There's no doubt that big agri-business is a problem. Some of these corporations chase popular crops in insane ways. For a while walnuts were the big thing, and the big corps planted tens of thousands of acres of them. Then when the prices dropped from over production, they went to almonds, ripping out perfectly good walnut trees to plant the new crop, and yeah, almonds take a lot of water.
Some of the wells in the West valley were being drilled to 2000 feet to get enough water. That's like a $1million well. Those wells draw down shallower groundwater, and then individual family farms go dry and they can't afford the deeper wells.
However the state response isn't a graduated one, it's using a catapult to swing the pendulum the other way and destroy more than "cash crops" like almonds. And lets not forget that CA lets billions and billions of gallons of fresh water bypass farms and dump into the ocean to "save" the Delta Smelt, which state biologists can't even find anymore.
Plus we can go back to the environmentalists kiboshing the one dam (I forget the name now) that the state tried to build in the 70s, which would have nearly eliminated the present water shortages. In many ways the water situation in CA is the same as the nuclear energy situation.
