Only on HackerNews are people silly enough to think you have the scalability of virtual infrastructure in the physical world. Farms measure lead times in years.

EDIT: I help my uncle manage a farm in Florida. The startup times are seriously ridiculous.

And is this drought not also taking years? It think it's reasonable to expect the farm markets to capitalistically take advantage of California's decline, even if it does take years.

The drought is going to start pinching farms in one year. This thread is about whether the California government should start rationing water now.

I don't see any indication that treehau5 thinks farm-related infrastructure is as easily scalable as tech-sector infrastructure nor did treehau5 suggest it would not take years.

Not only in Hacker News, but otherwise agreed with you.

Spoken like a true city dweller. Like other have alluded to, farmers think in terms of years. Ever hear the expression "the best time to plant a fruit tree was 5 years ago". I wonder where that came from.

"...and the second best time is today"

Grew up in a small town in NC. Agriculture and textiles were the biggest industries, outside of banking "in the city"

Ever heard the expression "assumptions make an ass out of you?"

Get real. Where is there that has the same amount of arable land and infrastructure and semi-skilled labor to just ramp up to where California is now?

The entire Midwest and plains states. They would just need to switch from growing field corn to something that people can actually eat.

It's not that simple. Farm crops are what works well for the soil and climate of that region. You don't see fields of corn in California because it's not an attractive climate for corn. Likewise, you don't see fields of broccoli in Iowa, for the same reasons.

Midwest corn mostly goes to feed for cattle, hogs, and chickens. The corn may not be really great human food, but it gets made into great human food through an extra process step.

Oh, it would grow. It's just not optimum use of the land.

Meanwhile, nothing is worth growing in the midwest unless it can handle real thunderstorms and real winter. A lot of vegetables rely on a mild climate. Our CSA farm grows a wide variety of vegetables, but they regularly lose parts of their crop to hail, late freezes, and other situations that just don't happen in California.

The Eastern US is awash in water and has a ton of underutilized, fallow land that is already cleared. The workers can migrate as they already do. We can rebuild our greenhouse industry to get winter vegetables.

Migrant workers will move a lot more easily than a whole agricultual and peripheral industries. They aren't going to willingly abandon productive land in California so long as no one forces them to stop sucking water out of the ground. If water rights laws are abrogated toward the approximate reality that everyone owns that water, and only a fraction can properly be removed such that this maintaining the productivity of California agricultural land is non-competitive compared to other areas of the country, that'd be the free-market solution. But that implodes both the tax and voter based in California, so the incentive now is that the politics will dictate the continued legislated alternative to a market solution. Both the politicians favor this as does the agricultural business interests. Imagine some 35% of California farmland being made fallow, how does California replace that tax base? One of the reasons why it's such a rich state is because of its massive agriculture. Just in wine alone it'd be like saying, OK France can't grow grapes anymore. No matter whether you go with a market solution, a legislated solution, or a hybrid solution, it's all just plain icky. The technical solution is how to cheapen desalination such that it keeps California sufficiently competitive, i.e. things get more expensive but not untenably so.

Which could take years.