This year’s “rainy” season is over, and California is beginning to accept its fate: Business-as-usual farming in the Golden State may soon become a thing of the past. The drought is now so far beyond the bounds of normal it’s become at least temporarily self-sustaining. Extreme heat begets more evaporation, and dry ground heats up more quickly than wet soil. Add in a dash of global warming, and you have a recipe for a megadrought that may last decades. For a state whose decades-long water-fueled bender has made it the most important agricultural producer in the country, one that leads the nation in countless water-intensive food crops, that’s all pretty terrifying.
It also explains the heated debate we’ve been having recently over, of all things, almonds—or “THE DEVIL’S NUT,” as Gizmodo facetiously called them recently. Amid the massive new water restrictions now in place in California, water-intensive almonds have become an easily vilified, easily visualized scapegoat.
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