(CNN)As California plunges even deeper into its multiyear megadrought after an alarmingly dry winter, officials are eyeing what experts say is one of the leading culprits in the crisis: water-guzzling grass lawns.
Residents and businesses in the counties around Los Angeles were told this week that they would need to limit outdoor water use to one day a week starting June 1. It's the first time water officials have implemented such a strict rule.
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"This is a crisis. This is unprecedented," said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. "We have never done anything like this before and because we haven't seen this situation happen like this before."
The Great American Lawn has historically been a status symbol and portrayed as a place of leisure and comfort. But they require exorbitant amounts of water to maintain -- water that is rapidly running out.
Grass was the single largest irrigated "crop" in America, surpassing corn and wheat, a frequently cited study from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found. It noted that by the early 2000s, turf grass -- mostly in front lawns -- spanned about 63,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Georgia.
Keeping all that front lawn grass alive requires up to 75% of just one household's water consumption, according to that study, which is a luxury that California is unable to afford as the climate change-driven drought pushes reservoirs to historic lows.
In Southern California -- dotted with wealthy celebrity mansions and pristine green yards -- having conventional grass lawns simply won't work anymore as the consequences of climate change intensify, said John Fleck, director of the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico.
"You want to have some space in your backyard for your kids to play, so a little patch of grass is not terrible," Fleck told CNN. "It's just the big expanse of lawn -- that's really not being used other than 'because it looks pretty' -- that has got to go. That's what we can't have anymore.
"We just can't afford the water for it," he said.
Water hogs
Burton Agnes Hall in Worcestershire, circa 1880. The obsession with a well-manicured lawn began in England and was adopted in the US -- even in places where grass isn't meant to thrive.
America's obsession with grass can be traced back to 17th century England, Fleck said, where meticulously manicured lawns became a "symbol of status and wealth" because of the high cost to maintain them.
"That idea of lawns as a demonstration of status really became embedded in gardening culture in this country with British colonialism, so it sort of traveled west with us and took all that labor in," Fleck said.
In the US, grass lawns expanded and thrived on the East Coast, "where it rains all the time, and you don't need to add a lot of supplemental irrigation water," Fleck said. And as Americans marched west, they took with them "the landscape they were familiar and comfortable with."
"The big problem is we have brought grasses to this climate in the Southwest that come from wetter places," Fleck said. "The classic example is called Kentucky bluegrass."
Kentucky bluegrass, which is native to Europe and Asia but grows particularly well in parts of the Eastern US, requires much more water than the West can offer.
Homes and a golf course in the Summerlin community of Las Vegas. Last year, Nevada passed a bill to ban ornamental grass, mandating the removal of all "nonfunctional turf" from the Las Vegas Valley by 2027.
The water doesn't last long in the arid Southwest. The hot, dry air evaporates water quickly, which in turn increases the amount needed to saturate a lawn. This effect grows even larger on hot summer days --