Highly recommend reading The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax if you'd like to learn more about this. The plants should never have been planted. Decades of unregulated

Highly recommend reading The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax if you'd like to learn more about this. The plants should never have been planted. Decades of unregulated groundwater pumping and effectively stolen federal water is feeding what used to be desert. There's no real plan for what happens when the water runs out (which is beginning to happen, evidently); just keep guzzling water while the going's still good. The current model of farming in California is ultimately doomed; much of the groundwater depleted over the past century cannot be replenished as the ground has subsided and compacted itself after the water was pumped out. Basically the entire Central Valley sank by about 16 feet between 1920-1970 (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/land-subsidence-in-california/science/land-subsidence-san-joaquin-valley https://www.usgs.gov/centers/land-subsidence-in-california/s...). Data since then is spotty because we basically stopped monitoring it.