And then they use it to flood irrigate things that don’t need to be flood irrigated.
That’s because they legally have to. Land owners with appropriative water rights must use their water or they lose access to it, forever. Flooding a low value field is the logical thing to do, even if it’s an unreasonable thing to do.
I moved to California about a decade ago, and I still struggle to fully grasp the scale of this place. Think about this example: CA grows 80% of the world’s almonds, but almonds are not native to CA and they consume an insane amount of water. I saw a statistic somewhere that the few thousand almond farmers in the state use something like 30 times more water than the entire city of Sacramento and all its residents.
I know farming is incredibly difficult with barely any profit margin, but crops like almonds simply aren’t sustainable, so the cost to grown them and the price to buy them should reflect that.
Pretty much all farming west of 100 degrees longitude depends on irrigation, with most of it being fodder for cattle and ethanol that’s blended into gasoline. Both of which are even less efficient than almond growing.
It has been like this for more than a hundred years because we have two different legal systems for water rights: riparian rights and appropriative rights. Until we get that mess sorted (a very tall order), some land owners will be able to pull free water while some cities will struggle to buy water or water rights.
