Your states ag is too important to the nation to mess around with. U less of course it all goes from veggies and nuts to legal weed. I think with desal plants the population and farmers can both be happy. Maybe then you could export water?
The agriculture should be done where it is actually (not merely politically) profitable.
From the article I linked above:
“As Johnson and Murphy point out, the first users in the western system are agricultural interests, and they are allocated water at subsidized prices that would not be available even in eastern states where there was much more water. At $5 to $15 for an acre-foot (enough water to cover an acre of ground with a foot of water), farmers are able to grow water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, cotton, and rice. (Even with the water subsidies, rice is also subsidized on the price end, as the cost of growing rice is greater than the price that can be obtained for it on the free market.)
Paul Milgrom and John Roberts point out that these subsidies create situations that can only be called an economic version of the Theater of the Absurd:
Water rights for farmers vary considerably throughout the state of California, depending on the source of the water. Some farmers have inherited extremely valuable water rights to have huge quantities of cheap water delivered to them. Water for farming from the federal Bureau of Reclamation sells for $10 to $15 per acre-foot, and the cheapest subsidized water sells for as little as $3.50 per acre-foot, even though it may cost $100 to pump the water to the farmers…Meanwhile, households in Palo Alto pay about $65 for the same quantity of water, and some urban water users pay as much as $230. The most desperate nonagricultural communities along the Pacific coast of California have gone as far as to build desalination plants to obtain potable water from the ocean at a cost of approximately $3,000 per acre-foot. (Since this was written, it is not now possible to desalinate ocean water at about $1,000 an acre-foot.)
How much of the cheap water is used? One agricultural use alone, irrigating pastures for grazing cows and sheep, used 5.3 million acre-feet of water in 1986. This is enough water to cover the District of Columbia to a depth of 1,250 feet! …Yet the industry of raising cattle and sheep on irrigated pasture in California had gross revenues for that year of less than $100 million. Plainly, devoting so much water to such a low-value use is possible only because the water used to irrigate pastures is sold so cheaply.
Government policies ensure that the water will be wasted, since those who have the water rights, as noted earlier, must "use it or lose it." Furthermore, they have been prohibited from selling those rights to other farmers or urban users. (The "reasoning" behind such regulations is that the government wishes to "preserve" the farm culture of Central California.)”
