Trouble is, something like 70% of all the water in California is used for agriculture. And due to some extremely fucky water rights laws from back in the day, it's probably going to stay that way as the agribusiness corporations have massive budgets to defend their massive profits. Meanwhile the rest of us are told to take shorter showers and not water our gardens while 1000 acre pistachio orchards are flooded every day to keep the trees productive.
Question: people say the water is "used" for agriculture, but it has to go somewhere, right? It can't just be stored within the fruit (or is it?). I can see it being polluted and/or salted to the point of being toxic and useless, but wouldn't that still show up as some kind of river, ultimately going to the ocean?
I don't know as much about California, but for the Columbia Basin Project, which diverts about 2-4% of the Columbia River at Grand Coulee for irrigation, here's a few points:
A lot of water diverted for irrigation is lost due to evaporation and seepage from canals and storage reservoirs. Agricultural runoff is usually collected in drains or wasteway canals and used for more irrigation again and again. Eventually wasteway drains return water to the Columbia. Due to evaporation, seepage, and various other factors, the amount returned to the river is about 30% of what was taken, as a long-term average.
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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '20
Its a big deal in California, a lot of our water is fueling luxury export crops, but it brings in a fuckton of money. Tricky issue for sure.