Pros & Cons:

• water prices are soaring in California's Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation's food is grown.

• Around 9% of the total water used by Wonderful is bought out on the open water market while that's not a huge amount of water it uses, the company can outspend pretty much every other farmer in the region, which can influence water prices.

• The Resnicks own 175,000 farmland acres, with nearly 130,000 planted in California alone. those crops consume an estimated 150 billion gallons of water a year, two-thirds of that on nuts, which would be enough to supply San Francisco's 875,000 residents for a decade.

• He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry.

• He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground.

• As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. The farmer moved the rain. The more water he got, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees.

Recent News:

• Environmental groups and Delta farmers want it returned to state control. Local water interests want it to remain in the hands of, well, local water interests. A Sacramento county superior Court judge ruled Thursday that control of the Kern water bank, one of the largest water banks in the nation, will not change hands.

• in an opinion originally filed on February 23, and later modified and ordered published on March 22, 2022, The Second District Court of Appeal reversed the trials court's judgment invalidating the Kern Water Bank Authoiryts Eir and approval of its project to divert unappropriated Kern River water in certain wet years to recharge.