LATER: Turns out that Net Cropped Acreage is the wrong metric. That’s how many acres are planted; not the number harvested. In 2009, only 360,000 acres were harvested in Westlands.
I got curious about fallowed acreage, since people keep saying different things. Sen. Feinstein, for example, said “over 400,000 acres of farmland have been fallowed.” So far as I know, that is mostly on the west side (hearing no anecdotes to the contrary). Westlands WD generously keeps their crop reports online (Westlands, then News & Information, then Reports, the Crop Acreage Reports). So I graphed them. Hmmm.
1. I’m not seeing the problem here. (Perhaps the problems are rising costs of water, using salty groundwater, subsidence. The problem is not acres-out-of-commission.)
2. Their reported fallowed acreage for 2009 was 156,239 acres. Where are the other hundreds of thousands of fallowed acres?
3. I was paying attention in 2001. I don’t remember hysterical pronouncements about Government Created Dust Bowl!!!
On the public record 
Thanks for digging this out. What also seems to be left out of recent news coverage is the long-term effort to fallow about 150,000 or more acres to address the selenium runoff issue.