Even in good years, as in NOT drought, California works a hard proposition: it's the top-ranking state for annual food production, but way down list in rainfall.
Since no one has figured out how to move the rain clouds, state leaders and farmers and irrigators have moved and stored the water across the landscape.
Mark Arrax grew up in a farm family in the fertile-but-dry Central Valley; he traveled the state for the vignettes contained in his book The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California.
The costs--financial, human, environmental--mount up over time, as the author explains in this interview.