How serious is the California drought? Before and after pictures

Even in dry years as we are experiencing now, California has more than enough water for domestic use. Some communities, especially those dependent on small local reservoirs, may run into trouble if the drought continues for several years, but California has dealt with this successfully in the past, most recently in the 1976-1977 drought[1].

The people who really need to worry are farmers, especially those without senior water rights. Many farmers in the state have moved from producing row crops, where fields can be left fallow in dry years, to orchard crops like almonds which still need irrigation during a drought. I don't have a lot of sympathy for almond farmers in Bakersfield. Here's a thought: maybe an area of the state with average rainfall of 6" a year isn't a good place for an almond orchard. The drought might actually be a good thing if it forces some of those farmers to move back to row crops. It may also finally force California to regulate groundwater pumping. Unrestricted pumping leads to subsidence[2] and kills off native vegetation by lowering the permanent water table below where the roots of valley oak and other drought adapted plants can reach.

Governor Brown has also been fanning the flames a little to sell the public on his delta tunnel plan. He used a similar tactic during the 1976-1977 drought to try and sell the peripheral canal.

1. see for example this CDWR documentary on the 1976-1977 drought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZXeEktMYLM

2. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140325-calif...

1) I was conservatively assuming that the cost of the meat is due entirely to the cost of the water. In reality, it's even less. Taking the value of meat-in-the-city would make the estimate err even further in the wrong direction by attributing, to water, value that was actually added by transportation.

2) For city dwellers, I wasn't using the actual cost paid for the water, but the (approximate, much-higher) amount they would way if push came to shove, in order to estimate the relative utility destroyed by people cutting back on showers compared to farmers producing less water-intense output, and thus how misguided are the campaigns to get people to cut back what are already high-value uses of water.

Despite getting water from the reservoirs, most ranches have had their allotments restricted to the point that they have to use well water to maintain their crops. A lot of the ranches have been forced to drill deeper and deeper wells. I know of a few ranches that are pretty much in competition with their neighbors to go deeper- one ranch drills under the other, and is then draining the aquifer out from under people with shallower wells. Most drilling companies are booked solid for the next year due to demand.

It's scary driving through the valley and seeing drill rigs everywhere, it really drives home how serious the situation is. I wouldn't want to be someone that lives off of well water, chances are their wells are going to go dry before the end of this, and it's crazy expensive to go deeper, plus the scheduling issues. What would you do if your well ran dry but it's $50000 and six months before you could do anything about it?

In other words, if the most environmentally friendly crop for an area cannot be eaten directly by humans, the most environmentally friendly thing may be to use cattle to turn them into calories that can be eaten by humans.

A large portion of North America used to be grassland fed upon by Bison. Range cattle have a very similar ecological footprint to Bison. By that measure, they are much more "natural" than any other food (except perhaps bison or mastodon). Pasture and hay land is rarely/never a monoculture, it is rarely/never sprayed with chemical. (Which is much more environmentally friendly than the organic alternative, plowing). It's also rarely irrigated. You're much more likely to find wild life on pasture and hay land.