Central Valley farms are a big consumer of water in California, but bear in mind that this article is about a desalinization project in the San Diego area. That

Central Valley farms are a big consumer of water in California, but bear in mind that this article is about a desalinization project in the San Diego area. That area of California gets its water largely from the Colorado River and the eastern Sierra Nevada range, whereas much of the Central Valley is in the western Sierra watershed. So the two regions don't have as much relative interdependencies as you might think. I don't really know what the Colorado's upstream usage breakdown is, but it's significantly over-allocated.