The issue with these is that the other side of the output is hyper-salty brine, which kills pretty much any life it encounters, and that brine does get dumped t

The issue with these is that the other side of the output is hyper-salty brine, which kills pretty much any life it encounters, and that brine does get dumped to the ocean. The ocean has more than enough capacity to absorb the hit, but it still damages the ecosystem at the exit point nevertheless. Israel and Saudi Arabia do it because, well, if they don’t their country pretty much ceases to exist, but it’s much better cost/performance ratio to focus on whatever water California has before we go there. It’s also that even the most water-conscious agriculture practice uses obnoxious amounts of water just because of the sheer size of land involved. Supplying that kind of water via desalination plants pretty much by definition means having done all prior optimisations to the max before tapping into that stream. If you’re interested in agriculture from a layman’s perspective, I recommend Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video, where Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear figures out how to farm right, long way round.