After absorbing sunshine all summer, mature rice plants in California’s Sacramento Valley stand as high as three feet tall, in five inches of flood water. Planted in spring, farmers drain their fields in August, and they drive big, loud harvesters into them in September, gently separating the rice stalks from the grain, and blowing the harvest into bankout wagons that they tow beside them. On average, each acre produces 8,000 pounds of rice, which is a greater yield than most of the world’s rice growing regions. But this September, 300,000 of California’s 550,000 acres of rice lay barren—over half the state’s rice crop. Instead of miles of soft green grasses swaying amid shimmering water, the fields were cracked bare dirt, some crowded with weeds—no water, no rice, no harvest.

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