California Farmers Are In a Dry Season

Over the course of the past 4 years, the state of California has been experiencing a drought. The majority of California has seen under 10 inches of rain which can be classified as a desert. This issue has made California a proven ground for a fight over water rights, where marijuana growers are being unfairly scapegoated as the accomplices behind the most severe drought the state has seen over the millennium.

It all began when a recent investigation was done by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who discovered that illegal and unregulated marijuana cultivation could possibly be a concern to sensitive wildlife and their habitat. The research team utilized many qualifying words in their study, because many of the key points aren’t sufficiently well known to effectively articulate how big of an issue marijuana cultivation could be to endangered species like the Coho salmon.

David Downs, a journalist with SFGate’s Smell the Truth is one of the few journalist to get it right, properly identifying that marijuana cultivation is a “tiny sliver of water use in the state” The research estimates that the average marijuana plant takes 6 gallons of water every day.

The research done by The Department of Fish and Wildlife discovered that “In California, irrigated agriculture is the single largest consumer of water, taking 70–80% of stored surface water and pumping great volumes of groundwater.”

In California almonds individually use 3 billion gallons in a single day, out of 30 the  billion gallons that is utilized by agriculture 7 days a week in the state of California; that’s 10% of the overall agricultural water use and 100 times the amount of water as Mendocino utilizes for marijuana cultivation.

With California currently going through a drought, it is a bit of a task to picture California continuing to keep up its same consistency with food production, which potentially can drive up prices. California’s drought has turned into a state of emergency and has led to states wide water restrictions. Last year was the third driest year of the course of 10 decades and the warmest year to date.