Approximately 75% of the irrigated land in California is in the Central Valley. It is one of the most-pumped aquifer systems in the United States. Two thousand gallons of subsidized water currently goes into the production of a dollars worth of Central Valley grapes. The real cost of that water is twenty or thirty times what the Valleys farmers are paying for it. At the time of this photograph, water subsidies often led to wasteful practices as shown here using flood irrigation in an arid climate.