Justin Fox, Columnist

California Keeps On Farming, With or Without Water

Crops were down in 2015, but not as much as you'd expect in a drought.

October 5, 2016 at 8:42 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

One of these years, the wells might run dry.
Photographer: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

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California agriculture, which had been plowing ahead in the face of a major drought, finally had an off year in 2015, according to data released recently1475676161958 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The state's farms brought in cash receipts of an estimated $47.1 billion (this will be revised in the months and years to come), down from a record $56.6 billion in 2014. Here's how that looks in historical context, with the numbers adjusted for inflation.1475676231154

Why should you care about this, if you're not a California farmer? Well, California is the country's leading agricultural producer, by far. (Iowa was No. 2 in 2015, with cash receipts of $27.8 billion.) It is also the most populous state, with an economy that would rank as the world's sixth largest (behind the U.K., ahead of France; although it's lower if you go by purchasing-power parity) if it were an independent nation.