produce alfalfa and hay, with some shipped to Saudi Arabia and China. The following article from Vox describes what happened there..
"Saudi Arabia depleted its aquifers, and agriculture collapsed
Over at Reveal News, Nathan Halverson has a terrific piece on how Saudi Arabia squandered its groundwater supplies in just a few short decades. Back in the 1970s, the government allowed landowners to dig as many wells as they desired, in order to transform the desert into lush farmland. An agricultural boom followed, and Saudi Arabia improbably became the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat.
“By the 1990s, farmers were pumping an average of 5 trillion gallons a year,” Halverson writes. “At that rate, it would take just 25 years to completely drain Lake Erie.” The problem was that Saudi Arabia doesn’t get nearly enough annual rainfall to replace those withdrawals. Its aquifers had built up over tens of thousands of years and were now being drained all at once.
Not surprisingly, the party didn’t last. By the 2000s, the aquifers had become dangerously depleted. Wells dried up. Oases that had persisted since biblical times were now gone. The country will need to build costly desalination plants for drinking water. Most important, Saudi Arabia’s agricultural output declined sharply, with the amount of farmland now less than half of what it was in the 1990s. In an attempt to conserve what water remains, the country has announced that the 2016 wheat harvest will be its last. An entire industry, gone."
Colorado Basin states are doing the same thing with dire consequences. Some basins in AZ are "mining" their groundwater, meaning extracting it faster than it can be replaced by rainfall and percolation. In fact, that water may have accumulated in historically wetter times and once pumped out will not be replaced.
Maybe Trump should order some more water released from California reservoirs and then proclaim problem solved!