1160 California Farming

California, because of the weather, is a beautiful place to live and farm. In fact, at about $50 billion annually, farming would be of tremendous economic importance to any other state but it’s only 2% of California’s GDP. California farms grow a significant portion of fruits, vegetables & nuts: for example, 88% of the nation’s strawberries. There’s 77,000 farms on 25 million acres of land, 9 million of which are irrigated with no riparian, water, rights. Agriculture approaches 70% of total water consumption in California while urban use: drinking, lawns, parks, golf courses, etc.; account for only 10%. With numbers like that, even if every lawn in California was dead due to lack of watering, it wouldn’t make much of a dent in consumption, but there is always intense drought alarmism: California declared drought from 2011–2019, yet farm production was unaffected. Also, because of the farming, California attracts huge numbers of both legal & illegal immigrates, over a million a year, and the farm economy rests on exploitation of this cheap labor which is the primary reason America’s southern border is ignored.