I feel that whenever people bring up that fact, there's an implicit point that water problems should be solved by reducing agriculture, but doesn't California's agriculture industry produce a huge fraction of the high-value fruit and vegetables that people eat?
What’s not clear to me is whether or not we have to grow our fruits and vegetables in California. Certainly one of the issues is that for huge swaths of our farmland elsewhere we tend to grow mono crops which are often inedible to humans (such as most of our corn). Perhaps we could grow more fruit and edible vegetables there?
> California’s $6 billion almond industry, which produces roughly 80% of the world's almonds.
> California almond production grew from 370 million pounds (nearly 168 million kilograms) in 1995 to a record 3.1 billion pounds (1.4 billion kilograms) in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. During that period, land planted with almond trees grew from 756 square miles (1,958 square kilometers) to 2,500 square miles (6,475 square kilometers).
> Although many Californians think that population growth is the main driver of water demand statewide, it actually is agriculture. In an average year, farmers use 80 percent of the water consumed by people and businesses — 34 million of 43 million acre-feet diverted from rivers, lakes and groundwater, according to the state Department of Water Resources
> Bill Patzert, a research scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, says that the West is in a 20-year drought that began in 2000. He cites the fact that a phenomenon known as a “negative Pacific decadal oscillation” is underway — and that historically has been linked to extreme high-pressure ridges that block storms.
> Such events, which cause pools of warm water in the North Pacific Ocean and cool water along the California coast, are not the result of global warming, Patzert said.