Plan B Forum

California is the biggest agricultural state in the US - half the nation's fruit and vegetables are grown here.

Farmers are calling for urgent help, people in cities are being told to conserve water and the governor is warning of record drought.

But at the other end of the state the water is flowing as the sprinklers are making it rain in at least one part of southern California.

The farmers are making hay while the year-round sun shines, and they are exporting cattle-feed to China.

The southern Imperial Valley, which borders Mexico, draws its water from the Colorado river along the blue liquid lifeline of the All American Canal.

It brings the desert alive with hundreds of hectares of lush green fields - much of it alfalfa hay, a water-hungry but nutritious animal feed which once propped up the dairy industry here, and is now doing a similar job in China.

"A hundred billion gallons of water per year is being exported in the form of alfalfa from California," argues Professor Robert Glennon from Arizona College of Law.

"It's a huge amount. It's enough for a year's supply for a million families - it's a lot of water, particularly when you're looking at the dreadful drought throughout the south-west."

Manuel Ramirez from K&M Press is an exporter in the Imperial Valley, and his barns are full of hay to be compressed, plastic-wrapped, packed directly into containers and driven straight to port where they are shipped to Asia and the Middle East.
"The last few years there has been an increase in exports to China. We started five years back and the demand for alfalfa hay has increased," he says.

"It's cost effective. We have abundance of water here which allows us to grow hay for the foreign market."

Cheap water rights and America's trade imbalance with China make this not just viable, but profitable.

"We have more imports than exports so a lot of the steamship lines are looking to take something back," Glennon says. "And hay is one of the products which they take back."

It's now cheaper to send alfalfa from LA to Beijing than it is to send it from the Imperial Valley to the Central Valley.

"We need to treat the resource as finite, which it is," he says. "Instead, most of us in the states, we think of water like the air, it's infinite and inexhaustible, when for all practical purposes it's finite and it's exhaustible."

Historically, 80 percent of America's winter vegetables are grown in the Imperial Valley, but these days, the dominant crop is alfalfa. Every field, as far as the eye can see, is either growing alfalfa or has just had its alfalfa mowed down, ready for baling.

Gigantic storehouses of hay dominant the landscape. Everywhere, workers are either loading or unloading bales. The roadways rumble with the sound of hay trucks, and shipping containers packed with alfalfa are trucked toward the closest sea port.

“The Chinese market for alfalfa has absolutely exploded,” said Robert Glennon, a public policy professor Robert.

Glennon likely has his picture on dartboards all over Imperial Valley because he's pointed out the problems of growing a water intensive crop in one of the hottest, driest places in the country and then shipping the alfalfa overseas. It's the same as sending them our water, he says.

“They use 6.5 or 7 feet of water per acre per year. That's a lot of water and the worst part is, a lot of it is used in the summer, because it’s so hot and warm. Alfalfa grown under such tough conditions uses as much as four times more water than the rest of the year,” Glennon said. “It's north of 100 billion gallons of water in 2013 that went into producing alfalfa that was then exported to China.”

In most parts of California, farmers have been devastated by the drought and are barely hanging on, but in Imperial Valley, there is no drought. Farmers shifted from growing human foods to animal feed because of growing demand and higher prices overseas, where emerging economies have promoted meat and dairy consumption.

In just six years, hay exports to China went from 2,000 tons to 400,000 tons and it isn't just from California. In 2012, western states including drought-ravaged Nevada shipped 4 million metric tons of hay overseas which is 30 percent of all the hay produced in the United States.

California produces nearly 9 million metric tons per year. Nevada produced 1.2 million metric tons, and it was shipped it to China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other countries. United Arab Emirates and Korea got some of California's hay.