Some blueberry farms and vineyards here in Oregon use large fans to mix the higher/warmer layers of air with cooler/lower layers, or “drain” cold air away (by blowing it straight up, it apparently doesn’t come back down). This keeps cold air from pooling in certain areas, which is what is needed to cause frost damage.
Here are some large mixers, which might be mistaken for small windmills. These are powered by propane (I think), which is what the tanks nearby hold. The heat produced is a bonus, even a degree can make all the difference: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d6UwmpPsYih5xkZD9
So while helicopters used to shake water off of crops can sound crazy, it’s literally a big mobile fan you can call in when needed to save your established perennial crop from much more expensive problems (like a disease epidemic, which now requires bacteria codes/fungicides instead of just burning some fuel. Which can make sense.
We also use helicopters to harvest Christmas trees. It’s too damn wet in the fall/winter to run most wheeled equipment up and down those horrible on red clay hills, which often have artesian springs temporarily form, resulting in clay mud that can grab and hold all land vehicles.
> Agriculture is a whole lot of “sure it’s stupid, but it works and is cheaper than the alternative”
The fan idea is actually quite okay, cold pockets exist. But let us not forget that "cheaper than the alternative" depends on the prices of everything else.
The problem capitalism constantly keeps running into is that certain externalities are not priced into that "cheaper" choice. You can defrost your fruit with helicopters if the fuel and helicopters are cheap enough, but you may be happily stacking a debt elsewhere, e.g. in the form of polution, social costs, climate crisis, draught etc.
The problem here is that these externalized costs are often not paid by the people who stack them up, which is when regulation can become increasingly benefitial.
Granted, the "crazier" measures like defrosting fruit with helicopters are often just limited stop-band measures in a bad phase that can safe a whole harvest, but if they are used to battle the stacking hidden cost they are in the danger of becoming more and more common while making the problems worse (or at least masking it).
An example: I grew up in the Alps, where skiing is a thing. Each year ski resorts have to rely more and more on artifical snow, which uses extreme amounts of energy and water. Climate change means that the snow mark moves higher and higher each winter, but what about the communities that built a living around the slope and it's tourism if it is their resort that has no snow this winter? That's when you go in with the artifical snow. Twenty years ago that may have been a few bad days in the year or just small parts of the slope, and over slow creeping times it has become more and more. The problem is it just prolongs the needed change, it doesn't solve it. Maybe they are lucky and blessed with snow next year, but what about 10 years down the line? The good ski resort villages are already aware that this is an issue and try to move more towards summer tourism, with the artifical snow just buying them time to do that transformation.
But the only reason they have to do that is because energy is expensive and artifical snow works only down to certain temperatures (to warm and it cannot be produced). These limiting factors may not exist elswhere.
There also are propane burners used to heat the orchards. Some are even dragged through the rows to provide heat. We used to get more citrus that was frost damaged, I can't remember any in the last few years but that may just be luck/where I am buying.
This could be good, but as always the second-order ramifications could be troublesome (only big agricultural business would be able to afford to have crops, etc, etc).
"Cadillac Desert" is a good read to see how bonkers the water system can be (and was devised to be) in the US West, because it basically tries to turn the desert into a garden. The only problem is that there's just not enough water to do that.
"While corporate growers of premium products like berries, which are shipped to the shelves of major chains like Whole Foods, Safeway and Trader Joe’s, can absorb the price of Pajaro’s water, there is no way farmers of commodity crops like cotton, alfalfa and soybeans can make the economics work, said David Sanford, the agricultural commissioner of the Santa Cruz County, which includes the Pajaro Valley.
"In the years since the price on water was imposed, growers of those crops either shifted to high-priced berries and lettuces, or simply left the region for cheaper pastures."
The increased cost could only be handled by shifting to higher-margin crops.
On the other hand, anyone growing alfalfa or soybeans in the stinking desert deserves whatever happens to them.
That's not really a big agribusiness vs. small farm thing -- it's just not going to make sense to grow those in the desert if the farmers have to actually pay the cost of the water. Classic case of internalizing the externalities.
It’s hilarious to see all the “Congress created [sic] dust bowl” signs down I-5 through the Central Valley when you consider how much of the land there was given to them for free through homestead acts, and taxpayers subsidize their water. Add in the extensive use of undocumented workers to make even more profits and I doubt many would be too sad if we just let them pay the actual costs of running their business, which wouldn’t work without all these subsidies. I’m not sure if it’s sheer audacity or just ignorance of their own situation that emboldens them to support politicians who aim to deport their laborers.
For that matter, what if farmers had to pay a livable wage? Berry-picking is especially rife with social dumping.
It is a hot topic here in Scandinavia, because every season farmer will cry “no one wants to work!”, and then comes testimonies of indentured servitude at its worth, and sweat-shops at its best.
Many farmers here “import” Asian rice farmers to pick berries these days.
Here’s one I remember from the permaculture or market garden ‘scene’ couple years back: There was a relationship where some would teach and provide food and accom and others would learn and work for no or little pay. Assume no one was forced into such arrangement. Then they’d go off later with skills and start their own farm. Yeah?
Later, govt got involved and enforced minimum wage standards. That previous relationship was no longer viable. The students could not return enough income for minimum wage. So, instead, those positions changed and the students had to pay instead, and not a small amount either because now there govt involvement in your training institution etc.
So did the situation get better? I feel as though no, because now, to ‘get into it’, you need a thousand dollars or whatever, where as before you just had to be keen and show up.
Are you arguing for unpaid/reverse paid internships here?
Look, people need to eat. There will always be a need for farmers. We're literally suffering from success. As far back as the 30s we were paying farmers to dump or destroy their produce to prevent racing to the bottom. The supreme court declared that was unconstitutional so they ended up just doing a ton of subsidies instead. We don't want farming to be maximally price efficient. A surplus of food is a good thing, since crops sometimes fail or disaster strikes.
Farming mega Corp domination is a fairly new thing and thanks to this guy
Usually, on those permaculture "internships", you get a roof over your head and food to eat. You don't get any money on top of that, the assumption is that you're being paid in skill acquisition. It's a fair deal for many people.
It's wild to me that people see problems like this, and think to themselves "Yeah, it's okay that we overwork people for no money, but there's no other way to turn a profit for this, so this just has to be the way the world works."
This is what governments are for. If the system doesn't pay people a livable wage to do the work to support our existence (food), then clearly we need to change the system to not be based on "maximizing profits".
But instead you justify it by saying the margins are "razor-thin", and farmers have to take advantage of people if they want to survive. And that justifies this terrible behavior. Move who you're blaming and call them to action, instead of just accepting terrible conditions for workers.
Farmers are responding to incentives, gov'ts have built subsidies for farmwork in the past, because food has to be cheap for people to live.
Exactly this. If your company cannot afford to stay open if it hires a certain number of staff, then it simply cannot afford to have that many staff and should hire less (and find a way to do that work with tech or what not instead). If it can't work with less staff and isn't practical to run, then the business itself isn't viable and should probably close its doors.
That's true of everything from banks to shops to restaurants to tech companies and farms; if they're not viable businesses, then either the proprietor pays to keep them open out of their own pocket, or they shut down and make room for companies that are viable.
And yeah, if society values the work enough but it isn't profitable to do, then the answer is that the government or some other organisation funds it, not that people get exploited or rules get relaxed to make it 'viable'.
US is the largest food exporter in the world. It would make sense to start with no longer subsidising exports, and putting more subsidies into food that is actually consumed in the country. This would kill the export part of the industry (whose main beneficiaries are rich people owning large farms), while increasing wages of farm workers.
Also, the US's Midwest has one of the best lands in the world for farming, there's zero need to farm in the deserts from the country's (not the rich farm owners') perspective.
The problem is that to provide farmers with livable wage the people would need to pay a lot more for food, so they would need to have money to pay for food.
I hope that with universal basic income we will be able to bring back market forces to food production instead of relying to artificial incentives for the farmers.
I challenge you to walk up to the nearest farmer, look at their (edit for clarity: accounting) books; and not realize that what you are asking, is just as impossible as asking 3 engineers to write a competitor to Windows.
I know enough about their lives to know that your armchair quarterbacking is an absurdity.
I don't feel that you're replying to what the parent poster is actually saying. It's not about asking farmers to make these changes by themselves and without any sort of extra compensation. It's that we really should be looking at the entire system.
If farmers couldn't afford to pay reasonable wages _and_ turn a profit, then, at the system level, the externality of those lost wages is being paid somewhere else _by_ someone else. We're just not recognizing that externality or worse, it's being hidden.
And frequently in situations like this, where people aren't being paid livable wages, they turn to theft and other crimes. So one of the "externalities" we're talking about here is an increased crime rate. We then pay police to try to curb that, who are remarkably inefficient at reducing crime, so we have to over-pay to try to achieve that goal.
If, instead, we formally recognized that externality and addressed it at the source -- for instance, like the parent poster suggested, by subsidies (which would almost certainly be cheaper than the increased police budget that addressing that externality would otherwise demand in our current climate) -- then farmers could pay reasonable wages and keep or even increase their margins to a comfortable level. It's not in our best interests to keep farmers poor or just scraping by either!
Isn't the farmer the wrong person to ask? As in, the margins are razor-thin because the competitors (merged conglomerates operating) are operating vertically-integrated at scale, driving prices so low that only they can skim enough to profit from participatong in the market.
So the farmer has no variables to change because the problem is not in their jurisdiction, but rather the government's, no? (i.e. breaking up giant agri-businesses, or taxing them and redistributing to subsidize small operations)
But I recognize there's also geopolitics of food, so there are many layers I don't understand :)
Why should we be subsidizing farmers that can’t do it as cheaply as these conglomerates you mention? It seems like in other industries we say “tough luck, find a different job” if you can’t compete. Genuinely wondering what the difference is here.
I mean, first, we've been subsidizing farmers since the dust bowl/great recession. As to why consolidation of our nations food supply into a small cohort of conglomerates is a bad thing.... I mean do I really have to expand on that one?
I'm all for setting price minimums on agriculture IMHO. We have such an excess of food already that, combined with food banks and stamps, I'm not concerned about people going hungry. Most of the expensive shit is from processing and logistics seems to be the biggest issue with food scarcity (there's a reason meals on wheels exists)
That’s why there needs to be government intervention. No single farmer is going to do the right thing because market forces are driving them to thin margins and poor behavior.
There are multiple problems, some which are real problem with the industry and other that are problem more inherent with that kind of farming.
Farmers who do human smuggling and steal labors passports in order to force people to work for nothing are a problem both about regulation and enforcement (and ethics). It the exact same problem in construction, cleaning, prostitution, and so on. Those industries can exist without human smuggling, and the bad actors only serve to make it worse for everyone.
Berry farms in Scandinavia do however have a problem with distribution. Most farms are located very far away from the consumer, with the distributor taking more than the major portion of the profits. The accounting can quickly look a lot better when a farming do not need to sell to gross distributors for 1/10th of the value of the product. Solving cheaper distribution and storage are possible, but is more similar to the issue of creating a competitor to Windows. Margins for farmers do not need to be that thin, but creating storage and distribution chains are complex when dealing with such perishable goods.
oh, well, I guess since everyone is doing it, that makes it okay, and we can't imagine a better world. Let's call it a day, accept our lot in life, and move forward.
I hate the sentiment that because things are bad somewhere they should be bad elsewhere. Every time I bring up benefits that I have that others don't they start by saying "you shouldn't have those" instead of saying "I should have those too." It's like we're playing a weird game of the prisoner's dilemma, but there's not actually any benefit for the person defecting.
Just for some perspective, the low-income limit for a single person in SF, Marin, and San Mateo counties is $104,400 for 2023, and not much lower ($96k) for Santa Clara county where much of “SV” exists. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/low-income-media...
There really should be a very fine tuned 'wage vs cost of living' number, which takes effort to look at grocery cost, along with housing cost, including buying a house, electricity, basically all basics.
Maybe some blended rate, where you look at "buying housing for a family of 4 + rented apartment for a bachelor" and blend, to get living costs.
When I did research compared to where I live, I discovered a person makes more living near Ottawa, ON, making $70k USD/year, than someone making $250k/yr US in .. say, Palo Alto. This was of course primarily due to housing costs, although this was in 2020. Things have changed dramatically in most of Canada (re: housing) in the last 3+ years.
Of course yes, most certainly, if you buy + pay off a $3M USD house/land vs a $300k USD house, you have more money to retire on. You could theoretically move to a lower cost area, and retire with style. Yet who wants to (potentially) leave their kids who might settle in the region too, and additionally, all their friends, associates, etc, etc.
Any yet buying doesn't take into account "What if a person just rents for their entire life", which can happen. Nor does it take into account things such as property tax, and other associated housing costs (water tax, etc).
To give an idea of the massive cost differences, just the property tax on a typical $3M Palo Alto home is 4x my mortgage on my $250k house. My mortgage is $800 USD per month. Palo Alto monthly property tax on $3M home? A little over $3000/month. Paying 4x as much just in property tax, compared to my mortgage? Well, that money is gone, gone, gone in terms of 'life savings', and is pure additional cost.
For the record, my property tax is about $120USD/month. Let's call it 25x more for Palo Alto property tax.
Again, there have been dramatic changes in Canadian housing pricing in the last 3 years. There are also differences in how peoples are taxed. For example, I probably pay more federal and provincial income tax, and a little less property tax, with money tricking down from those levels to the municipal level. Yet, I also get free health care (quality debates and issues not relevant, just a point), $10/day state funded day care, and pharmacare coming soon.
So it's really hard to equate across national borders in terms of living costs, but I guess my point is living costs can be so dramatically different. I suspect that making $100k in Palo Alto makes a person much poorer than someone making $25k in rural Arizona.
One of the larger unions here in Norway published an article with some calculations detailing how much a beer should cost in a pub or bar in Oslo.
Their point was that if it was significantly cheaper than their number, the owners most likely didn't pay minimum wages or some similar shenanigans was going on.
I've often since thought other groups, like farmers, should do something similar. I've got no clue how much a small basket of strawberries should cost for the farmer to make a decent living and the pickers to get a decent salary. Same with most other things I buy in the grocery store.
Additionally in certain circumstances it's less disruptive to use more water. E.g a nuclear power plant on a river: river water in, slightly warmer river water out w/o any or much steam generated. The more water 'used' the lower the temperature of hot water discharged, so kinder to the local ecosystem.
I am an electrical engineer that mainly works on hydro plants but also have done some work on natural gas plants. The fact that this is so high is shocking to me. I guess the big culprit is coal plant cooling towers. The natural gas plants I've worked in don't even have cooling towers, any cooling water goes right back where it came from.
As a life long Californian, when people tell me California is running out of water my response that California is running out of cheap water.
Calfornia farmers pay $30 to $120 for an acre foot (325,851 gallons or 1,233 cubic meters) which is ridiculously cheap and is wasted growing things like rice (California grows about 20% of the rice produced in the U.S. each year.)
On the private water markets, it used to be more on the order of $1000 per foot-acre for agricultural purposes in the US high desert. This clears the market so you can still make money in agriculture at these prices, you just can't be wasteful.
One thing to point out: this particular case was the response to a crisis.
"But in the 1980s, disaster struck. Growers over pumped the coastal groundwater, allowing saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to seep in below their fields, up through the roots of the berry crop."
It doesn't seem likely that a similar change would happen elsewhere without a similar crisis.
This story describes Pajaro, an agricultural community in California with a local water-management agency, the origins of that agency, and how other communities, facing water shortages, are looking to that model.
Farmers in Pajaro will pay $500 per acre-ft (3.3e5 gal) of non-potable recycled water in 2024. By contrast, a New York City resident paid $5,000 for the same volume of potable water and attached sewer charges in 2023.
Estimating irrigation requirements at 1.5 inches per week for 24 weeks, if I add 3 acre-ft of water for $1,500 to a 2014 report on the economics of strawberry production in Oregon (https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/oaeb/pdf/A...), the costs of growing (dominated by labor for picking (60-70%), followed by land preparation and planting (20-25%)) would increase by 7%.
Elsewhere, some estimates show as few as 12 weeks to grow strawberries, or that California acres have 5x the yield of Oregon acres. For strawberries (yield $25,000 per Oregon acre with plasticulture), it seems easy to absorb the $1,500 cost of water. Other crops (TIL: alfalfa, wheat, corn, soy, oat, rice: yield up to $1,000 per acre, need 2-5 acre-ft of water per acre) and other locales will have a different calculation.
Ultimately, farmers in different places will face different economic landscapes considering: sun/land, air, water, labor, market access. Where land and water are expensive, only high-value (possibly high-labor) crops make sense; where land and water are cheap, lower-value (and low-labor) crops and scale may make more sense.
There are lots of well-known ways to slow down rainfall to let it seep into the ground, things like terracing and berms. California does little of that, so when it does rain, it all just washes into the ocean and it's back to drought.
Good news, my California town makes terracing so difficult to do that it might as well be illegal. So when it rains there's rapid runoff into a creek that makes a beeline for the ocean.
It's really not that hard. Well, it takes time and labor. Beavers used to be the key to water retention in the ecosystem, but we hunted them to near extinction.
You can have some of the ones that live by me. They're quite the nuisance, and nobody wants to trap them for pelts anymore.
I'm pretty sure the colony that lives by me has been exporting them (given the number of babies and new dams I've seen) but they're not likely to cross the Rockies on their own.
Well, yes, you do need to erect fencing around the trees you don't want them to cut down, but beavers do greatly help create better water retention in the local environment.
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What would happen is people would start farming where water is essentially free from the sky again. Huge swathes of the midwest require no or very tiny amounts of irrigation for crops. But currently huge swathes of that land sit fallow and unused because people farming in the desert get essentially unlimited water on top of their near year-round growing season and can out compete them, which doesn't take much with how tiny farming profit margins are for most crops.
Farmers don't pay for water, it becomes part of the overhead that must be covered to make farming an economically worthwhile activity. So fruit would cost more, or it would be less available, or both.
In this model of what pay means, nobody making anything pays for anything. I know that's a reductive argument but really it mistakes the relationship of input costs, fixed costs, declared rainfall, and price in the market.
In Australia water has financial value as an asset class and is bought and sold, in a futures model as well as at time of use (irrigation)
I just think you're wrong on so many levels. Only primary mining can be said to not pay for anything in this model and they pay rent and royalties and other costs.
That seems like it might be a good thing. If we priced it in producers would need to find more water efficient ways to make the product to be able to be a viable participant in the market. If that means growing fruit in a desert isn't viable, so be it! Don't grow fruit in the desert!
California is the most important agricultural state in America, so really every other state is a special case. They export nearly 2x the next biggest state 24k vs 16k.
Dystopian is “water was free so the big farming business pumped the aquifer dry and exported the agricultural goods. Now people here have no water and the land is a desert”.
This stuff is economics 101.
The full quote is:
“”Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll’s who in January will become the chief executive, said in an interview that he “absolutely” sees the region as a model of water pricing that could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to Portugal. “Water can’t be free anywhere, because you can’t run a sustainable water supply without pricing it,” he said. “That would apply to the globe."
“”
Where I live it rains for the majority of the year. We could put out buckets and easily capture enough to care for our needs, but then you have to deal with making sure what we are going to ingest is clean and deal with no water pressure and hauling water around the house. It is so much easier to pay someone else to deal with it. So, water could be free some places, but…
As they should, because there’s no such thing as “your own well.” A well lets you pump water from a shared aquifer. If 100 parcels of land were on one aquifer and one resident pumped all of it, leaving none for anyone else, it would be a misleading lie to say they were just pumping “their own well.”
It's classic "tragedy of the commons" stuff. Having a "free" input sets up incentives for waste since that resource now exists outside the influence of market forces.
So it's either putting a price on these resources or careful regulation. The latter is not very popular in today's political climate.
Has never worked very well. Government bureaucracies are very bad at pricing and allocating things appropriately. A case study is in the 70's the government decided gas allocations for every gas station. The result was a patchwork of gluts and shortages across the country.
Reagan ended all that as his first Executive Order, and overnight the gluts and shortages vanished along with the gas lines.
Very much rooting for Argentina's Milei to provide a similar lesson in modern times but I am afraid that he has very few allies helping him (besides his own idiosyncrasies) and the current laptop class would simply ignore it as they ignored Venezuela's lesson...
> Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
There's a very unambiguously wide gap between water being freely available to every person for sustaining life, and water being completely free to use in quantities of trillions/quadrillions of gallons for profit.
You don't need to farm water-intensive crops in deserts, especially in the modern era of extremely effective logistics. We should be growing crops where they're most suitable for, and applying something closer to normal pricing dynamics will nudge us closer to that.
Agreed there's not a bright line, but we're clearly at one undesirable end of the spectrum.
I agree, but then we're back at exporting produce from wherever water is cheap and abundant. Which is a good thing and necessary, but it has to be done carefully at the industrial scale we're at.
Is it? What about using limited water for crops that don’t have as much value to survival as other crops? Or wasteful locations, etc.
I’m not advocating charging necessarily, but using up a limited resource with reckless abandon seems short sighted. What am I missing? Is it not a very important resource to manage?
But you see, their family got the land for free through a Homestead Act a few generations ago after they drove the Natives out (and/or murdered them) and now they get subsided water and property taxes through Prop 13 and cheap labor from undocumented workers, so why not do everything else in their power to maximize profits? That is the only mission in capitalism, after all.
"paying the water bill" is a pretty normal thing for a large portion of the world. certainly for most of america.
paying for water is not a dystopia. and taking a totally normal part of life and calling it "dystopian" with no further explanation is one of the laziest arguments ever.
Paying for water when you are poor is a threat to life and livelihood that's dystopian. This is the nature of dystopia, it mostly affects the impoverished.
Is it not the same for paying for food, as well? I generally agree, but water seems an arbitrary line to draw when we still have shelter and food to consider.
Before humans decided to pollute a lot of the fresh water on earth or appropriate it for themselves, humans could just go to the nearest stream and get water. In that sense, it feels right that it should be easily accessible at no cost. Meanwhile, humans have usually had to expand considerable effort to build a shelter and gather or grow food. So i don’t see the line as being arbitrary.
When I lived in a rural area on septic and well, my electric bill was often under $200 in the summer, running AC fairly heavily, and taking care of ~6 dense garden beds full of veggies for ~6 months... and regularly watering 1 acre of grass to keep it from drying too much. We even had a timer to auto-water the garden and parts of the lawn... We'd even let it run overnight on a few occasions (needing to water, but coming home very late)
I hardly considered water a costly resource
On "city" water now in suburbs, I followed a similar pattern for grass on a 1/4 acre lot, and heavily watered the lawn one month, and I had a $300 water & sewer bill -- on top of my $100 electric bill.
Water went from being something I hardly considered to something I am far more careful about 'wasting'.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Like others have said, “Water can’t be free anywhere” seems to be inevitable at a commercial level--but dystopian on an individual level. If you had neighbors in your rural area aggressively pumping water out of the ground your well would dry up...and you'd be paying "market price" for it.
Just looking at water usage when I owned a house, irrigation uses a ridiculous amount of water relative to everything else individuals use to live--including laundry, bathing, dishes, etc. If memory serves, sewage costs are significantly more than the water itself (and sewage as metered off of water consumption--so you're likely paying sewage feeds on water you're irrigating with).
The actual cost of enough clean drinking water for people is very small. Enough that drinking fountains are common and people shouldn't need to ration drinking water.
Yep, this is why we need a water price and dividend system.
Whenever you use water it is tracked and you pay the market price. All of that is then collected and put into a pot. It is then given back equally to everyone.
Everyone is thus incentivized to use less and those that use less than the average amount of water - a huge majority of people since the heaviest users use so much - will receive more money than they spent.
Eh, NIT and any sort of UBI are mathematically the same thing given you still have an income tax and can adjust the percentage. This just accomplishes that goal in a progressive way.
Well.. if your grass would dry out and become yellow without watering it, then watering is a luxury. The water in deep wells will eventually run out. Why waste it on grass?
No dog in this fight. I moved out of Scottsdale to the Great Lakes region a bit back partly because of the water issue. So I definitely get the natural inclination to not want to have to think about water.
All that said, I mean, if your HOA requires this, is the problem with the city charging for water use to upkeep the infrastructure required to deliver it? Or is the issue really just that your HOA has rules that it shouldn't?
Limited natural resources shouldn't be free for industrial exploitation. Unfortunately, money is the best mechanism for incorporating these concerns into a product.
A bucket of water from river or lake somewhere can likely be free in many places. Even ground water if you exclude building a well.
It is not unreasonable to charge everyone using water when it is treated, delivered and sewage is taken care of. As long as the price paid for minimal daily use is not exploitative.
