Few places feel the grip of drought like California, now in its fourth dry year despite a sodden January. The impact on the state's agriculture, vital to the entire nation, is stark: Acres harvested in broccoli dropped 72 percent between 2006 and 2009. Lettuce and tomatoes, down 46 and 48 percent, respectively, are not far behind. Unemployment in Mendota, a farm town outside Fresno, last year approached 40 percent.

Now California

wants to do something about it -- but at potentially huge expense to Oregon and even her own legacies in California. She proposes sending Sacramento River water reserved for salmon to farms in California's arid San Joaquin Valley.

Here's what's wrong: The salmon are the lifeblood of Oregon's salmon fishery. They are federally protected under the

. And they need the water to survive.

Salmon in our Columbia River leave, turn right at the Pacific Ocean and get caught off Canada and Alaska, mainly. Sacramento River salmon leave a crazy hydraulic machine known as the California Bay Delta, also turn right at the ocean and swim up into Oregon territory. That's where we catch them, in ever dwindling numbers.

That's where the pain in this scheme hits us.

Management of the delta, to be clear, is a beast. The delta's irrigation pumps are so huge as to reverse the direction of the Sacramento River when turned on -- anything to get fresh water to thirsty farms and cities to the south. And the delta is legal flypaper. Hard-won federal rules brokered to balance the needs of people and fish there are now tied up in a thicket of more than a dozen lawsuits.

Enter Feinstein. Her first action, before writing a jobs-bill amendment last week to divert the water, was to ask the Obama administration to re-examine the science supporting the delta's fish-protection rules. It was a sensible idea: Find some wiggle room for a policy that could help the farmers while also nurturing fish. But the

review won't be done till next month, while the bill with Feinstein's amendment moves forward.

That inflamed Oregon Reps. David Wu, Peter DeFazio, Earl Blumenauer and Kurt Shrader, who late in the week joined California congressmen to protest the water diversion.

And so here we are, fingers crossed. Late Friday, Feinstein stuck to her goal but also voiced the wish that California's dried-up farms could find another way to win an assured supply of the delta's water. She wished, in a prepared statement, that a solution could be found in the coming days "that would make this legislation unnecessary."

Have at it, senator. Because the amendment is, plainly, a bad idea.

Revisiting the water equation should include a commitment not to turn our backs on a natural resource as plundered but as valuable as Sacramento chinook. More than half the salmon caught off the Oregon coast typically come from the Sacramento River.

We're only going to see more demands for water as population grows and the climate throws curveballs, if not heat. Agriculture and rivers are our collective responsibility -- and abandoning one for the other is a dead end.