A billion pounds of California almonds stranded at ports amid drought

Not just the tree, but the fruit itself.

Almond fruits are essentially peaches. If you crack open a peach or nectarine seed, you'll see an almond-like kernel inside.

Almond trees have been bred to improve the kernel at the expense of the rest of the fruit, but that rest of the fruit is a substantial portion of biomass which requires water.

>if _banning the export of almonds_ would allow building another LA and SF, "does CA have enough water for its population" is not the right question to be asking.

Serious question from someone who lives on the east coast and understands little about almonds. Why doesn't this happen? Is the almond industry a particularly strong lobbying force?

I like almonds just fine, but I see them as more of a luxury food than a staple. Are the places in the world where almonds make up a significant percentage of calorie intake?

I see that the U.S. is the world's biggest exporter of almonds. Is it a thing where if we stopped exporting almonds we'd have nothing to put on the boats leaving California for China and elsewhere?

In Texas, rice farmers also account for, to use your wording, an “idiotic” allocation of water: https://www.dailytrib.com/2022/01/05/lcra-seeks-public-comme...

The stat I've seen is that each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow. I still haven't found a compelling answer to this question:

Where does that water actually go? An individual almond is tiny, even if it's 100% made out of water, you can't actually fit a whole gallon of water in a single almond. So 99.9% of that water must be going somewhere else, like transpiration or back into the water table. If the vast majority that water is getting cycled through the same area (e.g. transpiration comes back down as rain, water in the soil goes into the water table and gets pumped back up), the 1 gallon cost isn't such a big deal, it's not like the entire gallon of water is being shipped to another country.

If LA wants more water, I think they need to desalinate rather than diverting more and more long distances to populate the desert. I know that's not easy. And of course cutting way down on almonds is a great idea and needed, but still the central valley is already poor as hell and the water you want is all their little wealth. You have to think about how making these poor communities poorer and LA richer will effect people and places. There's only a few million less people in the valley than LA country. And about almonds, the enormous factory farms just north of LA need to be the ones taken out, not family ranches. But the thing is, LA will only ever want and demand more.

LA needs to figure something out to not be completely reliant on other places as they continue to expand. You talk about population carrying capacity, I'd say LA has already hit it then, very naturally. Use all that wealth to make some of your own. They just like to take with their might. We saw what happened when they created the largest ecological disaster in California history diverting water. I think we need to see they are serious, and they need to put up and make big investments instead of always taking. For every gallon we give them, they should have to create a gallon of their own. It's fine and true to say almonds are wasteful, but that doesn't mean it should be LA's water.