An interesting conundrum: in this Tweet, this Professor takes issues with a giant Chinese project that turns desert into a giant dairy yard. While advocates (linked in the tweet) talk about all of the positive environmental consequences, Prof. Hayek concludes the reverse, that it will have a huge and overwhelmingly negative impact on the environment.
While the particulars are different, California is more or less the same thing: they irrigated some tremendously fertile soil... that happens to be in a desert... and now it's really productive land. The California central valley averages 5-20 inches of rainfall a year in different parts, but uses that water (heavily supplemented by pumping out aquifers) to produce $17 billion worth of over 250 crops.
As a fairly random aside, a large share of the world's supply of almonds is among these crops. Estimates for 2021 show that California was on track to produce over 3 billion pounds, On the other hand, the rest of the world's entire production capacity was about a tenth of that. See FAO and OWID for bits of data.
