California drying up right before your eyes...

[rhett o rick]

44. What's using all of California's water?

I don't know how good this source is, but for what it's worth:

Alfalfa - The Thirstiest Crop
Natural Defenses Resource Council

California's rivers and wetlands, and the critical San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem, have suffered serious degradation as a result of excessive water diversions. Much of the water taken out of the ecosystem goes to support California's industrial agriculture.
Agriculture now uses approximately 80 percent of California's developed water supply
, but produces less than 2.5 percent of California's income.
Alfalfa, the biggest water user of any California crop, soaks up almost a quarter of the state's irrigation water.

Yet alfalfa -- harvested mostly for hay to feed dairy livestock -- is a low-value
crop that accounts for only 4 percent of state farming revenues.
An alfalfa farm using 240 acre feet of water generates $60,000 in sales, while a semiconductor plant using the same amount of
water generates 5,000 times that amount, or $300 million. (And while such a farm could function with as few as two workers, the semiconductor plant would employ 2,000.)
In short, California devotes 20 percent of its developed water supply to a crop that generates less than one-tenth of one percent of the state's economy. Given the degraded state of California's rivers and growing demands for water for higher value agricultural crops and urban areas, is this an efficient use of a precious resource?

from: http://geosun.sjsu.edu/~sedlock/Uses.Users.pdf