So why do we clamp down on residential watering while allowing almonds to be grown? Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose, and dead grass will grow back when the water comes back. Almonds provide an economic benefit and we usually have plenty of water for them. Diverting water from residences to almonds during a drought is simply the price of keeping that part of the economy alive.
Hybrid hazelnuts could be used in lots of places that almonds are currently. Chestnuts.
And there are hardy varieties of almonds that will grow in the east as well.
Cheap Latino labour, powerful organized industry groups, state subsidies, and an inaccurate pricing for irrigation....
Almonds get so much attention, but if you look at the amount of water necessary to produce almond milk vs the amount of water necessary to produce cow's milk, almonds start to look at lot more attractive.
You have an impoverished notion of economic purpose. Eating almonds make people happy, so almond growers grow almonds and sell them to people that want to them. Riding horses make people happy so alfalfa growers grow alfalfa to sell to people to feed to horses. So too, lawns make people happy so they spend a whole lot of money making sure they have neat, green lawns. That money gets translated into jobs and economic activity just like the money spent on buying almonds because they taste good.
There's no moral and immoral uses here, just satisfying preferences. The way to sort this out is through market mechanisms. It might be a different story if we were talking about pricing people out of drinking water, but that's not even close to what's going on here.
Residential watering of, e.g., vegetable gardens serves exactly the same economic purpose (food production) as agricultural watering does. The difference is in who benefits -- agribusiness vs. individual residents.
If they could, they would.
> It seems California is not a great state for farming, and was engineered to be suitable.
No place is a great place for modern farming, which requires considerable man-made infrastructure in any case. But in terms of things that you can't easily engineer around (except, recently, fresh water within a convenient collection area) California is a very good place for farming.
Iowa[2] for comparison.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Colorado/@38.9252672,-105....
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Iowa/@41.9383166,-93.38979...
[3] http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?...
Most of the parts of Colorado that are good for agriculture (e.g., not the Rockies) are already being used for agriculture. You can't really replace the area of California currently being used for agriculture with agriculture-suitable land in Colorado that isn't already being used for agriculture.
It also has a very different crop mix than California.