Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is
completely missing the issue. The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population. LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water infrastructure is
necessary for humans to live in most regions of California and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago.
This is a must-read to understand what's been going on: http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-tale
"Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental move-ment would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reser- voir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temper-ance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Ah Pah reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored fifteen million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for thirty years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that envi-ronmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities...
In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed to grasp that farmers’ drilling and pumping is driven not by greed or insensitivity to the environment but by a doubling in the state’s population and a water infrastructure that has not kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to increase vastly the reservoir surface water for agriculture so farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps...
Continuing drought means vast tracts of westside farmlands will turn to dust. California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export industry—led by dairy, almond, and grape production—is in grave peril. Its collapse would crush the economic livelihood of the Central Valley, especially its Hispanic com-munity. When the five-million-acre west side goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs in a part of the state where the average unem-ployment rate still hovers above 10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to further deepen their wells and save what water they can. Everything they and their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with extinction.
Water use in California is being curtailed by those least affected, if affected at all, by the consequences of their advocacy. But environmental-ists, who for forty years worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the state’s water infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon. No reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduc-tion of their salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to claim possession of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what was above it...
Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert, the exasperated left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project. And as the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made stor-age lakes will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even Southern California’s municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When Silicon Valley tech lords and academics can’t take a shower and find them-selves paving over their lawns and gardens or letting their pools stand empty, perhaps they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than for fish. The new dust bowl may see a different generation of Joads abandon-ing California for a wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest."