> Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.
> Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.
> The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.
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An article from UC Davis: https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/-files/pdf/shippingwaterputnam.p...
National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140123-co...
> Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. And that's just to China, which still trails Japan and the United Arab Emirates as a top destination for American alfalfa.
Chasing the author, that leads us to https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.7/how-we-export-our-water-to-a...
NPR: In Time Of Drought, U.S. West's Alfalfa Exports Are Criticized https://www.npr.org/2014/08/12/339753108/in-time-of-drought-...
And WSJ Parched in the West but Shipping Water to China, Bale by Bale https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444517304577653...