In 2022, California’s severe multi-year drought conditions led to the fallowing of roughly 750,000 acres of agricultural land.

Then early in 2023, historic flooding devastated some of the state’s most productive agricultural land, impacting livelihoods, rural communities, and farmworker homes.

While this weather whiplash can be a natural occurrence in the arid West, climate change is increasing the severity and accelerating the frequency of these events.

These climate impacts are laying bare the vulnerabilities of a highly engineered and aging water system and a decades-long lack of attention to agricultural soil health and biodiversity.