Warmer is not always better:

One of those messages is that water conservation and efficiency is the essential for farms. California farmers use 33.8 million acre-feet of water, which works out to trillions of gallons, according to the California Farm Water Coalition.

Data from the National Centers for Environmental Information shows that over the last 20 years, the amount of rainfall has decreased overall by about 50 percent.

"I think that when you talk to people about climate change they may say 'well we're dealing with it.' But the reality is we're not dealing with it at all," he said. "We're not worried about the major, major infrastructure needs that are necessary to deal with big droughts."

In fact, in January 2018, state water officials blocked 11 new water projects, including dams and reservoirs which were funded through a $7.5 billion bond voted on by the state three years ago.

The reason was that the projects did not score high enough on a "public benefits" scale. According to the fine print in the ballot measure, it doesn't necessarily matter how much water a reservoir can hold, but how much it improves recreation or environmental conditions.

"We can't build that reservoir or that dam because we're worried about using this land for that purpose because it wasn't naturally a dam or a reservoir and to create one we'll create some sort of habitat strain there," Terry said. "And that's all true."

But Terry said the opposite is also true.

"We say 'hey look we understand there's environmental impacts to building these new reservoirs or doing these things. We also understand that there is huge environmental impacts to not doing it,'" he said.

According to John Krist, the CEO of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, cities are trying to create more conservation projects, but they could be doing more.

"The city of Oxnard has an advanced water purification that treats municipal waste water for use," Krist said. "The problem is you have to you have to develop other systems to go along and make the best use of that resource and that's the part that's hard and tends to lag."

Farmers pay for water by acre-feet, which is the amount of water needed to fill up an acre worth of land with a foot of water. It works out to nearly 326,000 gallons. But it doesn't rain on just one acre of land at a time.

The 50 percent decrease in overall rainfall over 12 acres (the median size of a farm in Ventura County) works out to over 3 million gallons of water that the farms now have to pay for.

Without the rain, water can come from a few different sources. There are wells, but the water can run out of underground aquifers.

Dave Mitchell has seen this first hand. He grew up in Ventura County and has been farming bees most of his life. Bees, Mitchell said, are essential. They pollinate of crops like avocados and almonds, increasing yields. But, bees need water too, especially if temperatures rise.

"Over the years more and more people have tapped into the aquifer here," he said. "Well as that happens it drops and drops and drops and drops and finally with this drought it has dropped so low that in my entire life growing up here the [Santa Clara river] has finally went underground here in Santa Paula."

But farmers are resourceful, according to John Krist. He said when the drought first kicked in in the 90s water use dropped. But at the same time the value of production went up.

Amy's Farm in Ontario is a polyculture farm, with different kinds of crops in close proximity to each other. This soil, according to farmers at Amy's Farm, is "the best" as a result of the culture.

"So they're producing a lot more value a lot more product yield far less water than they did before. So it's a pretty good conservation," Krist said.

There are a few ways to use less water.

One way is to decrease farming's reliance on monocultures - the practice that many farms use of growing a single crop, plant or livestock variety in one field at a time.

The opposite of monoculture is polyculture, where farmers grow multiple kinds of crops in close proximity to each other. According to Scott Tenney, the owner of Bluebird Canyon Farms in Laguna Beach, it creates more of an ecosystem balance.

That means the plants need fewer "external inputs," Tenney said. The plants and the soil and the microbes all work together, making the system stronger and less susceptible to impacts of climate change.

For example, Tenney described a type of fungus that creates false root systems for a plant and grows out past where the roots can grow. That fungus then shuttles water back to the plant, creating less need for water.

But for big farms, that's not always possible, according to farmers.

Even though the Ventura County average farm size is smaller than national and statewide average, the average is 131 acres. 22 percent of farms are larger than 50 acres.

Will Terry farms a total of about 2000 acres with huge fields of single crops. The pro of this kind of system: it's more efficient. The con: he cannot rely on the symbiotic relationship of a true ecosystem that Tenney described.

Instead, Terry can turn to selective breeding to create varieties of crops that don't need as much water and are more resistant to heat.

"Everything we're growing is not probably how it was many many many many years ago," Will Terry said. "Over time we selectively bred tomatoes to present a certain way."

But it's not just about taste. It's also about the way the crop grows. Something Terry said most consumers don't always think about.

Different varietals of Roma tomatoes, for example, grow in desert-like environments. Some grow better at higher elevations, coastal environments, places with high clay content soils, or sandy soils.

"There's all that background information that goes into saying 'I got a Roma tomato from the store and if I go to the store 365 days a year there is probably going to be a Roma there,'" said Terry.

Luckily, because farming regions are located in many different climates, farmers can use technologies like selective breeding to mitigate against some extremes.

"There are lots of different varieties that are already being grown, say, in the Imperial Valley where it's very desert-like. So maybe those varieties that didn't used to be conducive for Ventura County, maybe they now have more usefulness here," Terry said.

In Ventura County, farmers may have to use this practice more. In 1998 there were about 50 days when the average temperature was above 70 degrees. By 2017, that number rose to 83. It's a trend that is happening everywhere - the Climate Change Assessment predicts the state-wide average annual maximum daily temperature to increase between five and nine degrees.

And while farmers are dealing with the heat, Scott Tenney said it is "really difficult to contend with."

Tenney's farm is in Laguna Beach, where the last decade saw an average 104 days per year above 70 degrees, a 10 percent increase from the decade before.

2018's summer's heat wave, Tenney said, was especially hard, with about "six weeks of just incredible heat."

Heat causes some of the cool season crops that Tenney grows, like lettuce or kale, to go through a process called bolting. It's when a plant that is grown for its leaves sends up a flower stock and goes to seed, causing the flavor to turn bitter, the leaves to get smaller, and the plant to become inedible.

"Some of the variety that we've planted that maybe we would normally expect to do well are not doing as well," Tenny said.

Heat can also cause fruit to rot. Daniel Veseley from Cold Creek Orchards in the hills of San Bernardino said a few hot weeks last summer caused about a $600 loss in figs.

"We had figs that would not turn purple, they would stay kind of red, but they would be spoiling and fermenting on the trees," Veseley said.

Sometimes he also sees trees at his small family-run orchard get "confused."

"We have some trees ... that start losing leaves in June because the weather was relatively mild and the heat started soon so they think it's fall. So we thought we had diseased trees, and then two months later they suddenly sprout out and are fully green," he said.

While Veseley's trees were not actually diseased, Ventura County Farm Bureau CEO John Krist said he has seen an increase in diseased plants due to heat.

"Warmer weather creates an environment that's a lot more conducive to certain kinds of fungal diseases and pathogens," said Krist. "If it's warm, they love it. And so it's been tough for celery growers and folks like that."

But it's also tough for bee farmers. Dave Mitchell said bees are extremely sensitive to temperature. They are able to cool down their hives from the inside, but if Mitchell goes out to work in extreme temperatures, the bees either become useless or die.

"When it's hot like that and you break that hive apart and you break that cycle, and then put it back together ... you see piles of bees on the outside and it's not good for them," he said. "I have a location that I have a very good suspicion that it overheated big time. And now the bees have kind of did a collapse."