The next morning I meet with the two men who, I’m told, will make sense of all of this for me. My guides on this tour of destruction. Jim Verboon is a big man, a walnut farmer and fisherman, with a friendly demeanor and a great jolly laugh. Russ Waymire is kind but serious. Hair oiled and shirt tucked, Russ is all business.

We meet in a little café and the two of them offer me a crash course in California Water 101. Even in non-drought years the logistics are complex. Snowpack runoff is captured in reservoirs. Rivers and lakes are dammed. Canals snake across the state. Some water is managed at the federal level, some at the state. There are 500 public water districts, each with local ordinances. There are senior water rights, junior rights, riparian rights. As difficult as it is to understand water collection and distribution, Russ and Jim simplify the crisis by reiterating what I heard the night before: Radical environmentalists have effectively lobbied to have water diverted away from the Central valley.

Beyond the salmon runs, Jim and Russ tell me about the delta smelt, a three-inch fish on the edge of extinction. Environmentalists claim the powerful pumps that send water to the Central Valley are killing the smelt. The plummeting fish population, and a lawsuit through the Endangered Species Act, has all but shut down the pumps. From the perspective of both environmentalists and the state, they’re managing for the longterm. As in, if they divert water from salmon or smelt, they may never recover. Ever. While the farmers will eventually be okay. For a time, they’ll have to make do with less.

Ducks fly from a mound of cattle feed.

Jim and Russ have no fight with the fish. They simply believe blame is misplaced. In their argument, Jim and Russ speak like professors, evenhanded and thorough. They show me maps and graphs, articles highlighted and annotated, findings from a scientist at U.C. Berkeley, attempting to validate their theory that it’s not the pumps killing the fish, but raw sewage from Sacramento’s regional treatment plant.

No matter the reason behind the pumps being shut off, one thing is irrefutable: The water isn’t coming to the valley. Much of California relies on surface water collected by state and federal water projects. This year’s snow pack was a dismal 29 percent. The winter and spring rains didn’t come. After farmers struggled through receiving only 40 percent of their surface water allotment in 2012 and 20 percent in 2013, the Westlands water district that delivers water to the west valley received an unprecedented 0 percent of their 2014 allotment. Before this year, receiving zero surface water was inconceivable to the valley farmer. But now it’s happened. Now anything’s possible.

We drive through Jim’s walnut orchard, his trees full and healthy. But the river behind his land is a deep canal of sand. I’m confused. This is the Kings River, the same river I slept beside the night before. Turns out this isn’t the work of Mother Nature. A weir alters the water’s flow a few miles to the northeast. Those who live above the weir have a river. Those to the south look upon a ghost-trench of silt and banks of dying woods.

Jim’s keeping his operation going with well water. He doesn’t want to deplete his land of groundwater, but has no choice. Wells are expensive, using groundwater dangerous. Natural aquifers are drying up, the land subsiding, as little as an inch in most areas, as much as a foot in others, the land collapsing as the water is siphoned out. How will he make it through this year? How does he sustain the land for the future? This is the balancing act Jim and every valley farmer must painfully confront.

For years, Russ owned a custom farming business and has helped harvest acreage in every corner of this valley. As we start to drive, he points out fallow land his crews once worked. We pass pistachio trees and Russ notes that the leaves are yellowing, the trees failing. The farther west we drive the larger the plots of unfarmed land. Signs mark the road’s shoulder: NO WATER = HIGHER FOOD COSTS; NO HAY AGUA, NO HAY TRABAJO!; CONGRESS CREATED DUST BOWL.

I take out my camera, but it’s impossible to convey the amount of fallow land with a photo. On one stretch, we drive for 35 minutes with unfarmed land on either side of the road for as far as the eye can see. This year, there’s an estimated four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand acres left idle, or 1,250 square miles of land on the high side, a landmass larger than Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco combined.

We drive for miles through nothing but dirt and tumbleweeds and then, like an oasis, a dot of green emerges in all that brown. Trees surround a little house. David and Sharon Wakefield have lived outside of Mendota, California, for thirty-eight years. For most of those years, this land would be planted with row crops. With this year’s 0 percent water allotment, his land is fallow, and the land surrounding the farm has been sold to a solar company. Where once was cotton and alfalfa will soon be fields of panels.

“I have no problem with solar farms,” David tells me, standing in his little yard. “I just don’t want to live in the middle of one.”

Sharon and David Wakefield in fallowed farmland near their home.

The ten acres that holds the Wakefields’ house is the last scrap of a legacy of farming that started when Sharon’s family moved out from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Jim introduces Sharon as “Dust Bowl Sharon,” and she smiles but gives Jim a playful glance like maybe he’s in trouble.

David and Sharon have been fighting for years to stay in business, have successfully made it through past droughts by abandoning land and shrinking their acreage. They describe what the land used to look like, the rows of cotton, green plants tufted white, the fields teeming with workers at harvest time.

Sharon shows me an old illustration from the Encyclopedia Britannica, a barnyard and farmhouse, crops in neat rows in the distance, a farmer harvesting wheat. A boy rides a brown horse. A woman in a white apron feeds the chickens.

“This was my dream since I was a girl,” she says. “This is all I ever wanted.”

They bought the land in 1976. They raised their kids here, made it a special place for the grandkids. At the edge of the yard sits a line of tractors. They’ve kept them all, dating back to a tractor Sharon’s grandfather once used, a tractor they take pride in saying still runs. Sharon says they planted every tree. A eucalyptus towers above us, and I begin to realize this land won’t just be sold, but all of this—the trees, the tractors, the house — might soon be gone.

We’ve circled the house and stand back in their little yard. I ask what they’ll do now. David steals a glance at Sharon. “When we go I’ll never look back up that drive again. It’ll just be too hard.”

Sharon says that when as kids they’d see a house and land being sold her father would say, “That’s someone’s broken dream.” She peers out beyond the green of her trees as the sun sets hard over the dusty, barren land. “This is our broken dream.”