[pilom]

If agriculture uses like 80% of the fresh water, why not just make water a public good and make people pay equal amounts for irrigation water so we stop subsidizing water rich plants like pistachios and almonds and alfalfa. All it requires is a little political backbone. Though I guess billions of dollars might be easier to find.

[runnerup]

While I agree, we’ll have to be careful that the incentive encourages productive transition to more sustainable domestic farming rather than outsourcing our food production to another country or continent.

It would take a lot of thought and planning to manage that transition. Of course the status quo appears to be untenable.

[bombcar]

Based on really rough estimates, the value of California's cropland is about 325 billion dollars.

So the state could ... buy all the farms? The annual CA budget seems to be in the $250 billion range.

[veganzo]

We should stop animal agriculture first, since it is by far the least efficient use of water in agriculture. Virtually all of the alfalfa grown in CA goes to animals.

Fuck almond milk, by the way. We don't need any "milks" per se, but oats are way better.