The San Joaquin Valley in California can be stunningly beautiful: On a visit two weeks ago, I saw billions of pink almond blossoms peaking, with the Sierra Nevada towering over all. It can also be a hideous place, the air choked with microparticles of unpleasant origins (dried cow dung, sprayed chemicals, blowing over-fertilized soil), its cities like Fresno and Bakersfield sprawling incoherently and its small towns suffering from poverty, populated by immigrants from places as near as Baja, Mexico, and as far as Punjab, India.

This year, much of its land is a dull, dusty brown rather than the bright green that’s “normal” here, even if “normal” is more desire than reality. With water, this is the best agricultural land in the world. Without it, not so much.

If you have a good well you can pump groundwater at will; atypically, that’s not managed by the state, so you pay only for drilling and electricity. Until, of course, you draw down the water table (or your neighbor does, by drilling a deeper well). This race to the bottom is not sustainable, and wells are going dry as a result. You may have a large or small water supply contract from one of hundreds of water districts, granted when population was small, water was plentiful and environmental concerns ignored. These contracts have boosted the economy at great cost to the environment, and they’re ludicrously unfair: Some pay $7 per acre-foot (roughly 326,000 gallons), others $200; some have to buy on the open market, and cities generally pay over $1,000. Even then, supply may be inconsistent.

This is an issue that falls to the state government, which has begun to slowly do its work, passing a package of water policy bills in 2009 that mandate a start to measuring water use and a pricing system based in part on the amount of water used. “The regs don’t say that you have to use less water, but that you have to use it more efficiently,” Doug Obegi, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained to me.

Efficiency is imperative: The amount of water available is not going to increase. This drought may or may not be a result of climate change, but the area is likely to become warmer and drier as the effects of global warming increase.

But there is enough water to farm here while providing water for 40 million people (with more coming) to drink, bathe and wash. Some of that will be “gray” (recycled) water, especially for lawns, the single biggest use of residential water. And, according to Obegi, it could be that not every one of the current eight million irrigated acres will be planted.

This year, about 500,000 of those acres will lay fallow, and although that may not have a national impact — mass-produced food is a global commodity, and California’s drought is not a global tragedy — it’s a crisis locally. Many farmers are receiving 0 percent (as in none) of their federal water allocation, and some are pulling out their trees or crops or not bothering to plant at all. The more squarely the state faces the necessary changes now, the more drought-resistant California can be in the years to come.

For a consistently reliable water supply, one of two things must happen: Crop selection must be modified or water delivery and use must be more rational. But trying to persuade politicians, farmers and even water conservation advocates to think about determining what’s grown may be nearly impossible.

Still: The most water-thirsty “crops” are industrially produced meat and dairy and the food needed to sustain them. Livestock guzzle water and produce a double-digit percentage of our greenhouse gases. Other crops, like almonds (California grows 82 percent of the world’s supply), are mostly exported.

But the state can’t dictate what landowners grow. (We can help by eating fewer animal products.) It can, however, price water more fairly and make profligate water use unprofitable.

Some argue that more dams would solve the problem, but as the Sierra’s snowpack shrinks, this might be a recipe for expensive and dry reservoirs. Less expensive and more effective solutions would essentially overhaul the water delivery system to provide metered water on demand (now it’s often “use it or lose it”), which in turn would encourage more farmers to install drip irrigation, which quickly pays for itself. The state should not just monitor but also manage groundwater usage, and mandate treatment and recycling plants; these may be expensive, but they’re far less so than building new dams and shipping water hundreds of miles. Furthermore, if farmers were encouraged to build soil health by rotating crops, planting cover crops and integrating more organic matter, the land itself would become more drought-resistant.

The current drought is a crisis worth exploiting. Because rainfall cannot be relied upon but California agriculture is of critical importance nationally (the state provides around 50 percent of our fruits, vegetables and nuts), these kinds of changes are needed to begin to shift an arcane and antiquated system.