New study: CA farmers could save a lot of water — but profits would drop, study says
California farmers could save massive amounts of water if they planted less thirsty — but also less lucrative — crops such as grains and hay instead of almonds and alfalfa, according to new research by scientists who used remote sensing and artificial intelligence. Such a seismic shift in the nation’s most productive agricultural state could cut consumption by roughly 93%, researchers with UC Santa Barbara and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported Monday. But Anna Boser, the study’s lead author, acknowledged that replacing all of California’s water-intensive crops with the least-intensive ones is an unrealistic economic scenario. … In a less-extreme scenario, Boser and her colleagues reported that fallowing 5% of fields with the most water-intensive crops could cut water consumption by more than 9%, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Communications.
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