Despite the Drought, California Sees Record Farm Revenues

As California’s drought drags on, we’ve been hearing stories about farmers in crisis mode: fallowing fields, digging deeper wells, and irrigating crops with wastewater from oil drilling operations. But a recent report by the Pacific Institute in Oakland seems to turn all that on its head. The report finds that California’s agriculture industry had record revenues in the past two years. Not only that, farmers last year hired more workers than ever before—417,000.