Growing alfalfa in the desert just isn't sensible

One of us here was writing about this very problem 25 years ago. The solution being obvious, simple, correct and politically impossible:

Agriculture – mainly alfalfa – consumes 80% of the Colorado River’s dwindling water supply, prompting calls for conservation efforts

Alfalfa is a distinctly low value crop. It’s glorified hay. It’s worth very much less than the water used to grow it.

The solution is, obviously and correctly, to have a market in water. People buying and selling the rights to that irrigation water from the Colorado River. The water will thus be sent off to its highest value use. Perhaps almonds, maybe for Angelinos to have showers.

Or, in a more theoretical analysis, you cannot have a shortage if you’ve a free market. Because, by definition, that free market price will be the one which balances supply and demand. Of course there will be plenty of people who would have demand if the price were lower - but that very action of allowing the price to, erm, float is what ensures that what water there is is devoted to its highest value use.

California water rights were allocated largely on a first come first served basis a century and more back. It can be illegal for people to buy and sell such rights at that market value. The problem is not the lack of water, it’s idiot public policy over the allocation of it.

Just allow those - for one of those proofs is that it doesn’t matter what the initial allocation is, markets still optimise distribution - who own the current rights to sell if they wish at whatever they can get.

Of course, there are people who get entirely the wrong end of this stick. Here’s The Guardian, on the same day, talking about largely the same place (locals would insist that the Inland Empire and Imperial Valley are entirely different, from this distance that’s just locals being locals):

Over the past decade, once bucolic Ontario has become one of the biggest US hubs for the e-commerce industry. In addition to the 4.1m-square-foot Amazon facility under construction, three other Amazon facilities as well as a sprawl of warehouses for FedEx, Nike, and other companies stretch to the east of Jaime’s farm. Another 5.1m-square-foot logistics center will soon be constructed down the road.

Mucky fields and cattle feedlots around Jaime’s home have been paved over to make way for clean, gray box buildings and herds of 18-wheeler delivery trucks. “You can hardly smell the cow manure in the air any more,” he said.

Folk not farming with the limited local water supplies is bad too apparently. But that land issue is that resource being applied to its highest valued use. If the same were done for the water then that problem would be solved too.