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).
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?