My city has gone to a 3 day a week water restriction on all landscape water use. 25 min/wk max.

[tularetom]

3. While almost every city in CA has enacted water restrictions, almond growers in the central valley

are drilling new wells at an unprecedented rate in order to get grandfathered in ahead of what they sense is a coming push to regulate groundwater extraction in the state. This has led to drastic depletion of water tables under much of the valley, dried up thousands of smaller domestic wells and raised pumping costs for over 5 million Californians who are customers of municipal water agencies within the valley.

The water that is used to keep lawns green in cities and suburbs is a literal drop in the bucket in comparison to the amount of water dumped on almond orchards in the state. Most of these orchards have been planted in areas where the terrain prohibited flood irrigation, but the introduction of drip systems made development of new orchards possible.

I don't have the statistics at hand, but the acreage of new almond trees planted in the past ten years is staggering. Most of these orchards are owned by corporations or investments of wealthy professionals like doctors. Makes me wonder if the world really needs this many almonds.

Anyway, the point is that restricting the lawn watering of people living on 6000 square foot lots won't do much to relieve the water crisis in CA as long as we continue to allow the unfettered drilling of new ag wells.