If you're seeing dire news about the water & alfalfa lately in the US, I have good news for you.
The US's water problems have solutions!
One of the most powerful solutions: give serious attention & investment to agriculture in the southeastern US.
Let's talk about just one way to do that.
In the South, we make hay that's as good or better than alfalfa... from peanuts.
We just haven't gotten around to exporting it.
That's a pretty simple problem to fix!
Peanuts grow underground. After you get the peanuts off the roots, you can use the leaves & stems as hay.
And unlike alfalfa, peanuts thrive in humid weather.
In other words, you can grow peanuts in rainy climates! Where the water is!
Peanut hay is a little dusty thanks to the harvest process, but dairy cows don't mind. They get the same nutrition & performance from peanut hay as alfalfa.
https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/02/26/93/00001/eckert_j.pdf
Now let's talk volume. Sure, let's say we're sold on using peanut hay instead of alfalfa.
But can the southeast actually grow enough of it to compete with the large, highly-capitalized operations out west?
You bet.
The US already grows 1.6M acres of peanuts.
That acreage also adds up to 2.4M tons of peanut hay. That's over half of total US exports of alfalfa hay (4.7M tons).
If we replaced 1/2 of US alfalfa exports with peanut hay, it would add $400-800M to rural southern economies.
This isn't to say we *should* export all our peanut hay- we want to use some of it here too! But it goes to show that the US southeast, where there's a lot of untapped farm capacity, can help with global-level problems.
Replacing half the US's alfalfa exports with peanut hay would also remove 1.6 trillion gallons (6M megaliters) of water burden from the arid west.
For a more tangible unit of measurement, that's about 10 Los Angeles's worth of water.
There's also peanut species that's perennial- Arachis glabrata. Perennial peanut is huge down here!
Instead of peanuts, it puts its energy into making thick green foliage. It cohabits well with other plants in diverse pastures, & often outperforms alfalfa on nutritional value.
Hay is a great option for land that's too hilly, rocky, or clay-ey or to grow crops. That's a decent chunk of the South.
Building an export market for peanut & perennial peanut hay gives farmers an option that's drought-tolerant, flexible, & often more lucrative than grain.
When I tell people about this, they're usually surprised.
If there's such an easy answer- just export peanut hay instead of alfalfa- why aren't we already doing it?
It's usually just lack of information. Countries that want to buy hay from the US don't know to call the South!
That's why we need good leadership for agriculture in the South.
We need people who can see new opportunities; reach out to potential buyers; and communicate those opportunities to people on the ground, so they can farm to meet them.
And to really get the full impact of economic development, we also need leadership that cares about getting the jobs & benefits of it to everyone.
It doesn't do much good to bring more export revenue to the South, if it only goes to a few well-connected large landowners.
Farming is already one of the biggest industries in North Carolina.
But everywhere I look, there are huge opportunities that we could do more with. And our rural areas need those opportunities to work for them.
That's why I'm running for Commissioner of Agriculture in NC.
If you'd like to hear more on how good leadership can grow rural economies, or how the US west & southeast can work together to solve our problems, I'm doing a Q&A this Monday.
There's a 7pm ET & 7pm PT session to accommodate time zones & work schedules.
There are options to donate when you register for the Q&A, but it's not required.
That said- if you're able, donations help a ton! I'm gearing up for near-constant road trips around NC's farm communities, & this state is enormous. Every little bit helps, especially early on.
Dude totally! SarahTaber was one of my favorite accts over on the extwitter. Itโs great to have you here on the mastodon. Your posts/threads are so different from everything else I follow but are super informative & relevant to living in the US. Iโve got connection to both the South East & the South West, also memories of doing a book report on George Washington Carver way back in 4th grade, he was super inspiring and big time into peanuts
@sarahtaber
I've done this math at least twice, and it continues to astound me. I'm hoping an expert (you) can do it to tell me if I'm wrong.
We use as much water growing rice in California as we do for all the human population south of somewhere around the San Fernando Valley.
That's all of LA, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and Ventura Counties.
I did it by finding the number of acres of rice, multiplying by acre-feet of water usage, then comparing that to the SoCal population times the average water use per capita.
Can that really be true?
@dingodog19 If you posted the calculations I could say for sure, but yes- the math you're describing is how you could get that info.
And yes, that's about right. Farm irrigation uses much, much more water than drinking water, sanitation, & urban landscaping.
This is the problem with focusing on the "hey city dwellers, reduce your water footprint" approach to conservation. Ag water use is a whole nother order of magnitude!
@sarahtaber
Couldn't find my previous work, so I had to do it again. :)
This time, alfalfa came out as the biggest offender; rice was about 60% of SoCal residential use.
Here's the calcs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yEQfXMPXQPNWzwJb_dgKeUz3EBFCReurkuNVjyeFpHw/edit#gid=0
@sarahtaber Hell yeah! I am proud to contribute.
@JenWojcik Yes! It's a high-protein, high-quality feed that doesn't need a lot of inputs.
Peanuts are famously often grown on the worst land out here in the south. They're the plant equivalent of goats- they'll grow where nothing else can make it. They deserve way more respect <3
@enmodo Oh yeah get this, the vast majority (like 80-95%) of alfalfa grown in the western US isn't exported at all. It's for local dairy farms.
Americans consume a LOT of dairy & that includes CA & AZ. Milk is expensive to ship, so local production makes the most sense. And those local desert cows gotta eat something! That's where almost all US alfalfa goes, not export.
But that's a whole nother can of worms, I'm just keeping it focused on "what can the south help with" for this thread!
@sarahtaber well it's good to know that only 15% is going over seas, and I get the keeping it local aspect for environmental reasons alone, let alone economic ones.
But even 15% would add up to as much water as Nevada takes from the Colorado River each year and we bend over backwards to conserve every last drop which is how the LV population has doubled in 20 years and total water use is down 20%.
Do we even need to raise cattle in CA in the first place?
@enmodo Yeah this is what gets me, we had people panicking over how a gallon of almond milk takes 20 - 50 gallons of water to grow, depending on how you do the math.
Meanwhile it takes 1,000+ gallons of water to make a gallon of dairy milk (bc the cows have to eat something! E.g. heavily irrigated forage crops).
All I can say is the nice thing about doing ag in NC is western water issues are not my problem. Other than how we can help out here.
@sarahtaber it's good to hear someone has time and impetus to think about helping the Western States out.
Now living in Nevada most of our concerns are about the annual sand and dust harvest ๐ I wonder what other things we could be growing here that don't require a lot of water. Perhaps all those acres of solar could be providing shade to some new crops?
Is there any risk to people with peanut allergies from meat or milk from animals fed on peanut hay?
@EricLawton Great question. So... there's a history of feeding peanut hay to dairy cows, and we don't seem to have enough reports on people getting peanut allergens from cow's milk to motivate anyone to do studies on it. I don't want to say it's impossible. But based on that, I'd say if it were a problem we'd already know.
As far as non-answers go, that's not bad?
Tangential, but related to the observation that solutions to the nationโs problems lie in the Southeast, like they always have.
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