“(T)he nation’s largest irrigation district is in the wrong place,” says the Los Angeles Times in story about the Westlands district of the Central Valley of California and its role as a driving force behind a $25 billion projects to ship water from the Sacramento River southward through two giant tunnels to the irrigation district twice the size of Los Angeles. “Carved out of a region so parched it was long considered uninhabitable desert, Westlands was formed in 1952 by a group of landowners desperate for new water supplies,” says the Times.
“The 600,000-acre, thinly populated irrigation district is entitled to more than 1.1-million acre feet of water annually — or roughly twice what the nearly 4 million residents of Los Angeles use in a year,” it says. There are a comparatively small number of farms but they operate “a highly efficient food factory that produces $1 billion of crops a year.” Growers say they adapted to rationed water by installing efficient irrigation equipment. Critics say farms also shifted to more profitable pistachio and almond orchards that cannot survive without water.