Will California Follow Arizona?

Slate:

It took decades, but Arizona finally learned that it had to adapt to survive. Still, many obvious questions have no easy answer: How to balance economic growth and environment? Does fairness mean cities get first dibs over farmers, even though they were here first? Is climate change a game changer? The issue of water in the Southwest is a preview of 21^st-century politics worldwide.

Everywhere there are signs of adaptation to this new reality, or at least attempts at it. A billboard just north of Tucson pitches FiberMax, a variety of genetically modified cotton seed originally developed by Bayer in Australia. It promises to increase production in semiarid climates like this one and has become one of the top-selling cotton brands in the nation.

The shift away from irrigated agriculture in Arizona hasn’t come without a fight. By some measures, farmers are still winning. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, more than two-thirds of Arizona’s water is still used to irrigate fields, down from a peak of 90 percent last century.

Decades ago, state officials in Arizona begin to plan for a future without water—and that meant sacrificing agriculture for future urban growth. A massive civil engineering project in the 1960s diverted part of the Colorado River to feed Phoenix and Tucson. Those cities could not exist in their current state without this unnatural influx of Rocky Mountain snowmelt. Now there’s tension across the region, as the realities of climate change and extreme weather catch up with the business-as-usual agricultural bedrock that laid the foundation for the economy here.
In some ways, what’s happened in Arizona could be a preview of California’s future.

For agriculture, doing what's easy often trumps doing what's smart.  Nowhere is that more apparent than in the desert Southwest.  Nothing is easier than turning on or off the tap as necessary.  However, is growing food in the desert the most efficient use of the limited water?  Then again, it probably makes more sense for a few people to live in the desert and grow food for the rest of the country than it does for millions and millions of other people to move from temperate areas to the desert to live and water their lawns.  I guess farmers aren't the only crazy people out there who do strange things.  The next couple of decades will be very, very interesting in the Southwest.