This is a fantastic piece of work by NPR. It covers two interesting ways that Californian farmers are dealing with water shortages due to the increasing drought conditions there.
First, and this is something I think that we will be seeing a lot more of in the next 5 years, is farming using rainfall only. No irrigation. While this won’t work for all crops, we have bloated and mutated many crops that can in fact thrive on less water than we pump onto them. In this case, apples are being grown on only 30 inches of rainfall per year. Ask any apple farmer you know, this amount seems so small that you’d intuitively think you’d kill the tree. So how, exactly, did apple tress grow for the thousands of years before we irrigated them? Anyhow, the results are interesting and inspiring.
In areas where rainfall is so minimal that nothing could be commercially grown without irrigation, new technologies are cropping up to carefully measure and monitor the amount of water used and how moist the ground is. Believe it or not, most plants actually don’t like being drowned. They thrive in conditions of exact moisture levels. The farmer must understand their crop, and carefully manage the moisture levels. Doing so can save large volumes of water, and produce EVEN BETTER produce than by the old fashioned “super soaker” approach.