Well, I did a little analysis and almonds sure are a consumer of water in California, but I’d encourage you to look into the water, land use and emissions impact of cattle and dairy, I know, you are worried about exporting away all your water, but there are larger impact agricultural products and you said everything should be scrutinized more, so here is more scrutiny.
tl;dr: In 2022, California used this much water on these agricultural products: Almonds: 9 billion m³ Beef: 20 billion m³ Cheese: 4.4 billion m³ Butter: 1.3 billion m³
This doesn’t factor in other dairy products because the data doesn’t line up well enough to compute and I’m just some internet user, so what do I know?
Anyways land use is crazy, beef alone used 1 million acres, while all other field crops used 627 thousand acres. (Source: cdfa stat review)
2022 1000 pounds metric ton m3 water usage
Almonds (with shell) 2565000 1163476.36759503 9362494330.0372
Butter 685953 311146.239680668 1346018632.85857
Cheese 2460538 1116092.71523179 4402985761.5894
Sour Cream 199309 90405.9693368412
Yogurt 377839 171386.646103602
Milk Nonfat 860246 390205.02585503
Milk condensed 108237 49095.9811303638
Dry Buttermilk 60090 27256.6451964075
Ice Cream 77939 35352.8984849859
Lowfat Ice cream 36140 16392.9964619432
Cattle Calves 2197765 996899.664338202 20154320513.9254
Water use (m3 /ton) green blue grey total
Milk 647 60 89 796
Butter 3519 324 483 4326
Milk Powder 3007 277 413 3697
Cheese 3196 310 439 3945
Almonds (with shell) 4632 1908 1507 8047
Beef 19102 525 590 20217
References:
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2022_Exports_Publication.pdf
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2022-2023_california_agricultural_statistics_review.pdf
https://www.waterfootprint.org/resources/Report-48-WaterFootprint-AnimalProducts-Vol1.pdf
https://waterfootprint.org/resources/Report47-WaterFootprintCrops-Vol1.pdf
I kept a standard layout keyboard handy for about a week, it took me probably 3 weeks to transition fully. I fall immediately back into bad habits of typing on both sides of the keyboard on standard QWERTY keyboards without the ortholinear split layout, sometimes I even try to reach across the split after a day or two and hit T or Y with my index finger from the wrong hand.