What morons.
On a side note - Selleck never stole the water. His contractor had paid for the right to take the water years ago. Much ado about nothing unless the purpose was to besmirch a famous Republican.
Besmirching works. Every time it’s tried.
California once led the world in terms of turning semi-arid, marginal land into a productive and fertile agricultural breadbasket, and also in more automated harvest of those crops. There are no longer persons dragging sacks behind and plucking cotton balls off the dead cotton plants, now that collection is almost completely automated with specialized cotton-picking machines, one operator crossing the field much more swiftly and collecting more cotton balls in minutes than a crew on the ground could do in an hour. Or perhaps in a day.
Many other crops are much less labor-intensive than formerly, as various new technology gets applied in the field, and irregularities of fertility, nutrients, or soil structure are taken into account, maximizing each acre in production. One of the problems had been that perhaps the methods were TOO productive, resulting in a surfeit of produce that tended to flood the market at inopportune times, reducing the all-important return on investment.
That was a large part of the reason that most of the smaller producers had gone out of the business of extracting a viable and useful commodity and marketing it. It just made more economic sense to consolidate and concentrate the ownership of land, machinery and the tools of planting, nurturing, harvesting and marketing the foodstuffs and fiber into fewer and fewer hands.