Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What to do? An acre-foot is the amount of water it would take to flood an acre one foot deep, and if you can find 70,000 of them lying around for the taking in Southern California, you can probably change your name to Yahweh and begin collecting burnt offerings. No obvious replacement source presented itself in the Mono Lake dispute until recently, when an economist named Zach Willey suggested that the city and the environmentalists get together to buy water from farmers on the western side of the Sierras in California's vast central valley...
...Water marketing, first debated in the 1970s, was an appealing idea: farmers use about 85% of California's water, and because they get it from state and federal water projects at subsidized rates, they tend to squander it. An acre- foot that costs Southern California urbanites $230 may cost farmers as little as $10, so even adding in the heavy cost of transporting the water in the state's vast aqueduct system, there is room for both sides to benefit from resale of unneeded irrigation allotments. The idea had two minor drawbacks: many California farmers would sooner spread salt...
...side of the San Joaquin Valley. An odd pair: Willey, somewhere over 6 ft. 5 in. in his cowboy boots, lean, green-eyed and with an easy grin; Graff, short and with a squared-off boxer's nose, but unpugnacious. As environmentalists go, they speak softly and strangely: California water distribution suffers under misguided socialist precepts, they argue. What it needs is fewer bureaucrats and more capitalists. Turn water into a commodity people can buy or sell, and the market will soon straighten out inefficient ways of using the stuff...
...wholesale taking away of resources from industry and farmers, or they're going to wind up litigating you for the next 100 years. You're going to do it through a system of incentives." His approach is to "go out and make some deals" with the people who control water rights -- the farmers...
...some groups in the valley that wouldn't sit in the same room with us." E.D.F. hopes to entice two of the more progressive irrigation districts, Firebaugh and Broadview, to risk heresy and agree to a 10,000-acre- foot pilot project. "The party line is that nobody takes water from agriculture. That's what they're going against...