The mountains in California are basically huge water collectors in the form of capturing snow and slowly letting it melt into waterways. And it costs tax payers and farmers $0 dollars for the desalinization and transportation. What's left is the purification and the final distribution (which might be solar powered pumps).

So from this article:

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/farming-family-uses-m...

1 billion gallons is not unreasonable for a large scale farm. Unless you're doing rail, 8000 gallons is pretty standard for a tanker. So that's 125,000 trips over the course of a year and 500 trips a day maybe? Assuming you had a 1 billion gallon source 100 miles would be somewhere around US$28M burning gas (assuming a tanker marginal cost per mile is $2.27). But water sources might be much more than that from where your farm is in the desert. If it's 1000 miles, it's $280M.

At that rate it may be cheaper to use solar power to boil 10 billion gallons of ocean water into steam and let nature do the work to move the water to where you need it.

I don't know. I suspect most people rate data centers higher than almond milk...

Of course! But what about all of the agriculture that gets exported? In CA, it is over half of almonds and ~15% of alfalfa (cattle feed).

If we could just get rid of these darn living creatures we would use much less water.