2 ms·

The stat I've seen is that each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow. I still haven't found a compelling answer to this question: Where does that water

The stat I've seen is that each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow. I still haven't found a compelling answer to this question: Where does that water actually go? An individual almond is tiny, even if it's 100% made out of water, you can't actually fit a whole gallon of water in a single almond. So 99.9% of that water must be going somewhere else, like transpiration or back into the water table. If the vast majority that water is getting cycled through the same area (e.g. transpiration comes back down as rain, water in the soil goes into the water table and gets pumped back up), the 1 gallon cost isn't such a big deal, it's not like the entire gallon of water is being shipped to another country.

singron 4y ago
The air is dry in California so it has a huge capacity to absorb moisture from transpiration or evaporation. The prevailing winds will carry the water hundreds of miles or more before it precipitates. They water crops year round, but there is almost no rain in the dry season, so that water is definitely going somewhere else. The other thing is photosynthesis. The oxygen is released into the air, and the retained hydrogen only accounts for 11% of the mass (although if you assume the O was replaced with ~1 C, then it's 77%). This often becomes part of the crop that's shipped off, but even if it sticks around to combust or decompose, the vapor can still blow away.