Quote:
Originally Posted by saybanana
Does CA and AZ need to grow that much crops despite being two states with not much rainfall and half of the year only getting rain? Can other states with reliable water sources just grow more food?
|
Yes, you would think. But the Southwest has two growing seasons, so it's ideal for perishable crops like fruits and vegetables, which happen to be water-intensive. Us in the Midwest have only one growing season, so we are resigned to growing commodity crops like grains and legumes where the crops can preserve until the next year's harvest. We have millennia of irrigation techniques for addressing the water shortage in the Southwest, whereas our techniques for addressing the Midwest's wintertime deficit of sun are limited and expensive (greenhouses, basically).
That's maybe 70% of why the Southwest is such an agricultural powerhouse... the other 30% is farm subsidies that pick winners and losers and provide farmers with incentives to grow certain crops even in contradiction to natural factors like climate and soil type. These are the reason the Midwest produces far more commodity crops than America actually needs, so we're forced to put ethanol in our gas and high-fructose corn syrup in pretty much everything else.
But I would love to see regional produce get bigger. No reason Chicagoans should be eating fruits and veggies from California or Chile in the summertime when Wisconsin and Michigan are perfectly capable of growing those things. But it's always gonna be a niche market until politicians in DC get serious about reforming our insane farm policies. Right now both parties manage to agree on the farm bill every time it comes up, the only actual debate is over unrelated issues like food stamps that are jammed into the bill.