Almonds get all the attention, but hay, that most pedestrian of crops, still covers more acres of California farmland. But less than it used to. In the drought of 2015, California farmers are planning to plant and maintain past plantings of 1.23 million acres of hay, according to new USDA data published last week. That’s the lowest since at least 1950 (which is as far back as I could figure out how to easily get data). This is what we should expect – land, water moved out of lower-value crops in drought:

For comparison, 860,000 acres in California were planted in almonds last year.