What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear almonds? It's almost always the same comment … "almonds use a lot of water." Why do we all know that it takes about one gallon of water to produce an almond but no one knows how much water it takes to produce other crops, an ounce of beef, the fact that grapes and young almond trees use much less water than alfalfa in California, or how much water is needed to generate a kilowatt-hour of electricity or to cool Google data centers?
Sometime between 2014 and 2015, a series of articles brought almond water demand into attention. 2014 was also the year that California's drought entered the exceptional category that lasted till 2017. Figures below show how Google's search interests for almond water demand spiked in early 2014. That spike happened shortly after Mother Jones and several other news outlets published articles about almond water use. It is possible that those articles etched in our memory that it takes one gallon of water to grow one almond (It actually takes 3 gallons according to the Almond Board if you included water from rain and other sources). As the drought ended, the debate was reduced to a simmer, so did Google searches for that topic. However, without a comprehensive solution, this debate will continue to resurface whenever a drought period occurs, and whatever crop happens to have the…
