Get ready to pay more for guacamole, or even consider giving it up.

That's the predicament Modern Farmer magazine says the world may be in soon with avocados, the creamy green fruit whose popularity has grown by leaps and bounds in the U.S. over the past few decades.

As the California Avocado Commission notes, the industry has grown from one that sold $24 million of avocados each year in the early 1970s to one that sells $435 million of them today.

But avocado production here has come under threat this year thanks to the historic drought in the Golden State, which grows about 95 percent of the fruit that goes in our salads, dips, snacks and sandwiches (not to mention the avocados eaten by themselves).

Prices for water have risen so high that in places like San Diego County, where about a third of the state's avocados are grown, for some farmers irrigating their groves has become more expensive than the price they can get from their crops, according to Take Part.

That's prompting a number of farmers in Southern California to let their fields go fallow, creating a void that growers in places like Mexico, Peru and Chile are rushing to fill, especially during the winter months.

“If you drive around here, I could show you thousands of acres of abandoned avocado groves,” Eric Larson, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau, said in an interview with Take Part.

Meanwhile, drought has hit many of those same countries over the past couple of years too, prompting farmers there to move their avocado trees from flat fields to hillsides.

But the fruit grown on those hillsides – most of which were unusable for farming until recently – also has come under fire from environmental advocates, who are argue that it is both unsustainable and an act of theft from poor families who live in the valley and depend on water that flows downhill.

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