Debbie Coffey
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Before we get to our featured article below, it is important to note that the BLM continues to remove wild horses and burros because of “drought,” or because there’s “not enough” forage and water. We know there is a “man-made” drought because of the huge amount of water used by mining and other extractive industries. Advocates need to be aware of all of the issues surrounding big users of water from our aquifers. I’ve listed a few sources regarding California’s dire drought below, but there are similarities in other states and areas.
A recent Los Angeles Times editorial by the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti starkly warned: “California has about one year of water left.”
Sonali Kolhatkar recently wrote an article “To Solve California’s Water Crisis, We Must Change the Nation’s Food System.” Residential use of water in California is about 4% and agricultural use is 80%.
Kolhatkar states: “The truth is that California’s Central Valley, which is where the vast majority of the state’s farming businesses are located, is a desert. That desert is irrigated with enough precious water to artificially sustain the growing of one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, a $40 billion industry. Think about it. A third of all produce in the United States is grown in a desert in a state that has almost no water left.”
Kolhatkar also states “When water allocations from the federal government were cut, Central Valley farmers began drilling deep into the ground to pump water out of the state’s precious, ancient aquifer. Now, the pumping has gotten so out of control that water is being tapped faster than it can be replenished by rain or snowfall, leading to some parts of the land literally sinking. What’s worse, California’s farmers are irrigating their lands with water from a 20,000-year-old reserve, depleting and probably permanently damaging a reservoir that formed in the Pleistocene epoch.
Shockingly, until recently, California did not even regulate groundwater use, unlike states like Texas. Anyone could drill a well on their property and simply take as much water as they needed for their own use—a practice that dated back to the Gold Rush.”
The New York Times also recently ran a big article on the drought. You can read it HERE.
Hopefully the links to articles above and the article below will give you some information on a few (of the many) issues with water and what is happening with our aquifers. The wild horses and burros are “the canary in the coal mine.” – Debbie Coffey
Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought
SOURCE: mintpressnews.com
“Nestlé is draining California aquifers, from Sacramento alone taking 80 million gallons annually. Nestlé then sells the people’s water back to them at great profit under many dozen brand names.”
Imagine 80,000 laying hens in a single building, crowded in confinement conditions, on “farms” with hundreds of thousands or a million birds. Is that organic?
The organic community has an opportunity to reverse this scandal and support authentic organic agriculture. The USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will be debating the meaning of outdoor access and stocking densities for organic poultry and other livestock at the upcoming meeting in Madison, Wis., October 25-28. 
The PPJ Gazette 