Here's an idea, charge 5x the amount for water for farms than we do residential, (or any industrial/commercial purpose) and if you pollute the water ways you pay 3x the cost to fix it, and if it isn't fixable you pay some really exorbitant (might as well go out of business fee).

Sure prices will go up on goods from those water ways, but maybe they won't..maybe they'll do better more environmental farming to preserve water, like vertical farming.

Agricultural use of water is heavily subsidized. The amount of water you would have to pay $2000 for, Big Ag gets for around $40.

Source: https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2018/01/26/the-cost-of-irrigation...

An individual almond contains only a small portion of the water used to grow it, so presumably the vast majority of the water used to grow almonds in California actually stays in California.

"Today nearly 80% of California almond orchards are using microirrigation and, as older orchards are replaced, we expect that number to grow."

"Previous studies have shown that a reasonable estimate of the runoff volume is 15-20% of the applied water."

Source: https://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/Almond-I...

I'd guess that runoff is a relatively small compared to transpiration. If it takes gallons of water to grow a single almond, there's no way that a significant portion of that is still in the almond when it's exported. IIRC almonds aren't particularly thirsty compared to other nuts, they're just really popular so their stats look the most dramatic.

Indeed, they're not especially thirsty; California just grows an incredible volume of them because we subsidize their production with vastly underpriced water far cheaper than the rate per volume that residential users have to pay.

It takes about a gallon of water to produce an almond, and the residual ends up in the air, where it's basically useless.

I mean, you don't see the state repealing rules about low-flow showers and toilets because "the water stays in California", right?