Pistachio orchards in California require an average of 3 acre-feet of water per acre per year.
Almond orchards in California require an average of 4 acre-feet of water per acre per year.
Alfalfa pastures in California require an average of 6 acre-feet of water per acre per year.
So in summary, Alfalfa uses a lot of water, but it cannot be singled out because California’s combined Almond and Pistachio orchards (which are also grown in the deserts) water acres per year dwarfs that of Alfalfa’s.
Bonus for those visual learners out there. This map shows a green dot for every Almond Orchard currently growing in California today. Each green dot accounts for a minimum of 1 million gallons of water used annually on almonds.
Pomegranates and avocados are also pretty water intensive and we can blame a not insignificant amount of this on the reznicks and their Fiji water money.
Almond and walnut orchards produce food though. Alfalfa does not. To me they are in different categories.
I don’t really agree with the premise that we shouldn’t grow food in California because it requires irrigation.
Do not buy into this bullshit. Almond and walnut orchards produce profit, not food. Only 7% of the production goes to feed the United States. The rest lines the pockets of California billionaires who made a deal decades ago that gives them the great majority of California’s water for basically nothing. One billionaire couple use more water than the entire Los Angeles metro area.
It requires an inordinate amount of water because it’s in the desert. Water is kind of valuable, but they’d rather piss it away on thirsty crops, golf courses, and cooling ai datacenters. Just grow fuckin beans and leave grass farming to the central and eastern states.
The vast majority of California is not a desert and there are ways to irrigate without significant environmental harms. I think we’re moving towards such a system, but the highly seasonal climate here makes agriculture without irrigation fairly difficult, and we are an agricultural society so…
I just imagine a guy in a suit made of money saying “we’re moving towards a sustainable system” while giving a golf course a money-shot with a giant water hose between his legs.
I’m definitely anti-golf course but the reality is that California grows a huge proportion of the food people in the US actually eat. Most of the Midwest is growing corn and soy for industrial purposes, not food.
If you want us to stop irrigating it won’t be the fat cats who suffer the worst when food prices double. I agree we need change and it needs to come quickly but it’s not going to happen overnight.
The vast majority of California is not a desert
uh…
- 38% of California is desert. That’s a non arguable fact. source
- 78% of California is arid or semi arid for at least half the year. source
Water in California is just as valuable as food and we are far from water sustainability statewide. San Diego is probably the most water sustainable city in the state, but they also don’t grow much.
Most of the desert is not under cultivation, excepting the imperial valley. I should have said the vast majority of cultivated and inhabited land. Semi-arid is not the same as desert. Much of California gets multiple times the precipitation of a true desert like Phoenix. We have water to work with and we don’t need to adopt the same strategies as desert cities.
There is a lot of work to be done, no doubt, but the law passed in 2014 requires each water district to come up with a plan to stop depleting ground water in the next few years.
There are solutions but I think we should focus on better infrastructure, higher efficiency, more desalination, groundwater recharge, etc. over water austerity. Water is a requirement of all life and pretending we aren’t going to need any is a fantasy.
Almond and walnut orchards produce food though. Alfalfa does not. To me they are in different categories.
I mean, it’s mostly for livestock feed, so it’s producing meat, which is food. Just indirectly.
I do personally like alfalfa sprouts on sandwiches, but I’m sure that that’s a vanishingly small portion of production.
Farmers will grow what people want to buy.
I was looking at these yesterday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_acutifolius
Phaseolus acutifolius, also known as the tepary bean, is a legume native to the southwestern United States and Mexico and has been grown there by the native peoples since pre-Columbian times. It is more drought-resistant than the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and is grown in desert and semi-desert conditions from Arizona through Mexico to Costa Rica. The water requirements are low. The crop will grow in areas where annual rainfall is less than 400 mm (16 in).
The tepary bean was a major food staple of natives in the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
https://actascientific.com/ASNH/pdf/ASNH-08-1460.pdf
Warming temperatures and declining availability of irrigation waters warrant the development of drought and heat-tolerant food crops. Common bean (legume) food crops (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) are affordable, provide good nutrition, and improve soil fertility but are mostly susceptible to droughts and high temperatures. However, tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius A. Gray) is an exception. Tepary bean, a crop native to the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, has been grown there by the native peoples since pre-Columbian times. This review aims to introduce this crop to the scientific community by presenting extensive results (production, seed composition/nutritional quality, utilization, Symbiotic N Fixation, varietal development, drought tolerance, etc.) from experiments conducted by us over many years and other investigators. We conclude that tepary bean due to its excellent nutritional quality coupled with heat and drought tolerance, and considerable potential for Symbiotic N Fixation, can be an outstanding component of cropping systems worldwide, especially for areas with arid and hot climates. This is important given that climatic change-induced drought and heat conditions are increasing on a worldwide basis. Tepary bean can also be an excellent donor of genes to breed stress (abiotic and biotic) tolerant cultivars of common bean.
https://sweetgrasstradingco.com/2020/07/13/how-to-cook-with-tepary-beans/
The Tepary bean is believed to be the world’s most drought tolerant bean; they are grown along the Gila River with limited irrigation or rainfall.
Going back to alfalfa for a moment:
https://msfagriculture.com/2020/01/18/which-crops-consume-the-most-water/
The fact is, alfalfa is the crop that consumes the most water in California.
The solution, however, is not as simple as stopping farmers from cultivating these water-intensive crops. The profitability of these crops is why farmers keep growing them.
Almonds consume nearly 10% of California’s annual water use, yet farmers continue to grow them because of their profits. Of course, operating loans for farms and other financial instruments take your profits into account when evaluating an application.
End Use
Alfalfa is indeed water-intensive and highly unproductive monetarily. But the ultimate value is far more than the sale price because both the beef and the dairy industry are supported by this crop.
https://foodprint.org/issues/the-water-footprint-of-food/
Pound for pound, meat has a much higher water footprint than vegetables, grains or beans. 4 A single pound of beef takes, on average, 1,800 gallons of water to produce. Ninety-eight percent goes to watering the grass, forage and feed that cattle consume over their lifetime.
If you could produce a dish made from beans — tepary beans probably being water-optimal, though any beans would radically improve the situation — that was so delicious that people would rather eat it than beef, you’d simultaneously solve the water issue and take a huge chunk out of US carbon emissions.
Then the researchers quantified the levels of beef consumption in the US and switched this for beans. They made sure that the bean quantities matched the calorific and protein value of beef—an estimated 188 grams of beans per day—so they could prove this would be a suitable nutritional substitute.
Through their analysis, the researchers revealed that switching beans for beef would save between 209 and 334 million tonnes of CO2e by 2020 in the United States. That’s between 47 percent and 75 percent of the total greenhouse gas reduction needed to reach the country’s 2020 emissions target. It would also free up 42 percent of US cropland that’s used to farm crops for cattle feed.
Of course, this scenario is highly hypothetical. Convincing people to completely replace beef with beans would be an enormous challenge, requiring that consumers dramatically alter their preferences and perceptions. That’s unlikely to happen on such a scale in the near future.
I had heard moth beans also do well in drought and poor soil. Man I would like to try both of these and will try and keep a lookout.
I haven’t heard of the moth bean.
kagis
It sounds like it also does arid soil; Wikipedia says that a limiting factor is the harvesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigna_aconitifolia
A drawback to this crop is its difficulty to harvest. Mowers cannot be used due to the shape and density of the moth bean’s branches, so the crop is typically cut with a sickle.[1] It is threshed and winnowed after being dried for approximately one week.
Man I would like to try both of these and will try and keep a lookout.
It looks like you can get moth beans on Amazon.
I’m sure that it’s possible to buy tepary beans. When I was reading about them, I saw at least two places that grew them, and one place that sold them online. One of the farms was a Native American place.
kagis
https://store.ramonafarms.com/Tepary-Beans-Our-Heirloom-BAVI/products/5/
This is the Native American place, and it looks like they sell them directly.
I don’t think that this is the other place that I saw earlier, but they apparently also sell the (well, one type of them; the different colors apparently have different characteristics):
https://www.ranchogordo.com/products/brown-tepary
Amazon seems to only sell small packets for seed use, not bulk for eating.
I also read one page saying that there used to be broader cultivation of the tepary bean in the US prior to World War II, but then changing tastes reduced production.
And there was a page somewhere where some guy who hadn’t had them before tried cooking them into a variety of dishes.
kagis
Pretty sure that this is it, was the guy comparing the characteristics of the different colors:
https://www.boonvillebarn.com/blogs/updates-from-the-farm/its-bean-month-tepary-beans-february-2025
ooh. thanks for the resources. I don’t buy much food online but I mike make an exceptions especially since the one is direct.
Now do livestock.
That’s under “Other Agricultural Uses”.
I wish it had the economy percentage for the same groups rather than just knowing alfalfa.
I know this one: alfalfa takes a ton of water, and is a great food source for cows… And because of 100+ yr old water legislation, it’s cheaper for other countries to take up tons of water, farm it in California, and ship it across the ocean, than to just grow it at home
Stop giving away millions of free gallons of water and this problem goes away.
More þan almonds is surprising.
