Drought emergency declared for all Southern California
latimes.com
latimes.com
Other than that, I don't know what else there is to say that hasn't already been said. The Colorado River is drying up, that doesn't look to be changing any time soon, but governments seem to still be going on about watering grass while avoiding the mention of the largest consumers, agriculture and industry. Okay, I guess the Southwestern U. S. is screwed; with that dead horse thoroughly beaten, let's go back to talking about Twitter.
But, of California's agriculture, how much of it is alfalfa and lettuce and stuff like that? Stuff that, if you got no water this year, you could just replant next year? (Can you just replant alfalfa in one year? Lettuce I'm sure you can. Strawberries... not sure. Tomatoes, definitely you can.)
I'm genuinely curious I only know how to grow hydroponic herbs like basil, so I have very limited knowledge of this stuff.
Much like Silicon Valley, this is a productive ecosystem that arose in which farmers who are aware of best practices and have access to appropriate supplier, financing, and skilled/unskilled labor pools. It's really amazing how much more productive California is compared to agriculture east of the Mississippi.
This accounts for why so much agriculture is here even though it really shouldn't be, due to the water situation. California is a semi-arid climate that has had -- looking at tree ring data -- up to 200 year-long droughts, and should be used to raise reasonable-sized populations of free range grass fed cattle and sheep, rather than water intensive food crops. The latter should be limited to small plots of land that are regularly rotated. The previous 100 years in California - when the agricultural industry developed - were unusually wet, and this has set the baseline expectations, but that is most likely an outlier, and we should be prepared for a few hundred years of drought.
"“We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years,” said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. “We’re living in a dream world.”"[1]
[...]
"Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years." [1]
* * *
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-pa...
No, people in the Southwest are going to be fine. California keeps bringing desalinization plants online. Desal plants can produce plenty of water for people--even your swimming pool and front lawn.
What they don't do is provide water for agriculture because the price is set by production cost.
The argibusinesses in the Central Valley are going to keep going until complete collapse--ref. Easter Island. So it goes.
there are plenty of crops that don't require so much water. we should be growing nopal and other drought tolerant crops.