Someone’s has drinking problem. Either it’s big agriculture or a lot of other people (myself included). That or this “water crisis” is one of the biggest scams in our state’s history.
I’m fairly certain the party with the drinking problem is not me, and I’m even more convinced we’re not experiencing the scam of the century. As mentioned in this similarly named post at Change.org, we are overdrafting groundwater at a rate of 1.6 billion cubic meters (bcm) a year, equal to 15 percent of the state’s annual groundwater use. Pair that with decreased rainfall, decreased snowpack on the Sierra Nevada’s and other mountains, and a dwindling Colorado River, California (and the rest of the world that depends on us for fruits and vegetables), is in a serious pickle.
Last week I talked to a group of farmers who told me they were parceling off their land solely because they couldn’t afford the hikes in water costs. (Which, consequently, are being pushed on small scale farmers first- residential homeowners will probably be the last to experience a big hike in price).
Growing around 80% of the exported fruits and vegetables for America, California guzzles water at an accelerating rate. Initially though, I’m less concerned about fruit and vegetable producers, with organic agriculture and small scale farming, I’m convinced we can better use and allocate the water we do have.
I’m less convinced we have the political will in California and the nation to shift the resources though.
Unbelievably, large parts of water-scarce California are earmarked for incredibly water-intensive crops non-native to California. 
Namely rice and cotton which are both federally subsidized “commodity crops” as determined by the all too outdated, Depression-era Farm Bill. A Bill which keeps getting renewed every 5 years because powerful mid-west farm lobbies in corn, cotton, rice, wheat, and soybeans. You know, all of the items that can be turned into super cheap sweeteners and livestock feed (read cheap sweeteners as: the root of the obesity epidemic, and livestock feed as: why meat is falsely cheap).
If these producers felt the real costs of production, the market conditions would shift and conservation of water would happen without regulation and legislation. It should, quite simply, be too expensive to produce rice, soybeans, and cotton in California.
But wait- we must have this whole water shortage thing wrong. As the California Rice Commission says:
Great weather and ample water. Those small farms Riverside, San Diego, and the desert counties who went broke on account of water costs must have been… you know, drinking.
(Hand+Forehead)
Listen to NPR’s Loss of California Farmland Story Here:
Say it!