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As the debate rages over the election of the next President, it seems that another debate with significant implications for California has yet to take place. It concerns the one commodity which our state and the planet cannot do without—water. As California enters its sixth year of a historic drought, the solutions from Sacramento have been short in coming and predictions that there will be continuing water shortages are as solid as the belief that the sun will always come up again.

Scientists have begun to account for the topsy-turvy carbon cycle of the Colorado River delta — once a massive green estuary of grassland, marshes and cottonwood, now desiccated dead land. “We’ve done a lot in the United States to alter water systems, to dam them. The river irrigates our crops and makes energy. What we really don’t understand is how our poor water management is affecting other natural systems — in this case, carbon cycling,” said Cornell’s Jansen Smith, a doctoral candidate in earth and atmospheric sciences.

On the day it became official that this was the wettest October in Redding in more than 50 years, the state released water conservation numbers for September. Redding conserved 7 percent based on its 2013 baseline usage. That was down from the more than 20 percent the city saved in September 2015. Still, Redding earlier this year chose not to reduce residents’ water usage from 2013 based on its 100 percent allotment. So the 7 percent reduction was an improvement over zero conservation.

California agriculture, which had been plowing ahead in the face of a major drought, finally had an off year in 2015, according to data released recently by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The state’s farms brought in cash receipts of an estimated $47.1 billion (this will be revised in the months and years to come), down from a record $56.6 billion in 2014. Here’s how that looks in historical context, with the numbers adjusted for inflation.

A drop-off in Californians’ water conservation efforts seems to have leveled off, state officials said Tuesday, though residents still used more water during the month of September than they did the same month in 2015. The news comes one month after the State Water Resources Control Board expressed concern that savings were slipping. Earlier, the board had decided to relax the rules and allow cities to set their own numeric targets; most decided that none were needed. So when conservation starting slumping, critics said the board wasn’t taking aggressive enough action.