You may have noticed in the news lately where the media has been discussing the California sever drought and water crisis. There are commercials that tell residents of California to conserve water and this affects everybody. I have heard that the majority of water consumption for the state of California is between the state government and commercial business and that only 5% is being consumed by consumers. I don’t know weather that is true or not, however I do know that California is an expensive state to live in. I haven’t been able to put a finger on exactly why it is so expensive. Now I know the answer why. This past weekend I drove up the I-5 to San Francisco and somewhere north of Los Angeles around Bakersfield all the way up to east of San Jose I found a huge issue why the state of California is so darn expensive to live in.
Here are some photos of what I saw along the way:
As you can see there isn’t a lot growing and it is arid, dry, and desert like.
Before long I started seeing signs along the roadway. Here are some of the signs I’ve seen:
I couldn’t believe what I saw. I saw signs stating that they need water to grow crops. One sign actually said, “millions paid and no water delivered.” I thought this was just the craziest thing I’ve seen. Why would anybody be trying to grow crops in this desert like area? I thought this would be a must better place to have solar or wind farms. It would be an excellent way to produce large amounts of electricity on land where much isn’t growing…well, I was surprised again. Before long I actually seen that fresh water was being pumped to this part of the state so that crops could grow. Here are the photos of the canal where water was being pumped.
Sure enough a little further down the road I saw farms that were growing everything from corn, to oranges, lemons, apples, wheat, almonds, and lots of other crops. Here are those photos:
Would you believe that they were actually raising cattle where the water was being pumped to? Here are those photos:
The weird thing was that in places where water wasn’t being pumped to, it was clear that things don’t grow there and here are some of those photos:
Now I don’t know whether it was a crack head, a hippie, or a politician who decided to have taxpayers pay millions and millions of dollars to pump precious California water to a desert area in order to grow crops, but I can assure you that the entire United States of America is not short on growing plenty of crops to feed the entire United States. It is very wasteful to pump water to this area of California in order to try to make things grow. I am actually really curious as to how much water is being lost by evaporation. I would guess that a high percentage of it is, since these water canals aren’t covered and water can freely evaporate. It would make a lot more sense for this area of California to put solar farms to provide energy that can be transmitted to other parts of the United States and have crops shipped to California. The electrical infrastructure is already here where these farms are. If you look in the background of some of the photos you will see power lines. It seems to me that the real water crisis is how the government of California is wasting the water. This is just one more reason why I can’t listen to the state of California’s government telling me to conserve water, while they are being so wasteful. I just can’t take the California drought seriously.