Mother Jones: Your almond habit is sucking California dry

[LiberalElite]

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/07/your-almond-habit-sucking-califoirnia-dry?google_editors_picks=true

-snip-
California farmers will reap a record 2.1 billion pounds of almonds this year, the USDA estimates—about three times as much as they did in 2000. That's great news for the world's growing horde of almond eaters, because the state's groves supply 80 percent of the global harvest...
-snip-

[leftstreet]

1. Stupid headline

Not you, of course, the article

Why didn't they write 'CA Farmers can't produce enough almonds!'

[KamaAina]

2. 'Cause we're in the middle of a record-breaking drought?

[leftstreet]

4. And that's the consumer's fault....how?

Why not just say 'record breaking drought...almonds, blah blah' ??

[KamaAina]

5. It's not.

It's the growers'. And all of Big Ag. Because water is heavily subsidized, thanks to their gigantic lobby in Sacramento , they have no economic incentive to conserve.

[leftstreet]

7. Indeed. Not the alleged Almond Junkies roaming the streets

Big Ag hires lots of PR people just for this very thing

[LiberalElite]

6. They grow them -

we buy them and then they grow more because we're buying more. It takes a lot of water to grow almonds and Calif. is running out of it. Growing a lot of almonds can't be helping.

[KamaAina]

3. Not to mention they use a ridiculous percentage of the whole country's bees

for pollination. Well over 50 percent. Factor colony collapse disease into that, and you've got a problem.

I just purchased a bag of California-grown... pistachios. The kind Colbert endorses.

[Retrograde]

8. You could substitute a lot of other fruits and vegetables for almonds

Any crop that requires irrigation - and in most of California that's any crop at all.