Re:California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem
by jacobolus on Thursday June 18, 2015 @04:34PM
(#9741460)
Even if it’s not a desert, it’s also clearly not an environment suited to growing many of these crops without heavy irrigation.
If we priced water appropriately, low-value high-water-use crops like rice, cotton, and alfalfa, which really have no business being grown at the expense of draining our reservoirs and aquifers, would be priced out of production, and the land could be devoted to more valuable or less water intensive crops.
This is misleading. Most of California, and even most of the Central Valley specifically, is not a desert. The southern part of the central valley is naturally quite dry, but even that is generally considered a semidesert.
None of this is to say that California shouldn't address how, where, and why water is being used for agriculture, but they cries of "They're irrigating a desert" are a distraction at best.