This is super interesting. I do some work in outdoor water use monitoring and California and water districts across the west are pretty starving for approaches to reduce water use. At the same time, there seem to be no real efforts being made to reduce water use where it is most gratuitous (read: agriculture). Home water use maybe accounts for 15-25% of the total water budget in some of these areas, but is something that is being singularly targeted by water districts.
What’s your stance on home lawns and golf courses?
Stance? They are easy to detect. Much easier than shaded turf grass or artificial turf. What I can tell you is that the term “non-functional turf” has entered the language over the previous 3 years in via the regulatory agencies. This term describes areas of turf grass like median strips or decorative turf around shopping centers (the strip mall soul patch bit of green near the entrance or sign).
These areas will likely be excepted in the current legal and regulatory framework, and its important to understand why. Groups like farmers or golf courses have strong advocacy groups going to bat for them in the water rights world. Other groups, like home owners, do not receive the same advocacy when it comes to laws, and often more importantly, agency policy (the interpretation and implementation of law).
So if we ban water use to golf courses, should we ban it to city (or heck, private) private sports fields?
In my personal politics, I’m as anti-grass as they come, unless its deep rooted annual grasses. But in practice there is a bit of nuance to appreciate, with a big part of that being that relative to agriculture, irrigated turfgrass is a nothing burger. Agriculture is far far more heavily subsidized with regards to water use, and far more wasteful. Look just south of pheonix and you see fields and fields of cotton. Southern Arizona is where your lettuce is coming from.
The Yuma area of Arizona only produces lettuce in winter as the Salinas Valley isn’t capable of producing veggies on the level needed for the country that time of year. Other than that, lettuce and most other veggies are from the Salinas Valley 3/4 of the year.
On golf courses, it’s the number of them which is obscene. Also, seeing it’s only the wealthy who are able to use them is another frustrating part. City sports fields are open to everyone while many golf courses have memberships. The amount of water it takes to upkeep a course is wild but doesn’t compare to ag for sure.
A 1/4 lb of beef takes roughly the same amount of water the average American uses showing for more than a month. Which blows my mind on soo many levels.
Water is life and we need to make moves to protect it. Thank for the work you do! Do you think charging cattle farms appropriately for water and removing some golf courses is a good place to start?
