The Culturalist: Water Is the Blood of Agriculture

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Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the Culturalist.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today, our topic is water, both ancient and modern, and we will return in just a few minutes after a word from our sponsor.

Welcome back to the Culturalist.

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That's H-A-N-S-O-N.com.

And he is available on social media, at Twitter and Facebook.

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Well, welcome, Victor.

We're happy to be here to talk with you about water in ancient Greece and then the current situation in California.

You wrote a book on ancient Greek agriculture called The Other Greeks in 1995, where you explain the emergence of Yale main farmers in ancient Greece and the importance of this independent free citizen to the city-state and then ultimately also democracy.

You also write in that book on water in particular and on the demands for water and the various ways that the Greek yeomen cultivated given the dry climate.

And I want to remind listeners that California shares that similar dry climate.

And we're often very interested in this ancient Greek agriculture because it does produce the Mediterranean diet, that very healthy combination of foods.

And I know that you have a lot to tell us on that.

But in particular, water and how the ancient Greeks really mastered water systems so that they could, in fact, have significant farms of agriculture and planned agriculture as well.

Well, most of the productive agriculture in the world is of two types.

It's large plains that are along river systems, the Mississippi or the Near East or Egypt, and they draw water from the Nile or the Missouri or the Mississippi.

But the problem with those systems are they're usually flat

and they don't have what we call chilling hours.

Those are 300 to 500 hours below 50 degrees Fahrenheit during the year.

Once you have that factor,

and once you have a Mediterranean climate, that means warm, hot, dry weather.

And by warm, dry, I mean essentially from may until october 90 85 to 90 to 105 dry heat then with a proper chilling factor you can grow anything you can grow olives you can grow peaches plums grapes anything and the only trick is that you have to have water and how do you do it if you don't have a big river and From the Mycenaeans onward, in at least the history of Europe, you let snow fall from mountains, come down in the spring, and they fill up reservoirs or lakes and then you tap those or you can make aqueducts or ditches or you can send it down and allow it to pool and then have shallow wells to pump it.

Not so smart in the ancient world without industrial power.

And there's only a few places where this really is productive.

One of them was in Greece.

And you had the Pindus mountain range coming from the border with Albania and the former Yugoslavia.

It's part of the southern Alps.

It goes all the way through northern Greece and it's got heights.

You know, Mount Olympus is about 9,600 feet and then all the way into the Peloponnese.

Mount Tyegetus is about 7,500, 7,300 feet.

And they have snow winter long and they melt and then when it's scorching, you get these streams of runoff.

Another is the Andes Mountains in Chile or the Atlas Mountains of North Africa and Libya and here in the San Joaquin Valley of California, of course, the Sierra Nevada.

Once you have cold but brief winters and once you have springtime that's not freezing to kill blossoms of grapes or blooms of almonds or trees, then you have the ingredients for a very productive agriculture.

And what the Greeks did is they had what they called the triad.

So they had grapes.

And just envision a typical 10 acre farm, 10 acres, three or four acres of grapes.

And what did they get out of grapes?

They got raisins that you could store all year round.

They got wine you could store all year round and they could eat grapes.

And then they had wheat or barley.

That was their bread, the stuff of life that they could mill.

All of these had to be processed.

You can't just eat raisins off the vine or drink grape juice.

You have to press grapes and you have to do the same with wheat.

And then finally, olives and you have to press them too.

And then from olives, they had a fruit that you could eat.

You had oil for cooking.

You had oil for your axle grease.

You had lubricants for soap.

And out of that self-sufficiency, they were able to produce in the sixth and seventh century an agrarian renaissance, which I argued in the other Greeks was the backbone of

the agrarian revolution.

So, we always thought that we called it dry farming, but I think I showed in the other Greeks that they were very sophisticated.

In other words, I'll give you an example of what I mean.

If you go to Plato's laws, there's a lot of statutes about water use.

Your neighbor can't steal spring water from you.

If you have a runoff from a small reservoir, you can't cut the guy downstream off.

Pretty much what I grew up with with a ditch tender and a consolidated irrigation district.

There's agrarian treatises how to make dams, how to run water down the row for small gardens.

So there's a sophisticated idea that you could have a garden or you could have fruit trees in addition to olives, grain, and grapes, and they did not take as much water.

Once they were established, they didn't take as much water.

And so that's pretty much the regimen that jump-started the Greeks.

There was some evidence in the Mycenaean period 800 years earlier, going back to 1400, that the Mycenaeans, I think there's a good dam right outside of Nopla, and you can see on the road, there's bridges where the Mycenaeans were capable, not of the flexibility of the city-state farmers, but they were capable of preserving water.

And of course, when you get into Roman times, the Italian topography and geography is similar.

The Apennese Mountains down the spine of Italy allows runoff, and then these very lush little tiny valleys that were separated that create city-state culture.

Small valleys across the mountain range from one another that are responsible for the topography that created 1500 city-states, individualism, autonomy, autarkia, all of those good things that were the foundational catalyst for constitutional government.

And so, just to wrap up, then

it's hot in Greece, it's hot in Italy.

For the summer farmers, especially today, they need irrigation.

That irrigation can only come from one of two places.

It either has to come from spring runoff of melted snows that are tapped into reservoirs and then distributed in aqueducts and canals, or that water has to replenish the aquifer that is pumped.

In the ancient world, usually a well could not be about any more than 30 or 40 feet deep.

deep that's about the limit that oxen or donkeys can turn a primitive pump or a person can you know hand crank water up at very low volumes and today i think the well out here in this farm we have a drought and it's gone the water table's gone from 50 to 60 to 70 fallen down to 80 i think it's about 95 feet the last five or six years and just to be safe i took the old well one that was 90 feet and drilled down to 440 feet with water in that well at about 95 feet and then pumping from about 125 feet.

But we have the same problems as the ancients did with one big exception is the volume of water and the acreage.

We have a lot more acreage

under cultivation than did the ancients.

So the irrigation magnitude is just extraordinary.

Thank you.

And I thought you had a very interesting quote where you're describing what Aristotle has to say about water in ancient Greece, where you're looking at the new era, the polis, and you write: In a settled Greece laced with bridal paths, publicly maintained roads, parks and canals, we should include small farmhouses and probably constructed irrigation ditches, ditches whose presence in the Greek countryside Aristotle compared to veins carrying blood in the body.

And I know that in your California,

there's an extensive system of canals and ditches that really lace the countryside and allow for that agriculture.

My listeners and I would be very interested to hear how did the Californians manage to bring water to such an extent that it really is the fruit basket, the vegetable basket of the United States and really exports throughout the world.

Could you talk a little bit about the construction of those, that water system

and then its cultural significance?

I can.

Let me just finish with the Greeks by ending with the idea that when I wrote the other Greeks, it was quarter million words.

And the predominant view of agriculture was there that it was involved by peasants, peasant controlled.

It was dry farming.

There was not any servile labor.

Those were the big later Latofundi estates.

People lived in town and walked out to their farm.

It was an empty countryside.

And I spent two and a half years in Greece and made the argument that on the archaeological and the epigraphical record, those are inscriptions about ancient life on stone public documents, and a vast corpus of Greek literature, some of it not translated.

There is a lot of references to people living out.

whether it's a Deuscolos and Menander's play of the same name, or it's references to farmers out in the country in Plato and Aristotle, or whether it's poetry

or Alcophon's letters.

Whatever it is, there's a lot of references.

Then you go out in the country, and there's just, if you go through the archaeological record of the last 150 years, there's hundreds of reports of people finding farmhouses on Mount Hymetas, on Mount Pentelikos, and in the Attic countryside, all over.

So there were houses.

People were farming about 10 or 12 acres.

They were using canals and water and springs.

They were diverse and diverse farming, so they were absolutely independent.

They had everything they needed, and they could add value to their product by controlling the process of milling and pressing and selling it in town for an enhanced profit.

So you had the ingredients again of a new class of people who would turn out to be the voters of the new constitutional governments that sprung up around 750, as well as hoplite soldiers who could afford their own armor.

That blueprint became famous.

It's called agrarianism.

Agrarianism is different than agricultural.

It just agrarian means that there is also an idea of land tenure in addition to the growing of crops, the growing of crops on small parcels that are equally divided or roughly a culture of middle-class small farmers, with the backbone of the United States and the Homestead Act and all that.

And that was what characterized California.

So

except for some coastal agriculture during the gold rush and after,

agriculture really started full blast in California right after the Civil War when Transcontinental Railroad was finished.

There were links from San Francisco down in the San Joaquin Valley, and you had 500 miles, essentially,

400 miles in the center of the state of very good land and very fertile.

And it was asymmetrical.

On the east side, the water from the Sierras gave people water tables of 30 to 40 feet.

But as you got off out 70, 80 miles near the coast ranges, then it dropped down to 500.

So the west side was empty for barley, maybe, or grain initially, or cattle, but it was not farmed.

There was no water there.

And then all of the east side is where people settled.

They settled in Bakersfield and Tulare and Visalia, Kingsburg, Salma, Madera, Modesto, Fresno, Sacramento.

Why are all those towns there?

And why is the 99 freeway there?

And why is the Southern Pacific Railroad there?

Water, water, water.

When they came out in the 1870s and 80s, they could find water for their steam engines.

And farmers could tap these Sierra runoffs with, at first, you know, just natural ponds.

And there were local irrigation districts, what we called riparian.

They fought over rights to the Kings River or the Cahuilla River River or the San Joaquin River or the Sacramento River.

And that was pretty much the story for the next 60 years, that agriculture was an east side phenomenon and everybody belonged to an irrigation district and they began ad hoc damming, Shaver Lake, Huntington Lake, Pine Flat, Millerton Lake in my area.

And that way

they found a very brilliant strategy, four-pronged strategy.

They were able to stop the spring flooding.

As late as the 19, early 1950s, there were late 40s, there were floods all around here until they built Pine Flat Dam.

Until they built Millerton Dam after the war, they were flooding in North Fresno.

So it stopped flooding.

It gave hydroelectric power, and that was a clean energy through, and at one time it supplied about 50% of California's electrical.

needs all the way down to Henry Huntington's developments in Los Angeles.

They had a 220-mile

tension line as early as about 1910,

1912.

And then, in addition to that, it provided cheap recreation so people could go up and actually see a lake rather than just a snow melt and a roaring river.

And finally, it provided water for agriculture and it was gravity-fed.

They didn't have to pump.

And so that was really a wonderful thing.

There were squabbles when I was growing up.

By then, the entire west side had been still empty, but the east side was planted.

And there were disputes.

I can remember when I was seven years old, one of the neighbors came over and said, Mr.

Davis, I'm taking your water.

You have

used it, and you know, you don't really need as much as you think you do, but I do need it.

And you had a very sophisticated, complicated formula for how you got water.

It was so many acre feet out of the ditch per acre per 24 hours.

And my grandfather at that time was in his 70s.

He wasn't active, but not muscular.

My dad was a big Swede, 6'4, 220 pounds, World War II veteran.

So when these things happened, that was his son-in-law.

He just called him.

My father went over and there was explosives right on the ditch.

When I took over the farming, I remember a neighbor, I won't mention his name, who said basically the same thing.

I'm taking the water when I want it, whenever I want it.

And you're not going to do anything about it.

And I say, well, the ditch tenders, I came from Stanford with a PhD, you know, in 25, 26, and like that.

Well, the ditch tender says you have a turn.

So do I.

I don't give a damn about the ditch tender.

The ditch tender does what I want.

Very big guy.

So he chained off my water gate and he flooded this whole 150 acres of vineyards and I had no water.

And then if you have no water, you have to pump.

If you have to pump, you have to pay a lot of money for the electricity to bring the water out of the ground when you have surface water that you pay taxes on.

So nobody wants to pump.

And finally, I went into the ditch tender and he said, he's going to take it until you stop it.

I can't help it.

I said, this is a civic agency.

What are you talking about?

This is against the law.

It reminded me of a movie out west.

There is no law west of the Pecos.

And so I went to my father and I said, hey, Dad, remember how you used to get these?

He says,

you're the director of it.

I can't bail you out.

You got to find it.

But I wouldn't let him take the water.

So I went over there and I took bolt cutters, cut off his lock, opened my access to the dick, and then took his chain and locked his up.

And of course, he came over.

And then I had a shotgun and I said, you're not going to take any more water.

You're not going to take any more.

In fact, you took my turn.

I'm taking two turns in a row to make up for it.

And if you don't like it,

do what you got to do.

Do your worst and I'll do my best.

And so we had a lot of people in the farm that agreed with me, brother and cousin.

And after that, it was the strangest thing in the world.

He said, I agree with you.

I'm finally, you know, basically I respect you now and I'll follow the rules.

But that's how, that gives you a sense of how important water was.

My grandfather said that when he was six years old in 1896, he saw a running gun battle in Selma with shotguns between two farmers, each accusing the other of stealing.

Okay, so that was agriculture.

That's how it worked.

And people made this, as you said, the fruit basket, the cornucopia of the United States.

They had plums, peaches, apricots, grapes, raisins, wines, you name it, as well as cotton and row crops and garden truck farming, gardens of you know squash and tomato.

You could grow anything in the San Joaquin Valley.

And they were all based on local irrigation districts.

And they were like a checkerboard because they all followed the Homestead Act.

And you couldn't have more than 160 acres for one person if you used an irrigation district that took federal funds.

They all did.

So I think there were 100 irrigation districts.

And that's how the valley started.

And there was very few people in California.

When I was a kid, there was about 15 million, 40 million now.

And then something happened.

Everybody eyed this big 5 million acre strip of no water and they began saying, you know what?

That land is actually richer than the east side.

It's a wonderful soil, but there's no water.

And the water table is 2,000 feet in some places.

And we don't have pumps that can go down at that time in the 60s.

So then became...

the California Water Project in the late 30s, 40s, but that really got going in the 50s.

And then something that was amazing, it was the largest water project in the world, the California Water Project.

And its preamble was that two-thirds of Californians want to live where there's one-third of the water, and two-thirds of the water is where only one-third want to live, and we've got to make amends.

So they started damming the major rivers, the bigger rivers, not here in Central California, but

in the north.

So there were Folsom Dam and Oroville Dam and Shasta Dam.

And these were not just a million acre feet, these were 3 million, huge amounts of water.

Then they dumped it into something, this new aqueduct called the California Aqueduct, and it started to head south.

And it got to the swamp where the delta, where all the rivers dumped into San Francisco Bay.

And they dumped the aqueduct water into the delta.

They let it go downstream and then they pumped it out to the southern aqueduct, which the next

oh, 200 miles all the way down the west side.

They pumped it up to the San Luis Reservoir.

That was 3 million acre feet.

And then the rest went into Los Angeles because by the 60s, the Los Angeles County water project was out of Owen Valley water.

Its aquifer was exhausted.

The Colorado River wasn't enough.

And they needed California aqueduct water.

And then suddenly these huge agrarian agricultural empires grew in the west side.

I mean, these were people who were farming 50, 60, 70,000 acres of cotton and tomatoes.

But they had wonderful land and they were subject to the Homestead Act, but there was a big fight and it went on for years.

And it was never fully resolved.

But the point is, that's where we were until

15 years ago.

And then as the population started to get larger and changed, I mean, a lot of different people came to California.

It started to be medieval.

A interior peasant class, the middle class started to leave, and you had a coastal elite.

The coastal elite had $6 trillion in market capitalization with Apple and Facebook, Twitter, you name it, all of those Silicon Valley.

They had all the marquee universities that now became global nexus of power, influence, income, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Caltech.

Stanford University, et cetera, et cetera, all the UC campuses.

And the shift politically began to change.

We had about 6 million illegal aliens come in the state.

Now, 27% of the population was not born in the United States.

And the result was that this early pioneer class of farmers in East and West Side lost their clout.

There was never going to be another Ronald Reagan, George McMajan, Pete Wilson, even Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And in their infinite wisdom, they stopped the California Water Project's last tertiary agenda, and that was low-level reservoirs about 400 feet, maybe 300 feet near the valley floor that would be full every fourth or fifth year in a flood year by that i mean when there was so much water that it filled up all the dams at seven six five four three thousand feet and there was still water that was overflowing in the Sacramento tributaries and the San Joaquin tributaries and it was going out to the ocean.

You could dump it in these new reservoirs.

And they were, you know, the Los Banos Grandes, the Seitz Reservoir in the Sacramento, the Temperance Flat behind Millett, and those were all canceled, 10 million feet canceled.

In fact, we haven't built a dam since 1983, the new Milonas Dam, for agricultural purposes.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, they continue to import water, of course, but not for agriculture.

And the result is that we have a California water project that was brilliantly designed for about 20 million people and a vibrant farming sector.

And it might have survived, except it was diverted, misused, destroyed.

It was ossified and inert, so it was never enlarged.

Now we have 40 million people.

But more importantly, people said, we heard stories when we came out to California in 1998.

When I arrived here in 2005, I remember John Muir, I read stories that there used to be salmon and they were jumping up in the rivers, San Joaquin River, and it was wonderful.

But why can't we have it?

It's those damn farmers who get rich with those awful almonds.

So why don't we just let the water come out of the Sierra and let's let the water come out from the Cascades and Northern California.

And when it gets to the Delta, let's not pump it all into that aqueduct for those awful west side farmers.

Let's let it out to the ocean.

And that would be wonderful because then the little three-inch smelt might survive.

And we had, let's say, a fish that had too much nitrogen in the water and was having trouble breathing supposedly because farming took out too much water but that wasn't the reason really it was 35 municipal water districts that were dumping their effluents into the delta but nevertheless a lot of the water going southward in the big aqueduct was cut and then water going from the sierra and these local irrigation districts was being released into the tributaries of the san joaquin and let out to the ocean.

And the idea was if you have a constant stream, we can plant fish.

And these salmon will will go into the delta and then they'll swim upstream to the Sacramento and they'll jump and they'll jump.

And we'll make those awful farmers cut off their canals and we'll block their aqueducts.

And they'll all be a white water, just like we read about it in 1870, 1875.

And the fish will jump, jump, and then we'll make them make little ladders at all these.

And then they'll get up to the Sierra and they're going to breed.

And then the little adolescent salmon will go back and we'll have this wonderful natural cycle.

And this is what we're going to do.

Now we're going to have to destroy agriculture because, you know, we need their water.

We want these rivers to look like they did in 1870 when there were 4 million people here.

So that's what happened.

And it cost about $70,000 of fish to put the fish in and have them swim.

It's okay when you have a flood year every four or five years.

You can let 90% of the water go out because there's so much of it.

But in the old days, the old timers would tell us: build those tertiary reservoirs and store it.

Put ponds everywhere.

We have a pond on our place.

Fill up the aquifer.

And now there is no

reserve.

So we've had a drought for two years and they're still letting water, whatever is left out to the ocean.

And the water table is being pumped dry by desperate people that want their trees to survive one more year.

It's not a question of saying, there's no water, I won't plant cotton this year.

There's no water, I won't plant tomatoes.

It's a there's no water and I'm going to lose $15,000 to $20,000 an acre in a mature almond orchard or a mature plum orchard or a mature peach orchard.

So that's where we are.

It's like everybody has a straw and they're all sucking out of a big pan of water 100 feet to 1,000 feet below.

And the guy with the biggest straw and the deepest straw will survive.

So there's a competition to build your well deeper than your neighbor and your pump bigger.

And you can see where this goes in a state that charges 17 cents and up for a kilowatt hour of electricity.

So we're getting basically three, $4,000 an acre cost in irrigation through pumping.

And you're still paying the taxes for the water district for the water that you don't get anymore.

We haven't had any water on my farm, even though I pay consolidated irrigation taxes in five years.

I don't know where it goes, it goes to somebody else.

Yeah, I just wanted to also refer to you, and you kind of already talked about this, but I wanted to ask where are we headed or do we have to head down this road?

We had that former Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu under the Obama administration say in reference to California droughts, quote, we're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California.

And since you've already sort of addressed that, I was just wondering, in addition,

do we have to go down that route?

Because

it makes it seem inevitable yeah they think not just inevitable but desirable stephen shoe remember told the country that he hoped that we could get up to nine dollars a gallon this is a guy that probably walked i don't know a mile to work so what the problem is is this that agriculture is next in line to all of the other things that have happened there is no mining industry in California.

They've stopped it.

They feel that it has a deplorable record in the past.

Does that mean that somebody in Nauviel does not want a granite counter or a marble bath?

No, they import it.

Okay,

there is no timber industry in California to speak of.

60 million trees were dying during the drought, and people begged and begged Governor Newsom and Governor Brown to just go in there and clean out these.

beetle-infested, drought-stricken trees and allow the timber industry to come back and give us some Douglas fir or fir for building materials, pine for framing doorways.

We had it all.

And they didn't.

And that went up in one of the biggest fires in California history in September.

And now they're all burned and the people are trying to rebuild in the middle of a burned out forest with 60 million trees.

Not all of them lost, have no lumber.

or they can't afford a sheet of plywood at $90.

So they destroyed the timber industry.

And they destroyed the auto industry and most of the big manufacturing industry because they felt they were either dirty or they were unfair.

And now they want the water.

They don't want to build, they do not believe in dams or water transfers unless you're talking about the drinking water, shower water, gardens of San Francisco Bay Area people who are 100%

dependent on two sources, the Hetch Hetchy Water Transference out of Yosemite and the California Water Project out of the northern dams of the state.

They get their water.

If you ever go down 280, you'll see the Crystal Springs Reservoir that looks like an alpine lake.

And I've had people at Stanford in their infinite idiocy say, well, we have water.

Look at this.

Look at our lake.

As if out in the middle of the desert of those coastal foothills, that water appeared out of the Zahed of Zeus.

It was all imported by 400, 300 miles.

They don't even know it.

But that supplies their water.

And the same thing is true of Los Angeles.

So you have 20 million people out of 40 million who say, and then you add the other coastal communities, they all are dependent on California transferred water.

They all want to live on the Pacific Ocean where it's cool.

There is no water, no aquifer along the Pacific Ocean.

From San Diego all the way up to Berkeley, there is no aquifer that can sustain that type of population.

So they're all dependent, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, from imported water.

And people say, well, we can do desalinization.

Look at the cost of desalinization in a state like California and ask how long they're going to allow you.

Can't use nuclear, can't use natural gas, and how will solar really solve that problem, that power-intensive.

So they don't want that.

So then, if you don't have manufacturing, you don't have timber, you don't have mining, and we're going to get rid of agriculture pretty soon because it's going to dry up.

What do you have left?

Well, you have

social media, you have Google, you have the big universities, and four of the top 200 in the world are Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, and UCLA.

We've got another great group of UC San Diego, Riverside, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara.

You've got 23 states.

So you've got an educational monstrosity, and you've got a few banking headquarters, finance, and a few assembly things in Los Angeles.

And we have a residual oil industry.

I think we have about, I don't know what it is, six or seven offshore wells left.

And there's in Kern County, there's still some horizontal drilling.

We have enough natural gas.

Let me just put it this way.

We have enough natural gas and oil in the ground to be self-sufficient in California.

We're paying about an average of $4.50 a gallon statewide, and most of that oil is imported from Alaska or Canada or from overseas.

and why we will not allow full exploitation of those resources.

We're shutting down our nuclear plants, we're shutting down our oil-fired plants.

So

we love wood, we love

minerals, we love food, we love energy, love being, we use them more than anybody, but we do not want to produce them here because they're icky and they're dirty and they're smelly and we've evolved beyond that.

And these other people will do it in stupid states.

The stupid people in Canada, the stupid people in Arizona, the stupid people in Alaska, they can send us electricity or oil or gas or timber or granite or whatever we need.

Yeah.

Well, I was just thinking, you know, I don't want to open a can of worms.

How do you think that in California politics, such an agenda has manifested itself?

What is it in California politics that it seems plain to an outsider, of course you would want to support your agriculture.

Why would you want to destroy an interior with so much potential for production in

food?

So what in California politics, and this might be too much for the time we have left, but what in California politics has taken it in that direction that there is no will to assure the water to the valley and to reify or manifest Stephen Chu's words of, you know, you got to start with the idea that once you went to corporate agriculture, you only have about, and I don't mean corporate necessarily faceless, peopleless corporations.

Some of these guys are family farmers, just got big, they're brilliant, but they're only about one and a half percent of the population.

Nobody knows.

If you go to the Bay Area and say, have you seen a farmer lately?

No.

People brag that they have a pickup truck.

For them, that's about as close as they get to farming.

They have no interest in it.

They don't, you know, I used to go every weekend for 10 years and sell organic fruit in Santa Cruz and I would meet my former professors I would meet PhDs and the kind of questions I got were like the following how many raisin trees do you have really interesting victory you tell me how many raisin trees you have or it would be January when we would be selling citrus and they said well where are the plums when's your next crop and I haven't seen any grapes why don't you guys bring up your grapes

And so they were completely ignorant of the natural world.

They have no idea how to farm.

They have a steady paycheck and they have no idea how they would do it.

It's the hardest job in the world.

Every day money goes out and it's very uncertain whether any will come back in.

That's one thing.

But the demography explains your question.

So once this bonanza of globalization hit California and once people discovered that they had particular marketable skills that would increase the market for them from 330 million Americans in today's population to 7 plus billion,

then it changed the entire state of California.

That meant that Silicon Valley and social media and Google and Oracle and all of these online tech, Silicon Valley, whatever you want to call them, became a siphon of six, seven trillion dollars poured into a very small geographical space.

At the same time, Hollywood, it can't make a picture that's any good, can do stuff that the world likes, like comic books or violence or action movies.

And they started bringing and partnering with China and professional sports in California partnered with China.

And China started pouring in students.

There's 370,000 Chinese students and a lot of them disproportionately are in California.

And they pay a premium, the whole very expensive tuition that's usually 10% higher for a lot of foreign students.

So what I'm getting at is a lot of money convinced these people, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, that you didn't need any other thing because you had so much money that you could buy whatever you wanted.

You want food, buy it, buy it from Mexico, buy it from Argentina, you want a steak, buy it from south of the border.

You could import things.

You want raisins imported from Greece, even though they're substandard and not nearly as good as American raisins.

Just buy it.

The second thing is the entrepreneurial class, the people who were the middle class, the small farmer, the small business person, the person that had a small fabrication plant.

When they looked at the corporate tax rate, they looked at the personal tax rate.

They looked at the sales tax.

They looked at the price of electricity.

They looked at the price of gasoline.

They looked at the estate tax.

They looked at all of that.

And they said to themselves,

this is the highest basket of taxes gasoline etc power in the united states so therefore obviously we have the best services and it was just the opposite the more they paid in taxes they looked at their schools and they're about 40th in the nation in terms of test scores they used to be in the top 10.

they looked at infrastructure it's about 49th rated by uh you know places like forbes magazine and fortune magazine they they looked at the roads they were horrible.

99 is the deadliest freeway in the United States per mile driven.

And so they said, and then they looked at crime and they said to themselves, this is a bad deal and we're leaving.

And then the powers of beast said, I hope they leave.

We don't like them.

They're these crazy right-wing people that voted for Wilson and Reagan and Dick Mason and Schwartz.

And they left.

Probably 8 million of them left.

And they went to Idaho.

They went to Nevada.

They went to Texas, Arizona, Florida, anywhere where there was cheap or low or non-existent.

And then

we had about half of all illegal immigrants.

There's 20 million of them in the United States right now.

We don't dare get a precise number, but half of them came into California because it paid

far better for subsistence and entitlements.

The result is you have 27%.

That's over one out of every four Californians was not born in the United States, is living in California, of residence.

So you have that trifecta, and the result is that you have a lot of very poor people, first and second generation immigrants, many from poor people from Asian, but mostly south of the border, Central America, increasingly more than Mexico.

And then you have very rich people from San Diego to Berkeley.

If you look at zip codes by income, our congressional district, that is the wealthiest people in the United States.

There's nine states.

There's two Californians.

There is the wealthiest state in the country along the coast that can

outsource and profit with globalization with a window on China and Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.

And then you have the interior where,

you know, essentially you have a poverty rate of about 27%, the highest in the United States.

You have one out of three people on public assistance live in the center of the state nationwide.

Fresno, Tulare, Kings County's per capita income of this tri-county area, if you were to make a new county out of it, is lower than anywhere in Appalachia.

One out of three people in California that are admitted to the hospital for any reason are found to be either suffering from diabetes or pre-diabetic.

Medicaid, health count, and remedial education account for about 30% of the budget.

So that's what happened to California.

And in that hierarchy of needs, desires, agendas, building dams to tap water is not only environmentally taboo, but it doesn't serve the right people.

The wealthy already have the water they want and the money they have, and they don't care about the shrinking middle class, and they really don't care about Latino people in the middle of the state here where we live.

They don't care.

And

that's

ramification someday.

So do you see politics changing because of the nature of the class system in California that's changing so drastically?

And by that, I mean, is California just headed to being an aristocracy of some sort, right?

Small enclaves with sort of local warlords leading or something?

Well, I mean, when they talk about defunding the police, you go live down the PCH in Malibu.

I think I pulled over to make a phone call and within a nanosecond, a security guard coming out of a big Hollywood actress's gated community that I was nowhere near asked me what I was doing.

So they have personal protection.

Every time an MBA star is robbed of his Rolex, everybody's angry and wondering why his security detail.

Diane Feinstein's got her lakefront mansion at Tahoe on the market for $41 million.

Gavin Newsom is usually late on his property tax for his multi-million dollar dual homes.

Nancy Pelosi's got about a $30 million gated estate up in Napa plus a huge place in San Francisco.

That's who we're dealing with.

If you go, Mark Zuckerberg is adamantly against building a wall.

All of his estates are walled.

He's building a 57,000 square foot home in Hawaii, one of his many homes.

So you have, yes, you have an aristocracy, an elite, they're in the keep, and the keep is the coast.

And then you have us and the peasants, and the middle class has been destroyed or left.

The question is: will there be a peasant revolt?

And

that's interesting because when you talk to Mexican-American people who have been here a generation, who are citizens or are voting, they are starting to ask some difficult questions.

They're saying, why do we pay over $4 a gallon for gas?

Why do we pay 18 cents a kilowatt or up to 28 cents in peak?

Why does my family have to go to to Walmart to keep cool and sit there when the people in the coast who set those energy prices live in 65 or 75 degree year-round temperatures?

Why can't I homeschool or why can't we have charter schools or why are they so angry at perequial schools when their kids are all in prep schools in the Bay Area and Los Angeles?

Why did my nephew get killed on the 99 by a drunk driver who left the scene of the accident?

And why are there open borders?

I have a relative in Mexico.

I have a friend in Mexico, but I do not want people coming here illegally, not with gangs that come to my community, not with poverty that affect my schools and my tax rate.

So you're starting to see the

very beginning of a revolt among half the population.

And I don't know whether how well the left can buy them off.

They can say, well, we gave you open borders.

And Donald Trump is a racist.

And the Republicans are all in the country club.

But when you recalibrate the Republicans and say, you know what,

when they start to say we're not Mitt Romney, you know, on the back nine,

we're a workers' party, we're a nationalist party, we're a party of blacks and Hispanics.

We don't hate the church.

We like religious observance.

We're very skeptical of abortion on demand.

We want infrastructure, but real infrastructure, not boutique infrastructure.

We don't want that Stonehenge high-speed rail project that ate up $12 billion for nothing when we had our 99 that we use every day in 1950s conditions so you can feel it when you talk to people that something's going to go on we'll see if it's too early yet to recall gavin newsom who could be recalled but they're spending a lot of money the tech people to protect him because he's one of theirs we'll see if the people there's enough people to fight the big money it's so weird because i grew up with all of this rhetoric that was the big money the rockefellers you know and oh my gosh, the melons.

Yeah, that was from your Democratic parents.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, not so much them, just school, UC Santa Cruz.

You know, I had a couple of professors that wrote books.

I remember David Horwitz wrote a book about the Rockefellers.

And I had another professor in psychology that used to just rail about these right-wing fortunes.

And then all of a sudden,

who's wealthy now?

It's all left-wing people.

That's who won the election in 2000.

They were the ones that had the money to send in $500 million to select precincts to enhance a particular profile of voter.

We haven't caught up, the politics haven't caught up with fast-changing realities that the Democratic Party is run

by arrogant, aristocratic, very wealthy people who either out of guilt or naive sincerity or real revolutionary fervor, I don't know, but they virtue signal and they performance art they're caring while they retreat to their, you said, enclaves.

That's where they live.

And they do a lot of damage.

They don't build dams.

They do not develop water.

They hate aqueducts.

They do not build roads.

They do not fix bridges.

They do not.

have a timber industry.

They do not have lumber mills.

They do not provide cheap housing, affordable housing for people.

They're not interested in it.

So back to the water issue and the question of the water in California, we don't see any immediate rectification of a policy that is slowly draining the valley of all its water, whether it's the water table or the runoff from the Sierras.

Is that correct?

Yes.

Here's how to envision it.

We had a huge water year four years ago.

That water is gone.

It was not stored.

Okay.

And then we had an average year.

And then in 2019, we had a below average, but not a drought.

2020, we had a drought.

This was the worst drought of all, as far as actual rainfall.

And so we had no storage going into this drought.

It had a very warm spring.

There's no snow melt.

So if I say it's a disaster and people say, well, I still had grapes in the store from California, what are we doing?

Well, we're doing this.

People are drilling deeper.

There is no surface water.

So they're not getting their contracted deliveries that they they pay the government for, state and federal.

So they are drilling wells.

If you're east of the 99 freeway, you can do this a year and maybe another year because the water table is dropping about a foot to two feet a month.

But it's not that difficult if you have a 300-foot well and the water table is 90 feet just to drop your submersible, you know, every six months, 10 feet, and then you pay another 15% for electricity.

And so you can pump your way out.

But pump your way out, I mean they turn on their pumps in May and they turn them off in October and they never stop.

But if you're out in the west side,

the environmentalists thought they were going to cut them off five years ago when they stopped giving them their contracted water from the Northern California.

But then these guys, brilliant though they be, or especially because they're brilliant, they figured out there was an aquifer.

The old literature mentioned it.

It wasn't at 300, 400, 500 feet where their wells hit nothing.

It was way down there at 1500, 1700 feet.

And there was not the technology in the 60s to get it.

And now there is.

The problem is that when you go down 1700 feet, when you look at the pump, the pump's the size of a Volkswagen, whereas our pump is the size of, you know, a small desk.

And that thing can cost you, you know, seven or eight thousand dollars a month easily, more than that.

So you get the head of water is about the size of your fist, and you're paying, say, $8,000 or $9,000 a month for it.

And over here on the west side, when you're coming down from 90 feet, the water is the size of your shoulders, and you're paying $400 a month for it, $500 a month for it.

So they have another year, maybe.

But even driving along the west side, you're starting to see things I never saw before.

There are orchards out there where they've shaken the almonds off to keep the tree alive, but not to have enough water for the crop this year.

Or haven't they also ceased to water you know a certain percentage of their trees and letting them die so that they do that water for the rest?

You can, yeah, when you fly above it, you can see there's blocks where they have cut water to a particular older block.

They're making those decisions.

And they're also the price of almonds has gone from 450 a pound down to $1.50.

And right around $1.70, it's break-even.

So now the existential question for a big farmer is if he, say, had 10,000 acres and at 4.50 a pound with water being delivered, he was clearing 5,000 an acre.

Well, he was making 50 or 60 million.

And now,

does he want to continue to farm at $1.50 when the water cost alone is more than that per pound of almond?

Or to keep the hope up that he has the infrastructure to make it back when prices climb and water gets plentiful?

I'm not sure that's going to happen, but a lot of people are losing money this year because they feel they made it so big four or five years ago that they can risk that the good times will come back.

But people who are farming almonds are not making money right now.

Well, Victor, we are at the end of our time here.

We would like to thank you for your sober words of wisdom here today and thank our listeners for another,

should be 45 minutes of The Culturalist.

This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink signing off.

We'll see you next week, Sammy.