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I doubt that desalination would work at agriculture scale because most of the fields and orchards are too far away from the ocean, and the water is just too expensive.

That said, seeing water prices from desalination, I'm very frustrated California wants me to take a shorter showers when I would very happily pay an extra 50 cents for that long shower.

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One thing you could do is desalinate water in Los Angeles, and thus keep the water in the central valley rather than pumping it over the grapevine. I'm pretty sure agricultural use of water in CA dwarves urban use, so maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference. (Maybe someone can find actual numbers, sorry I can't right now.)

I bet this is the first use of large scale desalination. It already takes huge amounts of power to pump the water over the mountains to L.A. so reducing that load could make the desalination power requirements more palatable.

You cannot use the desalinated water in this way, because the excess salt will build up in and destroy the soils fertility. Sounds just like the kind of thing government would mandate, further destroying the environment.

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