“WATER” you doing Gov. Brown?

California is experiencing one of its worst droughts in history. The reservoirs run low, and the wildfires run rampant.

As part of the state’s conservation program, a number of policies have been implemented to restrict household water usage. One of the most prominent is the restriction on lawn watering– if you have taken a walk down your neighborhood recently, most of the lawns are just cracked earth and brown grass. These policies certainly help the situation by eliminating frivolous water usage but are not very impactful in the long run.

People often complain about sources of waste apparent in our everyday lives. “Our idiot neighbor is a scourge to the Earth — he should stop watering his lawn” and “Bottled water companies should stop exporting out of California,” and “Maintaining the fairway maintains an unfair way of using scarce water.”

While I agree that these are all real and preventable sources of water loss, there is a larger source of loss that we infrequently see or hear about.

The government continues to neglect the largest consumer of water — the agricultural industry.

According to the California Water Science Center, Irrigation alone accounts for 60.7% of California’s total water consumption. Compare this to the mere 0.5% of domestic consumption of water.

So even if all households were 100% water efficient (or stopped using water at all) the total impact would be negligible. It would be like removing just a spoonful of snow from a driveway– you have undeniably made progress, but not significant progress. Why do so when you can break out the shovels?

While it is true that California produces a large portion of America’s food and supplies over 90% of the stock of crops, agriculture only accounts for only 2% of California’s GDP.

Yet it is still possible for farmers to save large volumes of water while maintaining the same agricultural output. Farmers currently practice many environmentally unsustainable policies.

For instance, many producers exclusively water their crops during the daytime. The sun evaporates most of the water before it even reaches the crops, so the best time to irrigate is actually just after the sun sets.

But because farmers have their water subsidized by the government, it is actually cheaper to pay for the extra water than it is to pay workers extra to maintain the fields at night, or change irrigation schedules. Logically, they continue these wasteful practices rather than irrigate at night.

I am not saying that households should stop saving water. Continue taking five minute showers and keeping your lawns dry — any improvement is better than nothing. But if we want truly significant change to occur, farmers must be willing to pitch in as well.

The most immediate and obvious solution is for the government to stop giving unreasonable privileges, like water subsidies, to farming combines. Will this drive food prices up? Yes, certainly, but also temporarily. Not to mention that the government further supports farmers by giving subsidies to certain crops. For instance, cotton farmers in California received about three million dollars in subsidies in just 2012 alone.

Farming corporations affect the food we buy by directly under-pricing or overpricing certain crops. If we were to eliminate these price checks, the invisible hand of the market would shift us back to “true” prices.

These prices may conflict with current societal expectations of food. Perhaps a food item we consider a staple suddenly becomes inaccessible to the mass public. But at the same time, other equally valid substitutes would become more affordable.

The government has long bowed to large established farming combines. During a drought as precarious as this one, the well-being of the people greatly outweighs superfluous and oversold economic opportunities that only benefit a select few.