One thing I've heard rumblings about here in California (especially around Sacramento, where I grew up) is running wells in reverse in order to pump floodwater back into the now-depleted aquifers and "recharge" them. This way, restoration of the water tables in the Central Valley can happen over a scale of years or decades rather than centuries or millennia.
That's really the big push around here, I reckon. California's in a relatively-unique position of having very fertile and nutrient-rich farmland (to the point where it's responsible for the vast majority of the world's supply of various fruits and vegetables), but current water use practices run the risk of turning the Central Valley into a barren desert. It's becoming clear that we can't rely on precipitation alone to sustain the current state of agricultural water usage; we need to get way more efficient when it comes to water usage and/or we need to start seriously investigating other water sources (in particular: California's long coastline could be hosting a long line of desalinization plants, bringing our water production v. consumption back into the positive and even paving the way for California to export to more arid states like Nevada and Arizona).
In other words: it's not that we need more farms, at least here. It's that we need to make those farms more water-efficient and/or produce more water for those farms to use.
That's really the big push around here, I reckon. California's in a relatively-unique position of having very fertile and nutrient-rich farmland (to the point where it's responsible for the vast majority of the world's supply of various fruits and vegetables), but current water use practices run the risk of turning the Central Valley into a barren desert. It's becoming clear that we can't rely on precipitation alone to sustain the current state of agricultural water usage; we need to get way more efficient when it comes to water usage and/or we need to start seriously investigating other water sources (in particular: California's long coastline could be hosting a long line of desalinization plants, bringing our water production v. consumption back into the positive and even paving the way for California to export to more arid states like Nevada and Arizona).
In other words: it's not that we need more farms, at least here. It's that we need to make those farms more water-efficient and/or produce more water for those farms to use.