acre-feet

The amount of alfalfa eaten just by horses requires ~1.9M acre-feet, which is ~620 billion gallons.

Here's all the cost figures in metric, in case you forgot how to handle gallons => acre-feet in your head.

Irrigation Central Valley averages 110,000 acre-feet a day, although there are significant seasonal differences.

Near the beginning of the article, the daily volumes are discussed in terms of millions of gallons, but later on, acre-feet is used.

California receives a total of 80 million acre-feet of water per year.

It makes no sense at all to pay $2k an acre-foot for water in a state where millions of acre-feet are being used to grow alfalfa that sells for less than $400 per acre-feet of water consumed.

The largest desal plant I am aware of is in Saudi Arabia and produces about 830 acre-feet of water a day.

Building all of the 17 planned desalination plants would decrease the water deficit by 0.54 million acre-feet (MAF), but the actual shortfall is around 10 times that.

All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet.

> in case you forgot how to handle gallons => acre-feet in your head Or in case those have no intuitive meaning to you:) Thanks.

>when does the average person deal with acre-feet?

I'm not a metric purist, but the only advantage to using imperial units is that they are more familiar to the average American, but when does the average person deal with acre-feet?

(Which is really a kind of "cubic inches (of water) per square inch (of land)", but the units cancel out.) So if you know the net water requirements of some crop given the climate, and you know how many acres of land you intend to grow it on, acre-feet are a natural, easy-to-calculate unit to measure the water supply needed.