If you want Mississippi water, pick up your ass and relocate it to one of the 32 states in the Mississippi watershed.
Farmers in California are literally pumping the aquifers dry. There are already people who have had to abandon their homes because you can't just dig the wells deeper to hit water anymore.
>A frenzy of well drilling by California farmers leaves taps running dry
https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-farms-water-well...
Ground water is a limited public resource. Farmers do not have the right to pump the aquifers dry and render the area uninhabitable.
I would imagine that you could require a license to pump ground water in areas where the ground water level has already dropped dangerously low.
>Water rights east of the Mississippi work differently than water rights to the west. In the west, they are based on seniority.
That applies to water on top of the ground (lakes, rivers, streams), not the water under the ground.
Farmers in California were running out of water 100 years ago too, and people responded with massive engineering projects to regulate water throughout the year and move it from places that were at the time water-rich to places where more water would allow using the extremely fertile land with favorable weather for agriculture.
It’s not insane to consider doing the same again.
The idea that californias water projects only direct water downhill is invalid anyway - the California aqueduct flows uphill quite a lot, and over mountains.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant is one of at least 5 pumping plants along the aqueduct.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
In all seriousness, the way the west (and California in particular) price water defies logic. All this talk about senior and junior water rights doesn't make any sense: it only benefits the entrenched incumbents. A properly setup market would simply price out water uses whose utility was materially less than demand of the produced product.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_a...
It's a quotation used by the socialist trio of Cabet-Blanc-Marx, and itself has origins in scripture, just with a materialist reframing, instead of a spiritual one.
in good part because California doesn't charge people a fair price for the limited resources.
sun
good soil, almost all capability class 1
ideal mediterranean climate
Not such an ideal climate evidently, since they're so desperate to import water.
Irrigation agriculture, rather than depending on natural water for growing, was an innovation humanity developed 6000+ years ago.
It used to be a great climate for growing things, a century ago. But that was during an abnormally wet period in Californian history. California is usually much dryer than it was a century ago, and is drying out once again. In California, people think one or two centuries of experience with the land is a long time. In most of the world, that's a joke. Try farming the land for a thousand years before you form such expectations.
I assume your opinion is probably that the water projects in California were all mistakes, but it’s not accurate to say that at some point the Central Valley was naturally ideal for growing things without artificial irrigation from far away.
but “does not require artificial irrigation” was not what I meant by “ideal climate.”
The Mississippi River basin is hardly an agricultural desert.