Hard Times, Courtesy Of The Greenies

Water that used to flow from California's delta southward to irrigate the nation's breadbasket fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and on to slake our thirsts in SoCal, now stays in the delta, thanks to the Center for Biological Depravity's ... uh, Diversity's ... lawsuits to protect the Delta smelt fish.

When stuff like this happens, it causes what is generally referred to as "results." For starters, the California Department of Water allocation is now at 35 percent of normal, down from the routine 50 percent of normal, which is, as you probably guessed, half of what people would like to get.

And that has its own results. From the Bakersfield Californian:

Faced with too little rain and restricted pumping to protect an endangered fish, farmers and ranchers in and around Kern County are facing tough choices. In a typical year, 850,000 acres are irrigated, according to the Kern County Water Agency.

This year, about 45,000 of them will be idle at a cost of $46 million. In addition, 100,000 acres will be “underirrigated,” causing a $59 million loss.

“It’s a catastrophic crisis of historic proportions,” the agency’s general manager, Jim Beck, told the Kern County Board of Supervisors Tuesday before the board passed a resolution declaring “a potential disaster condition exists throughout Kern County.” ...

Rancher Kenneth Twisselman is worried. He works on Temblor Ranch in western Kern County, raising cattle on 50,000 acres. ...

Twisselman declined to divulge specific numbers, but said the drought forced the ranch to halve its herds from last year by slaughter or relocating them to pasture in Oregon or further north in the state.

“We have very few cattle, and very little grass,” he said. “And of course a lot of the corn has gone to ethanol, not feed lots.”

That translates as higher food costs, brought to you by the Greenies. Add it to the higher fuel costs, also brought to you by the Greenies (who are responsible for that portion of higher costs attributable to low domestic production and shortage of refining capacity), and higher housing costs (in CA between one-quarter and one-third of the cost of a home is its regulatory burden).

It seems a key platform of the Greenies is for us to have less green in our wallets ... and on our fields.