The Facebook of Mormon

The woman that he was trying to reach almost never picked up her phone, and she lived more than 50 miles away. Plus, he had to watch his gas mileage. So Brandon Gonzales, a then-20-year-old missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints, stationed inSlatington, Pa., looked her up on Facebook. The young Mormon found that she was almost always free to chat online in the mornings, and soon they were chatting every day. He would send her links to church videos and sermons that explained aspects of Mormon faith, family life, or church theology.

This was 2010, and, as far as most Mormons knew, what he was doing was completely forbidden.

Restrictions on technology have long been a defining feature of life during the Mormon mission, a full-time proselytizing effort that typically lasts two years for men and 18 months for women. Missionaries don’t use personal cell phones, browse the Internet, or even watch movies, excluding certain church-produced films. They read nothing outside of the Mormon scriptures and missionary-relevant texts. They call home only twice a year: on Mother’s Day and on Christmas. Up until April 2013, these missionaries kept in touch with friends via handwritten letters. Today they have access to email on a church-operated server for a limited time once a week. The lifestyle is constructed to minimize worldly distractions, and focus missionaries on the task of preaching their gospel. Which is why it was a pretty big deal that Brandon Gonzales was on Facebook.

He didn’t know it at the time, but Gonzales, who grew up in West Valley, Utah, and now studies accounting in Salt Lake City, was serving in one of several largely secretive test missions, started by the church in 2010 to evaluate the risks and benefits of introducing social media to the mission field. While the church won’t release any data about these test missions, there are at least 30 test missions worldwide, some which have run for two or three years—since 2010—and others are just starting. Some, like Gonzales’s in Philadelphia, were particularly successful with Facebook. At a test mission in West Billings, Montana, each missionary kept a blog to serve as a public face for potential converts. A mission in Moscow distributed iPod Touches to the missionaries, complete with pre-downloaded dictionaries and Russian-language scripture.

The new technology highlights what has always been a dual purpose of the mission: to gain converts and to confirm young Mormons in their faith. As a current missionary, L., explained to me, the general wisdom is that “you have to convert yourself before you can convert others.” (Current missionaries asked to not be identified, as they were not speaking in their capacity as missionaries). By preaching every day for two years, missionaries also testify to themselves. For many, the isolation that came with disavowing social media was critical to their spiritual growth. This was an experience few teenagers in America could imagine—two years without Facebook.

* * *

The Mormon Church has always been tech-savvy. America’s first transcontinental telegraph line could not have been built without Mormon volunteers, motivated by the enthusiasm of Brigham Young for new communication technology. The television was invented by a Mormon. In the age of the Internet, the church re-adopted the term Mormon for their outreach websites—despite it being an outsider label—in recognition that people don’t Google “Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints.” In 2011, they launched the “I am a Mormon” campaign, further leaning in to the power of the Internet. (The Church has not shied away from leveraging other secular developments: When the Book of Mormon musical swept Broadway, the church took out ads in the playbill, inviting theatergoers to read the real Book of Mormon. Missionaries stood outside theaters, asking people if now they wanted to meet a real Mormon missionary.)

But the Internet allowance still shocked the missionaries. “I mean, everything up until that point was about avoiding any contact with the outside world,” said Brendan Elwood, who in 2010 became one of the first four missionaries at the Philadelphia test mission to use social media. He is now a strategy consultant at Adobe Offices in Orem, Utah. “But it was exciting. The mission president called four of us into his office and said, ‘Our mission has been chosen as one of the pilot missions for this program. I’d like you four to try it out before we get the wheels rolling.’”

Gonzales thought the whole thing was a joke. “I was just kind of shocked,” he said. “I just didn’t see it coming, and could see it being a prank very easily,” he said.

Despite the suits and ties, missionaries are still 19-year-old boys away from home, and pranks, like filling a friend’s bathtub with Jell-O or faking a proposal from a girlfriend, are not uncommon. But this was no prank. Gonzales, six months into his service, was given the choice of making a new Facebook page or using his old one. He stuck to his original page, deleted some pictures, and put up a status saying his Facebook use was strictly for missionary business. When asked about further rules, Gonzales said the missionaries were told only to “be smart” and that his companion had to always be able to see his screen.

Missionaries serve in pairs that must remain together at all times. “Companions,” as each member of a pair is known, can change every six weeks. Companions sleep in the same room, attend the same events, even accompany one another on walks around the block. They are same-gender and, like all missionaries, refer to one another as “Sister” or “Elder,” respectively. One of the oldest features of organized Mormon mission work, companionship protects against “spiritual and physical danger,” according to the mission handbook, and is the bedrock of missionary self-policing. The handbook specifically instructs against seeking alone time by waking up or going to bed without one’s companion. Even missionaries allowed limited email access once a week must use their computer in the sight of their companion.

There are three main concerns voiced against Internet use: wasting time online, pornography access, and safety. On all of these fronts, Gonzales trusts that most missionaries will make wise decisions about their limits. This may mean choosing, as several missionaries in his mission did, to not go online. But such a decision is rare. Many feel that the Internet is no more a temptation than the world itself. When asked if being online ever exposed him to unholy content, Gonzales laughed. “I live in Philadelphia. You can’t delete what’s on the street.”

* * *

On June 23, 2013, Elder L. Tom Perry, 91, a member of the Twelve Apostles, the ruling council of the church, announced in a public web broadcast that all Mormon missionaries would begin phasing in social media and Internet use in the coming year. The reactions to Elder Perry’s announcement were overwhelmingly positive, if startled. While the occasional article about a specific test mission had been published in Deseret News, a Mormon-operated newspaper, very few people were aware that social media was being tested and considered. “This change is huge,” said Lon Nally, President of the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, Utah, as we went on a tour together of the building. “Traditionally they’re knocking on doors, and now with these hand-held devices the methods of work will change.” That was seen as a good thing. True to its optimistic reputation, most Mormons I met with had only faith in the upcoming generation.

“In every regard except for one they’re better missionaries [than we were],” said Erlend Peterson, a vice president at Brigham Young University who served his mission in New York the early ‘60s. Older Mormons are among the Internet’s strongest supporters. According to Peterson, the one problem with today’s missionaries is their need for immediate gratification. “Because they didn’t come from agrarian societies,” he said, “they don’t have patience. We knew what it meant to sow in the spring and harvest in the fall.”

Sheldon Child, a former mission president, area president, and emeritus member of the First Quorum of the Seventy—one of the top leadership positions in the Church—agreed that missionaries today are “better prepared to go into the mission field than 20 years ago.”

Elder Gary and Sister Kay Batchelor, a senior missionary couple currently serving their third volunteer mission (including 19 months on the Guam island of Chuuk in Micronesia where they taught morning seminary in Chuukese), were one of the most traditional couples I spoke with. During our interview, Sister Batchelor stayed mostly silent, deferring to her husband. Elder Batchelor called me “young lady,” and wanted to discuss my future marriage prospects. At the close of our interview, he told me that he could see I was a believer at heart, and strongly recommended I pray for revelation, on my knees. As a mission president in Little Rock, Arkansas, he made his missionaries handwrite and mail him weekly letters through 2008, even though most missions had used email since at least 2005. He was unfamiliar with texting, and he was dismayed by how many missionaries today arrive in the field “addicted to their cell phones.”

Naturally, I expected him to think the worst of Facebook. But he too was excited to reduce time knocking on strangers’ doors. As a former mission president, he knows how discouraging it can be for missionaries to face constant rejection at doors. He wants the missionaries teaching, not walking streets, and if Facebook can do that, then for Elder Batchelor, “it is a real bless”—that was his colloquial term. “Nobody opens their door anymore today,” he said.

I saw very quickly how much missionaries hate knocking on unknown doors. Known as “tracting,” the door-knocking has long been the backbone of mission work since the start of the 20th century. Missionary handbooks from the 1940s devote an entire chapter to effective tracting methods. This method has fallen out of favor in recent decades, especially in Western countries, and in many missions has been abandoned for a referral-based approach. Much of the optimism around technology has focused on it as a replacement for tracting.

Alan Hurst, a Yale Law School graduate who served as a missionary in Berlin from 2002 to 2004, tracted from nine to noon every morning for parts of his mission. This was intended solely to “put [missionaries] in the missionary mindset, even though it was a fruitless endeavor.” He acknowledged the unintentional benefits of “the old ways”—building resilience—but he said that it was ineffective proselytizing.

Nathan Gunn, who served in Barcelona from 2003 to 2005, agreed. “I don’t think I tracted another day after I became a senior companion,” he said, referring to the senior and junior roles assigned companionships, in which the senior companion determines the schedule. Parts of Africa or Latin America, he said, were receptive to tracting, as well as many immigrant communities in the United States. But “it has to be done in the right place at the right time, and Spain to me was just not the right place.”

“There was less pressure,” Ben Carraway said of online communication. Carraway served in the Philadelphia test mission from 2011 to 2013. “Online it’s online, instead of three people on my doorstep.” When contacted online, people can respond on their own time. Carraway would go “Facebook tracting,” sending Facebook messages at random to people with an explanation of who he was and linking to a church video.

In his web broadcast, Elder Perry acknowledged this shift. “The nature of missionary work must change if the Lord will accomplish His work,” he said. “People today are often less willing to let strangers into their homes. Their main points of contact with others is often via the Internet.” This admission lit up Mormon blogs and newspapers, with Mormons rushing to share their enthusiasm that the days of tracting were coming to an end.

The fact that the Church continued to develop test missions and decided to phase in Facebook, blogging, and iPads worldwide indicates the success of these tools. Within two years of introducing online chats to the Provo Missionary Training Center, missionaries chatting online had converted people in 42 states and 20 different countries. Two missionaries I met on a test mission in Utah got a woman in Texas baptized (baptism is the ritual that formally confirms one into the faith); a mission president in Moscow told me that two sister missionaries were able to baptize a woman by keeping in touch through Skype.

Online dictionaries and digital maps especially can seem like a godsend for missionaries learning foreign languages. More than 57 languages are taught at the Missionary Training Centers, including Hmong, Icelandic, and Samoan. Training lasts two to 12 weeks, depending on the language. Given the complex topics and specialized vocabulary needed, every missionary schedule includes mandatory daily language study for foreign-language missions.

Stephen Sorenson, who didn’t even own a cell phone before becoming missionary president, was quickly won over to the blessings of technology. Mission president in Russia from 2010 to 2013, he will never forget the day a missionary showed him how to search Russian terms on an iPod. “It’s like all of my life led up to that day,” he said, “and the rest of my life followed that day. I can’t imagine doing work here now without this iPod capability.”

“I don’t know that it was a big permission thing,” Ken Woolley said to me when I questioned his introduction of Skype and iPods to the field as a mission president in Russia. “I thought it just made sense.” Woolley is the CEO of Extra Space Storage, and one of the founders of the More Good Foundation, an organization dedicated to spreading knowledge and counteracting disinformation about Mormonism through the Internet. When he received the call to serve as mission president, he began creating a series of websites in Russian, and advertising on Russian social-media sites. Along with his wife Athelia they bought 25 iPod Touches for their 50 missionaries, and loaded them with regional maps, a Russian dictionary, the Mormon scriptures in both English and Russian, lectures from General Conference, and more than one thousand songs—permissible music must “invite the spirit,” which usually means Mormon Tabernacle Choir and anything over 100 years old.

In 2009, Woolley approached his area presidency about the new technology; the area presidency called in to the Missionary Department in Salt Lake City, which never responded. At that point, his area president—Elder Greg Schwitzer—gave him the green light. This wasn’t indefinite permission however, and so Woolley, a numbers guy with a background in the sciences, set out to test the effectiveness of his ideas. He divided his four zones in two, giving half the iPods and leaving half without. The results were incredible.

“The baptismal rate was almost double,” he said of the missionary efforts using the iPods. While the iPods didn’t help missionaries find new people, they were very useful in bringing to baptism people who had already expressed interest. Woolley believes this is because the iPod material made missionaries more effective teachers. They had professional videos illustrating their lessons, and language support. “You’re not substituting the technology for face to face conversations,” he said. “You’re using technology as an adjunct, to better make a point.” Woolley felt that the technology, instead of distracting missionaries, inspired them. “It gave them more enthusiasm,” he said, “because it had more success and they were having more fun.”

Woolley, despite his radical embrace of technology in spreading the gospel, is no media enthusiast. Like many Mormons I spoke with, Woolley felt strongly about the role of the Internet in spreading pornography, which he described as “cybersin” and incredibly destructive to healthy relationships. He was also sensitive to hard rock music or music with vulgar lyrics, which he believed to be spiritually harmful, and felt that many young men waste tremendous time on video games, becoming addicted instead of getting on with their lives. But ultimately, none of these concerns seemed to him substantial enough to ban technology from the mission field, especially when it proved so effective at reaching converts.

“I have nostalgia about the letters, but I don’t have any concerns about the Internet,” he said. “I am very much an optimist, and believe when we give people tools that can be positive, they will use them in a positive way.”

* * *

If anything, it is the younger generation that is more concerned about Facebook and Internet access. “I think my jaw dropped for about 10 minutes after the announcement was made,” said Elder Drew Brown, 19, at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, where he was in language training before heading to serve in Taiwan. Brown worried that he was “going to spend more time inside a room rather than face to face” teaching people, like his father’s mission.

For many missionaries the difficult lifestyle comes drenched in virtue. Most come to the field with hopes of—in addition to preaching the gospel—improving their discipline, concentration, and obedience. Basically, traits the Internet is said to destroy.

“If someone wakes up in the middle of the night, and goes into the kitchen and wants to have a go at it, there is certainly nothing stopping them … you don’t have to sneak out, you can stay right there in the comfort of your home,” said Stephen Sorenson about his early concerns that the iPods would make pornography more easily available.

“I think it is going to be harder for the missionaries,” said B.W., a current missionary. “I mean, if I had Internet access I’d be on eBay looking for ammo deals,” he added.

Younger Mormons, particularly from test missions, are cautious. “Part of me was a little worried,” said Ben Caraway, “because I feel like a brand new missionary shouldn’t be able to use Facebook until he has been out for a little bit. If you are a brand new missionary, home is always on your mind, and it is easy to be tempted to look at home and see what people are doing and what friends are doing,” making it a particularly vulnerable time for Facebook.

“Netflix kills you,” B.W. said when asked how he felt about the addictive nature of technology, adding that visiting families in their homes as a missionary has made him rethink the role of technology in everyday life. “The kids are all watching a movie, playing with Grandma’s iPhone. I don’t want to let technology get in the way of my being a parent.”

As he spoke, his two companions nodded vigorously. “You see kids in member’s homes … turn off the TV and they didn’t know what to do,” one said. “I would play video games for hours, and I lived across the street from a park!” the companion continued, saying he feels more present on his mission than at home. For him, staring at screens “Kind of dims you from the world.”

But not all Mormons agree on the central purpose of a mission. Different Mormons have different emphases.

Sheldon Child was adamant that bringing others to the Gospel must be the principal goal of one serving a mission. “The main reason they go on mission is to invite people to come to Christ,” said Child, who oversaw missionaries both as an area president and as a mission president himself in the 1990s in New York City. “The self-transformation is a byproduct. If you had a missionary who went on mission to become a better person or be a better speaker he would be a less effective missionary,” he said. From this perspective, the only hesitations one would have about technology would be whether it would result in fewer converts.

For many missionaries and their families, however, the personal process of the missionary is equally important. It is a classic coming of age experience, and one that ideally cements traits of discipline and obedience. When Ken Woolley was being trained as a mission president, the message was “beat into” him that “your primary success as a mission president would be manifest by the lives of your missionaries five, 10, 15, 20 years after the fact … the conversion of people was the outgrowth, not the primary objective,” he said.

* * *

In 1974 President Spencer Kimball called on every young man in the Church to serve a mission. As it became more common for Mormon men of all sorts to serve missions, mission rules became stricter. Mormons who served in the ’60s describe it as more adventurous, and certainly less structured. Overseas missionaries never called home, and could go months without hearing from their mission president. Up through the 1970s, missionaries generally were allowed to see movies, read books, write letters on days other than their designated day of the week, and use technology as dictated by their own common sense, including phone calls. They also had a full day off once a week, as opposed to the weekly 11am to 6pm time currently allowed missionaries to do laundry, write letters, go grocery shopping, or get their hair cut. Calling home twice a year became standard only in the late ‘70s. Today’s missionaries also email their mission president once a week.

Erlend Peterson, like many Mormons I interviewed from this generation, owes his faith to his mission. When he began, he woke up every morning at 5:30am. He didn’t need to be up until 6:00am (for missionaries today it is 6:30am), but Peterson wanted that extra half hour to study the Book of Mormon.

“I didn’t want my companion to know that I didn’t have a testimony,” he said over lunch at Brigham Young University, and reading scripture was his attempt to gain faith. A Mormon’s testimony is his or her conviction that the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith is God’s true prophet, and that the head of the LDS Church is a living prophet. For Peterson, his mission enabled him to gain a firm testimony.

As the Church continued to grow and expand, it was announced that while the call to serve a mission would still be universal, the opportunity to do so would be even more conditional. In an oft-quoted 2002 address titled “The Greatest Generation of Missionaries,” Elder Russell Ballard said, “The day of the ‘repent and go’ missionary is over.” He did not want missionaries who, like Peterson, were still gaining a testimony. “We live in perilous times,” Elder Ballard said, calling on all men to commit to a standard of worthiness. “This isn’t a time for spiritual weaklings. We cannot send you on a mission to be reactivated, reformed, or to receive a testimony. We just don’t have time for that.”

This sentiment was reiterated by President Gordon Hinckley, in an address known as “Raising the Bar.” President Hinckley said, “The time has come when we must raise the standards of those who are called … as ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ. … We simply cannot permit those who have not qualified themselves as to worthiness to go into the world to speak the glad tidings of the gospel.” After this address, the number of missionaries per year dropped from 60,850 in 2000 to 51,067 in 2004, a drop the church also attributes to changing demographics.

By all accounts, and despite general societal despair of the current youth, today’s missionaries are likely the most well vetted, and most committed, cadre that the church has ever sent forth. While younger—the church lowered the age minimum for service in October 2012 to 18 for men and 19 for women—they are certainly the most thoroughly trained. “I don’t know what the MTC was doing,” Sorenson said of his 2013 missionaries in particular, “but this last year the kids were just tremendously sharp. Language, maturity, good judgment, willingness to work hard and be focused on missionary work and not other things.” They are focused, and coming to the field at a time of tremendous change.

It is undeniable that Facebook and iPads and multimedia will change the mission field; it has never been easier to sift out the hostile or ignore the uninterested (though, in other ways, it has become easier to attract the hostile). Missionaries using social media as outreach will face a lot less rejection in their daily work and connect more readily with those interested in hearing their message. They will hear more anti-Mormon messages as well, and have greater access to alternative Mormon histories. They will spend more time staring at screens. Their missions will probably lose some of the adventure of their fathers, walking miles down a dark road on nothing more than a feeling that a house down there was waiting for them. Future missionaries might only visit homes they’ve already called, texted, and confirmed a meeting time with. But for the romanticism lost, a much more effective system is gained. They may yet be the first generation to reinvent the foundational experience of Mormon proselytizing.

* * *

There is a recurring joke that every returned missionary refers to his mission as “the happiest years of his life.” I heard this first-hand before I learned it was a cliché. The first time, I had asked one of my missionaries who was a few months away from the end of his service, if he was looking forward to returning home. He looked down.

“I’m so happy,” he said. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”

The life of a Mormon missionary is hard. These kids pay out of pocket to serve, are allowed almost no entertainment, and no break from their work. And yet, technology advances or not, most lit up when discussing their mission. This was certainly not the case for everyone, and many Mormons have serious grievances about the conditions under which they served. But for Mormons today with faith intact, coming home is hard. The advice, often, is to get busy immediately upon returning home. Many Mormons begin school or work mere weeks after coming back from a two-year mission, a turnover rate that surprised me.

“Those first six months were the most difficult of my life,” said Bob Farthingham about coming home from his mission. Farthingham served in England from 1965 to 1967, and as a mission president in Colorado from 2008 to 2011. By the time he said this, I wasn’t surprised. It was the sentiment I heard from countless missionaries, regardless of decade.

There are a number of reasons given. Some Mormons attribute it to a spiritual change in status, that missionaries have a special closeness to the Holy Ghost that leaves when they return. In speaking with missionaries, however, it seems there is something inherently powerful about knowing what to do with every moment of your day, and the confidence that comes from sincere conviction that you are doing important work. Most missionaries are motivated by altruism, believing they are in the field to help other people find the happiness they have found as Mormons. After two years of pushing yourself in the fight, it can be hard to feel you are abandoning the field for more trivial matters.

For recently returned missionaries, Facebook provides a slight antidote to the pain of losing one’s missionary status. Most missionaries today keep in touch with their investigators—individuals considering conversion—through Facebook. “It makes returning less difficult, because you are still doing missionary work,” Elwood said. Though like many emerging adults constructing a Facebook identity, some returned missionaries worried about their investigators seeing them living non-missionary lifestyles, such as going to concerts.

When I began interviewing Mormon missionaries, I assumed the technology innovations would be eroding their productivity, exposing them to temptation and doubt. Instead, I found surprisingly similar stories of struggles and rule-breaking and temptations told across the decades, technology notwithstanding, from men who served in the ‘70s and boys still in the field. I didn’t find my last tribe of Western kids who had tasted life before laptops, who could tell me what I wanted to hear, which was that they were happier without their devices, and that they had deeper friendships because they hand-wrote letters to one another; that superficial communication and splintered attention spans are modern problems, easily attributable to technology.

Instead of fear, I found incredible optimism and excitement about technology in mission work, albeit alongside caution. Instead of second-hand nostalgia for the past, I found some rare faith in the future.

Drought forces California farmers to idle cropland

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Drought-stricken California farmers facing drastic cutbacks in irrigation water are expected to idle some 500,000 acres of cropland this year in a record production loss that could cause billions of dollars in economic damage, industry officials said.

Large-scale crop losses in California, the No. 1 U.S. farm state producing half the nation's fruits and vegetables, would undoubtedly lead to higher consumer prices, especially for tree and vine produce grown only there. But experts say it is too soon to quantify the effect.

Coming off its driest year on record, California is gripped in a drought that threatens to inflict the worst water crisis in state history, prompting Governor Jerry Brown last month to declare a state of emergency.

He urged citizens to reduce their water consumption by 20 percent voluntarily.

California water managers later said the drought would force an unprecedented cutoff in state-supplied water sold to 29 irrigation districts, public water agencies and municipalities, barring an unexpected turnaround.

Irrigation deliveries to another group of agricultural districts served by the state are expected to be reduced by half, and an even larger group of farmers who get water from the federally operated Central Valley Project are likewise bracing for sharp cutbacks this year.

"We're in a dire situation that we've never been in before," said Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation.

The state's network of reservoirs that collect runoff of rainfall and snow melt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range - the state's biggest source of fresh water - is badly depleted.

So too are the underground aquifers that have provided farmers reserves when water was otherwise scarce.

"Some farmers may still grow crops on some of their land. Some farmers may face bankruptcy because of this," said Mike Wade, executive director of another industry group, the California Farm Water Coalition.

Ironically, the crisis is unfolding after an all-time banner year for California agriculture, with statewide production valued at $43.5 billion in 2012. Most of that comes from California's Central Valley, a flat, fertile region stretching 450 miles north-south from Redding to Bakersfield.

Farm districts representing about half of irrigated agriculture in that region have reported that they already expect to fallow 385,000 acres this year because of the water shortage, Wade said.

Extrapolating to the remainder of the Central Valley, Wade said his organization expects the full amount of irrigated land removed from production this year will easily top 500,000 acres of the region's approximate 6 million total.

The Farm Bureau is similarly projecting between 400,000 and 500,000 acres of irrigated land being fallowed, Wenger said.

BROCCOLI AND CANTALOUPES HIT HARD

Hardest hit would be such annual row crops as tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, cantaloupes, garlic, peppers and corn. Wade said consumers can also expect higher prices and reduced selection at grocery stores, particularly for products such as almonds, raisins, walnuts and olives.

He said the potential total value of unplanted crops was hard to calculate. But his group estimates the overall impact of idled farmland will run roughly $5 billion in direct costs of lost production and indirect effects through the region's economy.

An economic toll of that magnitude would put about 40 percent of all agricultural jobs in the Central Valley at risk, or about 117,000 people directly employed in farm production, processing and transportation, he said.

Wenger declined to venture an estimate of economic losses. But he said, "It's going to be a sizeable number that we've never seen before, and it's going to ripple through the local economies, especially where agriculture is the name of the game."

By contrast, a California drought in 2009 resulted in an estimated 269,000 acres of cropland idled, $368 million in lost farm revenues and total reduced economic output of $796 million, according to a study from the University of California at Davis cited by Wade. Nearly 10,000 jobs were lost.

Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture, said the agency is working with UC Davis to develop real-time impact assessments.

"We are anticipating significantly higher economic impacts, compared to the 2009 drought, for the agricultural sector," he said.

The current water shortage could be made worse by the fact that many farmers have switched from annual field crops to orchard-style produce, such as almonds and olives, which cannot simply be left fallow from one year to the next.

Many growers face the choice of either shutting off irrigation to their older, less-producing trees to save the younger ones, or spreading less water across their groves and accepting smaller overall yields.

Orange and lemon growers, who just weathered a damaging week long blast of sub-freezing temperatures in December, are fairly safe for now but worried about running short of water for next year's crop, said Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual.

The recent cold snap cost the Central Valley growers, who account for most of the nation's fresh citrus fruit, about $441 million in lost revenues, out of about $1.5 billion in annual production, the trade group said.

Still, the losses paled in comparison with a severe freeze in December 1990 that damaged citrus trees so badly that growers lost two years of production.

Livestock producers are facing their own drought-related difficulties, including scant winter rain they rely on to grow grass for grazing their herds, industry officials say. Beef producers are being forced to ship much of their stock back East, while dairy producers face higher costs to purchase hay and feed.

How to Preserve Heat in Your Home

One of the most important things in the winter season is mastering the art of preserving the heat inside your home, without turning up the thermostat sky-high.

You can look at this matter from two points of view: first, if you manage to keep the heat inside the house, you will save a lot of money on your energy bill. Second, in an emergency scenario, if disaster strikes and power outages become frequent, it would be a great idea to maximize your resource efficiency and keep your house warmer for extended periods of time.

In order to achieve these goals, learn a few simple tips and tricks about keeping your house cozy and warm in the cold season. It’s a win-win situation.

Generally speaking, most people are not aware of the basic fact that there are lots of ways their home is leaking air. Unfortunately, along with the air, the heat  goes away too. It’s a no-brainer that plugging the leaks is the most realistic way to reduce your utility bills for the entire year, because the same principle applies in the summer if you’re using an air conditioner.

Also, during a cold winter (like this one), keeping your home warm at all times can be crucial in a survival situation.

Let’s take a look at some of the key areas in your home that might need improving.

Thinsulating Weak Areas

The main areas that let heat escape from your home are the exterior walls, the basement ceiling and theattic floor. In order to minimize the heat loss, you should add insulation to those key areas.

The basement ceiling should be insulated with roll-in fiberglass; thus the cold air will no longer invade your house through the floor. You can prevent the warm air from escaping through the exterior walls by adding blown-in insulation.

If your house has an attic, it is probable that you have ventilation ducts up in there and they are most likely leaking air. This leads to condensation. In order to prevent this phenomenon, you should insulate these ventilation ducts with fiberglass.

Insulating the attic floor is the same story as the basement ceiling; you can use the same roll-in fiberglass in order to prevent the heat from dissipating through there.

Almost all residences have electric switches and outlet boxes hanging on the outside walls and, especially in older homes, many of these have gaps that will allow the heat from inside your home to escape. All you have to do is to fill in the holes where the wires enter the box with an insulating material, i.e. silicon or foam.

Sealing the windows and doors

Another obvious thing is to check your windows for drafts. This is actually one of the main causes of your house losing heat in the winter and lots of people are not paying attention to this matter.

Along with the windows, doors may be the culprits in letting the heat out. All you have to do is to stop heat (and cooling) loss from around windows and doors is attach weather stripping insulation around the perimeter of them and you’ll be fine. Weather stripping comes in various widths in order to properly fit your windows and doors and it is very easy to install all by yourself.

You can also caulk your windows with silicone; pay extra attention to those visible holes or cracks that let the heat out. Silicon is highly recommended because it lasts for a long time and it is flexible even in extreme temperatures and it will not crack or shrink as it ages.

Install double-pane windows, as the air trapped between the two panes of glass will act like an insulator; the double-pane windows are way more efficient than regular windows and even if they are more expensive, they are worth it in the long run (you will save lots of money on your heating bill).

Easy Tips

• Keep your shades pulled down during the night and during sunless days. This will help insulate your house especially if you have shades made of thick fabric (much better than synthetic/thin fiber).
• You must keep the damper in your fireplace closed when you’re not using it because an open fireplace will let the heat escape from the house like there’s no tomorrow. Also, if the fireplace features a glass door in front of it, you should keep it closed if you’re not using it for the same reason.
• Keep your heating ducts clean and inspect them on regular basis because a blocked duct will seriously affect the efficiency of your heating system and can even cause a fire.
• You should keep your water heater wrapped in order to reduce the amount of heat lost; you can achieve this by acquiring an inexpensive blanket, specially designed for your particular water heater. You can find one in your local hardware store or you can buy it online.
• If you don’t have a programmable thermostat, you should buy one as soon as possible. A programmable thermostat can be used to keep the temperature low inside your home when you are at work or when you’re sleeping, hence significantly reducing your costs. Also, you can heat various areas of your home, i.e. the ones you spend the most time in will be heated more than the others.
• Since exposed pipes can easily freeze in the winter, you must wrap them with special foam, tape, or with pipe wrap insulation.

Before turning up the heat, just spend a few minutes and review these tips and tricks, as they will help you reduce your utility bills during the cold season and will also make your home the perfect shelter from the storm in a real life survival scenario.

Get Prepped: Shelter How to Choose and Power a Crisis Locale

One of the most common mistakes made by preppers, according to Practical Preppers’ Scott Hunt, is putting too much money and effort into building an impenetrable fortress. “I’ve seen people who literally put millions of dollars into building bunkers, and then didn’t have enough money left to buy adequate supplies of food and other essentials,” he says. “A lot of them are just out of balance. They put all their eggs in a bunker, so to speak.”

And while there’s an argument to be made for designing a structure with features that can to provide shelter against natural disasters or nuclear attacks, thick walls and sturdy doors in themselves may not be sufficient protection against security threats. Hunt’s partner David Kobler, a military combat veteran and security expert, advises that it’s smarter to design layers of security that surround your dwelling, so that intruders can’t actually reach it. No matter how thick the walls, “If the bad guys get close enough to fire a shot at your house, you’ve already failed,” Kobler warns. “And if they can drive a vehicle up to your front door, you’ve lost.”

Instead of focusing merely on survival against threats, Hunt advises preppers to put more thought into how they’ll actually live in a structure for extended periods.  “Shelter means a lot of things,” he says. “You have to think about how you’re going to heat it, how you’re going to cook, how you’re going to generate electricity, how you’re going to collect water. Your shelter has to be sustainable.”

Location: Perhaps the most crucial aspect of shelter is not what sort of building you build, but where you put it. Hunt advises picking a location in a valley, near a water source and woods, and ideally close to arable cropland where a prepper can grow food as well.  Proximity to energy sources is crucial as well. Hunt advises: “My optimum location would have southern exposure for solar energy generation, a decent amount of wind, and a creek that falls a couple of hundred feet for hydroelectric power.”

Bunker/Safe Room:  There are a variety of shelter designs to pick from, ranging from custom-built circular homes that provide greater energy efficiency and resistance to hurricane winds, to repurposed steel shipping containers.  Another option is to build a “rammed earth” building with thick, sturdy walls made of clay and sand. Building a portion of the structure underground adds to the protection from disasters, and also can provide residents with a cool cellar for storing fruits and vegetables without refrigeration. A metal roof is a good investment, because it provides better-quality water from rain catchment systems.

Power Generation:  Ideally, multiple sources of energy will help protect preppers against running out of juice. Houses should be built facing south with pitched roofs, so that they can be outfitted with solar panels for either passive water heating or electricity generation. Wind and hydroelectric power are other options for electricity. A generator that runs on biomass fuel is useful as a backup.

Heating/Cooling:  If a source of firewood is nearby, Hunt favors using a wood stove. “Wood really is the best renewable resource out there for heating your home and your water,” He explains. “That’s what the Amish do.” Another option for heating water is to have a passive solar water heater, but it’s still necessary to pump the water, which requires additional energy.  An on-demand propane-fueled water heater, which only burns fuel when a prepper actually needs it for showers, cooking or washing, is another option.

Cooking: Again, wood may be the best option for cooking stoves, and it’s possible to use the same stove to heat a room and cook as well. According to a 1991 article in Mother Earth News, preppers who cook with wood as a heat source may need to learn different culinary techniques. The surface of the stovetop is hot enough to fry foods in a skillet, and at the same time has enough area for simmering and slow cooking, and the oven inside the stove can be used to bake bread and roast meat.

Bug-Out Location:  Preppers may want a back-up dwelling at another location, where they can seek refuge in the event of a fire, an attack or another disaster. One option is to buy a custom-made “tiny house” structure on wheels, which can be towed from the main compound to another site if necessary.

California: Before And After The Drought, And Why It's Only Going To Get Worse

While the Northeast is blanketed by another winter storm, California has its own, quite inverse, climatic problems in the form of a historic drought which as Bloomberg reports, is forcing farmers in the fertile central valley region to fallow thousands of acres of fields and has left 17 rural towns so low on drinking water that the state may need to start trucking in supplies. It is so bad that water reservoirs are at about 60 percent of average, according to state water data, and falling as rainfall remains at record low levels.

Unfortunately for our California readers, it is going to get worse before it gets better because mountain snowpack is about 12 percent of normal for this time of year. The following picture of California from January and a year ago shows just this dramatic difference, which confirms that there is little hope for the parched state.

Here is the WaPo's Reid Wilson explaining the above visual comparison:

The three-year long drought plaguing the western United States is only likely to get worse over the next year, forecasters and climate scientists say, given a dismal snowpack that has officials in many states worried. Despite a snowstorm earlier this week, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains stands at just 12 percent of the average level, the lowest measurement in the half-century records have been kept.

The low snowpack has serious consequences for the summer. Less snow means less summer runoff. Already, California has banned fishing in some drought-prone rivers. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has asked residents to turn off the water while brushing their teeth. Earlier this week, President Obama called Brown to discuss the drought.

Earlier this month, Brown declared a state of emergency, urging residents to conserve water as much as possible. Several state agencies have said they plan to ration water throughout the summer. And already this year, several wildfires have broken out in areas of the state like Humboldt County, which is typically wet enough in the winter to mute any fire activity.

This of course is great news for America's already reeling economy, not to mention its stock markets and earnings growth-less corporations: it means one more excuse can be added to the arsenal of scapegoating, because while the latest snowstorm will come and go, even if it should provide "economists" and "analysts" with another reason to ignore "weaker than expected" February data, the aftereffects of Calfornia's drought will linger. And as everyone knows, Californians don't buy houses, cars, iPads, burgers, clothing, and generically, stuff, when there is a drought raging.

So bring on the bad data, and let it all be explained away by California's lack of snow, not to be confused with the overabundance of snow everywhere else.

Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst

LOS ANGELES — The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the state’s drinking water supply.

With no sign of rain, 17 rural communities providing water to 40,000 people are in danger of running out within 60 to 120 days. State officials said that the number was likely to rise in the months ahead after the State Water Project, the main municipal water distribution system, announced on Friday that it did not have enough water to supplement the dwindling supplies of local agencies that provide water to an additional 25 million people. It is first time the project has turned off its spigot in its 54-year history.

State officials said they were moving to put emergency plans in place. In the worst case, they said drinking water would have to be brought by truck into parched communities and additional wells would have to be drilled to draw on groundwater. The deteriorating situation would likely mean imposing mandatory water conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.
Launch media viewerA once-submerged car at a California reservoir. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing” said Gov. Jerry Brown, who was governor during the last major drought here, in 1976-77.

This latest development has underscored the urgency of a drought that has already produced parched fields, starving livestock, and pockets of smog.

“We are on track for having the worst drought in 500 years,” said B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Already the drought, technically in its third year, is forcing big shifts in behavior. Farmers in Nevada said they had given up on even planting, while ranchers in Northern California and New Mexico said they were being forced to sell off cattle as fields that should be four feet high with grass are a blanket of brown and stunted stalks.

Fishing and camping in much of California has been outlawed, to protect endangered salmon and guard against fires. Many people said they had already begun to cut back drastically on taking showers, washing their car and watering their lawns.

Rain and snow showers brought relief in parts of the state at the week’s end — people emerging from a movie theater in West Hollywood on Thursday evening broke into applause upon seeing rain splattering on the sidewalk — but they were nowhere near enough to make up for record-long dry stretches, officials said.

“I have experienced a really long career in this area, and my worry meter has never been this high,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition. “We are talking historical drought conditions, no supplies of water in many parts of the state. My industry’s job is to try to make sure that these kind of things never happen. And they are happening.”

Officials are girding for the kind of geographical, cultural and economic battles that have long plagued a part of the country that is defined by a lack of water: between farmers and environmentalists, urban and rural users, and the northern and southern regions of this state.

“We do have a politics of finger-pointing and blame whenever there is a problem,” said Mr. Brown. “And we have a problem, so there is going to be a tendency to blame people.” President Obama called him last week to check on the drought situation and express his concern.

Tom Vilsack, secretary of the federal Agriculture Department, said in an interview that his agency’s ability to help farmers absorb the shock, with subsidies to buy food for cattle, had been undercut by the long deadlock in Congress over extending the farm bill, which finally seemed to be resolved last week.

Mr. Vilsack called the drought in California a “deep concern,” and a warning sign of trouble ahead for much of the West.

“That’s why it’s important for us to take climate change seriously,” he said. “If we don’t do the research, if we don’t have the financial assistance, if we don’t have the conservation resources, there’s very little we can do to help these farmers.”

The crisis is unfolding in ways expected and unexpected. Near Sacramento, the low level of streams has brought out prospectors, sifting for flecks of gold in slow-running waters. To the west, the heavy water demand of growers of medical marijuana — six gallons per plant per day during a 150-day period — is drawing down streams where salmon and other endangered fish species spawn.

“Every pickup truck has a water tank in the back,” said Scott Bauer, a coho salmon recovery coordinator with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “There is a potential to lose whole runs of fish.”

Without rain to scrub the air, pollution in the Los Angeles basin, which has declined over the past decade, has returned to dangerous levels, as evident from the brown-tinged air. Homeowners have been instructed to stop burning wood in their fireplaces.

In the San Joaquin Valley, federal limits for particulate matter were breached for most of December and January. Schools used flags to signal when children should play indoors.

“One of the concerns is that as concentrations get higher, it affects not only the people who are most susceptible, but healthy people as well,” said Karen Magliano, assistant chief of the air quality planning division of the state’s Air Resources Board.

The impact has been particularly severe on farmers and ranchers. “I have friends with the ground torn out, all ready to go,” said Darrell Pursel, who farms just south of Yerington, Nev. “But what are you going to plant? At this moment, it looks like we’re not going to have any water. Unless we get a lot of rain, I know I won’t be planting anything.”

The University of California Cooperative Extension held a drought survival session last week in Browns Valley, about 60 miles north of Sacramento, drawing hundreds of ranchers in person and online. “We have people coming from six or seven hours away,” said Jeffrey James, who ran the session.

Dan Macon, 46, a rancher in Auburn, Calif., said the situation was “as bad as I have ever experienced. Most of our range lands are essentially out of feed.”

With each parched sunrise, a sense of alarm is rising amid signs that this is a drought that comes along only every few centuries. Sacramento had gone 52 days without water, and Albuquerque had gone 42 days without rain or snow as of Saturday.

The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which supplies much of California with water during the dry season, was at just 12 percent of normal last week, reflecting the lack of rain or snow in December and January.

“When we don’t have rainfall in our biggest two months, you really are starting off bad,” said Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the Air Resources Board.

Even as officials move into action, people who have lived through droughts before — albeit none as severe as this — said they were doing triage in their gardens (water the oak tree, not the lawn) and taking classic “stop-start-stop-start” shower.

Jacob Battersby, a producer in Oakland, said he began cutting back even before the voluntary restrictions were announced.

“My wife and I both enjoy gardening,” he wrote in an email. “ ‘Sorry, plants. You will be getting none to drink this winter.’

5 Water Storage Tips Everyone Should Know

Please note this article is about water storage tips. Purification of water is a different topic, although I do touch the topic here a bit.

Tip #1 Know Your Containers

Not all containers are created equal. Whether the container you wish to store water in is something you can place in your Bug Out Bag, or bury underground at your retreat, the material that it made from is as important as the purity of the water it holds.

Plastics:

Plastics that are safe to store water in must be food grade safe, on the outside of the containers there should be a recycling symbol (triangle of arrows), which has within it a number between 1 and 7. Food grades are 1, 2, 4, and 5. (Although some bio-plastics are also food grade and marked with a 7, unless you know the container is meant for food do not trust it, as not all number 7 stamps mean they are safe for food). The best food grade containers made of plastic are marked with a number 2, as this is High-density Polyethylene (HDPE) plastic. The others are PETE (#1), LDPE(#4), and polypropylene (PP/#5).1

If you are recycling old containers be careful not to use old milk jugs, or cardboard type juice boxes. Milk proteins and Juice particulars are almost never removed completely by washing and it is best to go with a new container for long term storage.

Glass:

Not even all glass containers are the same. Some glass used to store chemicals originally would not be considered food safe, let alone safe to store water. Glass can break, crack due to freezing, and even end up with tiny flaws from use inside which might trap contaminates.

Borosilicate glass (trademark name Pyrex) is likely one of the best forms of glassware to store food and water in as it can take temperature ranges and even has some resistance to breakage. Watch out for soda-lime based glass that calls itself Pyrex as it is not heat resistant. One example is Mason jars, and jars that look like mason jars but cannot be pressure canned.

Stainless Steel Tank:

If you plan on collecting your water from rain run off, the best way is is store it in a stainless steal tank. They generally have a 40 year life span, and they tend to actually cost less over the lifetime of the tank compared to other storage systems. Stainless Steal is best for Water Storage systems.

Tip #2 Preserve Your Water
Chlorine:

Water from the kitchen sink tap might not need anything added to it to store it. If your municipality water supply adds chlorine to the mix store the water as is works. If however you have ‘clean’ water, without additives, you will need to add the chlorine yourself. Add two drops, of non-scented chlorine bleach to every 2 litres of water, make sure it is also non-additive as well. When you need to use the water, let it stand open for 30 minutes before drinking. You should be able to smell the chlorine in the water when you add it, if you don’t add another two drops, but remember to wait an additional 15 minutes of airing the bottle before use. Be sure to read the label when purchasing chlorine for this use, 5.35% chlorine content is best for calculating your needs. Chlorine bleach will kill mostbacteria causing diseases.

Storing the chlorine itself is another issue. Chlorine should be stored between 50 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, after a year of storage, it starts to degrade by approximately 20% per year to salts and water. If the chlorine source you are using is 6% sodium hypochlorite, you should replace it after 3 months of storage.

Calcium Hypochlorite:

Calcium Hypochlorite is actually better for storing water then using liquid bleach, because of it’s longer shelf life. It is generally sold in two forms, dry and hydrated. Although the hydrated is safer to handle the dry granular can have an indefinite shelf life (a yellow white solid which has a strong smell of chlorine). It can be purchased by the common name as “pool shock”.

The thing to watch for when buying pool shock is if they add anti-scaling agents (water softeners), you want a 68%-78% calcium hypochlorite without the water softeners added, although calcium chloride is often added as well.

One pound of granular Calcium Hypochlorite will treat up to ten thousand gallons of water (37854.1 litres). The process is rather simple. First you make a solution of the Calcium Hypochlorite(approximately 1 teaspoon) to two gallons of waters (8 litres). Do not drink the solution! The ratio for stored water is 1:100, one part solution to 100 parts water.

Added Note: Calcium Hypochlorite can also be used to make Chloroform, but that’s another topic.

Iodine:

The first thing that must be mentioned about using iodine is that some people are allergic to it, some people who are allergic to shellfish are also allergic to iodine. Second, using iodine is more effective as a point-of-use method for stored water where your not 100% sure it was stored correctly. Potable Aqua Water Treatment Tablets should be stored nearby, or in your bug out bag. I include it here as a fall back method. Iodine purification works best with the water temperature being over 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and the iodine itself must be stored in a dark bottle away from UV sources such as direct sunlight as it is sensitive. Persons with thyroid problems or on lithum, women over fifty, and pregnant women should consult their physician prior to using iodine for purification. Iodine removes/kills Giardia lamblia better then bleach.2 Giardia lamblia is a flagellated protozoan parasite that colonizes and reproduces in the small intestine, causing giardiasis.3

Useage: Liquid 2% Tincture of Iodine Add 5 drops per quart when the water is clear. Add 10 drops per quart when the water is cloudy. Iodine kills microbes down to 0.004 microns!

Tip #3 Where you store is important.

Keeping safe drinking water in a proper place is as important, as storing the water correctly in the containers. Dark closets are better then garages where the sunlight hits the containers, as some plastic containers degrade faster when exposed to sunlight, as well as methods such as chlorine are also effected by the same UV rays. You might also want to consider the construction of the area the water is stored in, is it safe there from an earthquake or fire?

Tip #4 Water should be replaced every six months.

Even bottled water from the store has a shelf life, but home made stored water can have small amounts of contaminates which can have a compounded effect over time. Keep track of your preps and rotate them, including the water and methods used for your water supply.

Tip #5 More than just drinking

You need more water than just for safe drinking supply, you need to bathe, clean surfaces and utentiles, cookware needs to be maintained, and even need sterile water for first air. Take stock of the water you use on a day to day basis so that you have a better understanding of what you use when there isn’t a crisis, so that you are better prepared when there is one.

REPORT: US CATTLE HERD AT LOWEST NUMBER SINCE 1951

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) -- The lingering effects of drought across the Great Plains in recent years have led to another decrease in the U.S. cattle herd.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service reports that the U.S. inventory of cattle and calves totaled 87.7 million animals as of Jan. 1. That was down by about 1.6 million cattle, or 2 percent, compared with this time last year.

The agency says this is the lowest January inventory since 1951.

A bright spot was a 2 percent increase in young, female cattle retained for breeding. One expert says that factor could allow the herd's seven-year contraction to stabilize.

Totals in Texas, the nation's leading cattle producer, decreased 4 percent.

The January report had been anxiously awaited because the agency didn't issue a report in July due to sequestration.

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