Excellent write up - the newyorker has been knocking it out of the park lately. I particularly like this nuance: Growing food in a desert may seem nutty, but

Excellent write up - the newyorker has been knocking it out of the park lately. I particularly like this nuance: Growing food in a desert may seem nutty, but there are advantages. Frost, hail, and damaging rainstorms are far less common than they are in other parts of the country, and the growing season is year-round, as are the jobs. Last year, Brawley received a little over half its average annual rainfall on a single stormy day, August 21st, and other than that got just the odd sprinkle. Total reliance on irrigation is a drawback in one way, because the water has to come from somewhere, but the absence of rain is what makes precise planning possible: farmers in the Midwest don’t know to the day when they will harvest the corn they hope to plant next month (weather permitting). As well - the fact that conservation, can actually be negative - this article is full of all sorts of nuance you can get when you let a writer actually spend time, and do the research: Cox drove me past a field in which one of his employees was planting lettuce, and parked by another ditch. “This is some of our citrus, here,” he said. “It’s grapefruit. It’s been flood-irrigated in the past, but we’re switching it all to micro-sprinkler.” Doing that will reduce Cox’s water need, but it will also have the perverse efficiency effect that Bradley Udall described, by turning a non-consumptive use (irrigation runoff) into a consumptive one (more grapefruit). That’s an especially complicated issue in the Imperial Valley, because runoff from farms like Cox’s is the only source of water, other than modest amounts of rainfall and mountain runoff, for the Salton Sea, an immense but shrinking and increasingly threatened lake at the northern end of the valley.