This blog was written by guest author, Gillian Roy, who was a 2023 Schneider Fellow from Stanford University. Gillian is graduating in 2024 with a degree in Earth Systems.
California owes much of its success as the nation’s leading agricultural producer to the vast systems of irrigation that supply water to the state’s agricultural land. Every year, California irrigates an average of more than nine million acres of agricultural farmland using roughly 34 million acre-feet of water–roughly 80% of all water used for homes, businesses, and agriculture in California.
However, climate change is fueling more severe and longer-lasting droughts in California, threatening the economic and environmental viability of the state’s irrigation-reliant agricultural sector. To address this challenge, state and federal government grant programs (such as NRCS’s…