Alfalfa..a cautionary tale and perversion of farming when sustainability is lost.

It is a mainly a story about California. The golden state that supplies over 1/3 of all vegetables in the USA..and about 2/3 of nuts and citrus. A state that has been ravaged by drought and yet grows thirsty crops like citrus, almonds and alfalfa.

In the 1970s, a farmer from the Midwest started exporting cubed hay to Japan. To this day, japan is one of the largest importers of alfalfa hay from the United States. The Middle East and esp UAE imports hay too. But the biggest importer of hay from the USA is China.

In the early 2000s, there was no hay exports from California. But it was the high season in Silicon Valley with iPhones and cheap plastic toys coming into our ports in giant shipping containers. Instead of sending them back empty..someone thought it was a good idea to sell hay to china. It made sense from a logistics pov because shipping hay would be win win for china as well as the USA.

Around this time in the early 2000s, china was barely importing 2% of our hay exports. Fast forward 15 years, china is the largest importer of alfalfa hay and takes almost 30% of the market share(if not more).

This happened because of the increasing prosperity in china and there was a spike in demand for milk. While dairy was once a luxury, now the prosperous middle class wanted milk for themselves and their families. But when they started dairy industry, they found that china was also losing arable land and there was no grazing land for the cattle. The aquifers were drying up and whatever water available was polluted with industrial wastes. Importing from USA was a good idea as alfalfa was high in protein and the best feed for milch cows.

How did this affect us? Imperial valley in California grows a lot of alfalfa for hay..you can do multiple cuttings in a year and fill all those empty containers returning to China. It was so profitable and the logistics made so much sense that it was cheaper to send hay to china than to the dairy central of California, Tulare.

Now American dairy farmers are competing with china for American alfafa. The pricing becomes competitive and the dairy farmers were going under because there was no way to make money on milk. Dairy industry is another out of control rodeo show but that's another story.

And then the drought happened. Alfalfa being a thirsty crop took a lot of water because it was more profitable to grow hay than food. But with little price wiggle room, we were selling alfalfa to china and exporting it to other countries cheaper than it costs because we were not taking into account of the cost of water. DURING a DROUGHT! How fucked up is that? It became a popular wry thing to say that our cheapest export was our water. We were selling water in containers to others while we were being asked to cut down our water usage and water rates was raised.

To make this all even more interesting, farmers were letting fields go fallow during the drought because water was too expensive. Citrus and almonds were becoming so expensive and they were our main exports. Many farmers lost everything and started selling pieces of their land. For which there were few buyers because there was no water!

And yet..why do we have this delusion that food is 'cheap and plentiful'. Because our food comes from South American countries..our quinoa..our gmo soy comes from destruction of rain forests and the break down of indigenous people from other places that are poor.

Our mega farms grow commodity crops like corn and exports what we do use for our hogs. Pound for pound, pork or meat is more expensive wrt water than vegetables. And here is the perversion, our biggest buyer of corn is Mexico. A country with a rich and diverse cultural and food history of corn..heirloom, native corn..has to buy gmo corn from USA while their own corn strains are disappearing. Their farmers grow tomatoes and chives for us because it's cheaper.

And round and round we go..a tangled web we weave...it's so messed up..I can pick up from here and tell you a 'dairy story' or a 'quinoa story' or a 'soy story'. It never ends and it doesn't have to be complicated.

Water needs to be treated as the precious resource there is..in a hundred years, countries might as well go to war over water not oil..and secondly, sustainability is key. Local food production is key. Govt needs to be reined in..they are taking away control of farmers over what they do best..they are making them into beggars and debtors. Lesser the govt interferes with our lives..and our food..it's better.

Nothing is sustainable..from the population of china ..to California exports to imports from Latin America.

And yet we imagine that all is well..food is plentiful and cheap..and food production is not something to worry about. I worry about it. A lot.