Episodes

California’s Central Valley is an agricultural bonanza, producing a third of America’s food crops. But it’s facing serious water challenges. The valley floor is 20,000 sq miles of some of the most fertile soil on Earth. Here, the sun shines 300 days a year. More than 250 different crops grow, worth $17 billion per year. The valley was developed into farmland around the turn of the twentieth century. When farmers arrived, they began to drill wells into the fresh-water aquifers below. By the 1930s...