaffa orange:


Orange groves at Bir Salim


Located at the crossroads between Africa, western Asia, and Europe, Palestinian farmers produced a number of commodities for export via imperial and global distribution networks throughout the late Islamic period (1200–1900 CE). Among these were soap, sugar, barley, oranges, and cotton. Though cotton left its mark throughout the region, the only commodity, that remains a symbol of production in Palestine is the Jaffa orange.

The Jaffa orange was a new variety developed by Palestinian farmers after emerging in the mid-19th century as a mutation on a tree of the Baladi variety near Jaffa.^[1][2] While the sour orange (C. Aurantium) was brought westward from China and India by Arab traders, who probably introduced it to Sicily and Spain, the Jaffa orange was developed from the sweet orange (C. sinensis) which was brought from China to the Mediterranean region by Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, in 1498.^[2]


After the Crimean War (1853–56), the most important innovation in local agriculture was the rapid expansion in citrus cultivation.^[4] Foremost among the varieties cultivated was the Jaffa (Shamouti) orange, and mention of it being exported to Europe first appears in British consular reports in the 1850s.^[1][4] One factor cited in the growth of the export market was the development of steamships in the first half of the 19th century, which enabled the export of oranges to the European markets in days rather than weeks.^[6] Another reason cited for the growth of the industry was the relative lack of European control over the cultivation of oranges compared to cotton, formerly a primary commodity crop of the land of Israel, but outpaced by the Jaffa orange.^[7]


Jaffa Orange brand from Sarona





Exports grew from 200,000 oranges in 1845 to 38 million oranges by 1870.^[6] The citrus plantations of this time were primarily owned by wealthy Palestinian merchants and notables, rather than small farmers, as the fruits required large capital investments with no yield for several years.^[4][8] Fruits carrying the "Jaffa orange" label were first marketed by Sarona, a German Templer colony established in 1871.^{[citation needed]} An 1872 account of Jaffa by a European traveller notes that, "Surrounding Jaffa are the orange gardens for which it is justly extolled, and which are a considerable source of wealth to the owners. The annual value of fruits grown in Jaffa was said to be 10,000 pounds."^[8] In the 1880s, an American grower, H.S. Sanford, tried to cultivate the Jaffa orange in Florida.^[9]


Crates of Jaffa oranges being ferried to a waiting freighter for export, circa 1930

The prosperity of the orange industry brought increased European interest and involvement in the development of Jaffa. In 1902, a study of the growth of the orange industry by Zionist officials outlined the different Palestinian owners and their primary export markets as England, Turkey, Egypt and Austria-Hungary. While Palestinian cultivation methods were considered "primitive," an in-depth study of the financial expenditure involved reveals that they were ultimately more cost-efficient than the Zionist-European enterprises that followed them some two decades later.

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_orange}


Banana in Palestine 1930s

https://uk.pinterest.com/bradleyf81/historical-palestine-ottoman-provincebritish-manda/

The North African countries were also exporting olive oil and cork products to the United States and Palestine was shipping wines and potash from the Dead Sea.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vBuLBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=Olive+oil+export+from+Palestine+1920s&source=bl&ots=UtiyN7Usnd&sig=y95Lq6h3GGCIkcXeJDHpjkpI1tU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CE4Q6AEwB2oVChMIu9aIx6OJyQIVAbkUCh2h2Q3G#v=onepage&q=Olive%20oil%20export%20from%20Palestine%201920s&f=false

Original Quill wrote:Yes...serious business.  Big time fines for using sprinklers these days.

We have a huge weather system moving in right now.  We'll see how productive it is.

I don't think one huge storm is going to make much difference if underground acquifiers are running out.

sassy wrote:

Original Quill wrote:Yes...serious business.  Big time fines for using sprinklers these days.

We have a huge weather system moving in right now.  We'll see how productive it is.

I don't think one huge storm is going to make much difference if underground acquifiers are running out.

My experience is they fill up very quickly.  But what do I know?  It won't happen in a single year, nor in 5-years I suspect.  Here is Lake Tahoe: