Can You Guess How Many Gallons of Water It Took to Grow the Avocado in Your Guacamole?
According to Mother Jones, avocados and almonds are pretty much guilty pleasures when you think about how much of drought-ridden California's water it takes to grow them. sean dreilinger (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
So we know that avocados should have gone extinct millions of years ago, but how about how much water it takes to grow a single of these creamy green fruits?
Mother Jones:
US consumers certainly love this unctuous tropical fruit. According to the US Department of Agriculture, per capita avocado production jumped from 1.1 pounds annually in 1999 to 4.5 pounds in 2011.
Avocados don’t require nearly as much water per pound as almonds. But they do require significantly more than other kinds of produce…And as in the case of almonds and so many other crops, California dominates US production, accounting for about 90 percent of the US avocado harvest. Nearly all of it takes place in southern California, in a five-county region that straddles the coast from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.
Like the rest of the state, the southern coastal region is locked in a drought, and largely cut off from the flow of surface water from the state’s big irrigation projects. The result has been strife in the avocado groves—sky-high water costs and a reliance on water pumped from underground aquifers.
—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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