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It hardly matters until we pump all the aquifers dry. At that point a majority of US crops will be reliant upon rain water, which won't be enough to sustain the farms in the west. Much of Oklahoma, Kansas, California will revert back into the Great American Desert (as it was known before).

For a great book on the subject, check out http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-...

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Most of California's agriculture is the Central Valley. Surely that was never desert? It's got rain all winter and runoff from the mountains all summer.

From Wikipedia[1]: "The northern Central Valley has a hot Mediterranean climate (Koppen climate classification Csa); the more southerly parts in rainshadow zones are dry enough to be Mediterranean steppe (BShs, as around Fresno) or even low-latitude desert (BWh, as in areas southeast of Bakersfield)."

Central Valley farms and the coastal cities are mostly fed by water from the Sierra's, via either rivers or one of California's many aquifers (e.g. Hetch Hetchy, Los Angeles, Colorado, California).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)#Cli...

The vast majority of water for California farms comes from Sierra Nevada snow-melt runoff, not aquafers.

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