As the single largest water-consuming industry, agriculture has
become a focal point for efforts to promote water conservation.
The drive for water use efficiency has become institutionalized
in agriculture through numerous federal, state and local
programs. Since the 1980s, some water districts serving
agricultural areas have developed extensive water conservation
programs to help their customers (From Aquapedia).
Fresno State President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval acknowledged the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act’s (SGMA) importance to
the valley in his opening remarks. … As water supplies
decline, said Central Valley Community Foundation CEO Ashley
Swearengin, it is key to bring all the valley’s many players to
the table to hammer out coping strategies. The need for
coordination is paramount, given the magnitude of the
challenge. As PPIC research fellow Andrew Ayres explained,
reducing groundwater pumping ultimately will help the valley
maintain its robust agricultural industry and protect
communities. But even with new water supplies, our research
found that valley agriculture will need to occupy a smaller
footprint than it does now: at least 500,000 acres of farmland
will likely need to come out of intensively irrigated
production.
The Colorado River is in trouble, and farmers and ranchers are
on the front lines of the crisis. A new report surveyed more
than 1,020 irrigators across six of the seven states that use
the river’s water: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico,
Utah, and Wyoming. About 70% said they are already responding
to water shortages but many identified a trust gap with state
and federal agencies that are trying to incentivize further
water savings. The report, from the Western Landowners Alliance
and the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute, sheds
light on attitudes in an industry that has an outsized role in
the fate of the Colorado River.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have
created a searchable atlas that compiles regional research and
efforts to deal with water scarcity and drought. The map,
called the Water Adaptation Techniques Atlas, was developed by
the agency’s Southwest and California Climate Hubs and so far
contains 183 case studies from Arizona, California, New Mexico,
Nevada and Utah. … The map offers a range of case studies,
many of them related to agricultural and ranching practices,
crop choice, and irrigation methods. Silber-Coats hopes it can
be a resource for agricultural professionals and advisers, like
cooperative extension workers.
Some states in the arid West are looking to invest more money
in water conservation. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico
have agreed to re-up a water conservation program designed to
reduce strain on the Colorado River. Those states, which
represent the river’s Upper Basin, will use money from the
Inflation Reduction Act to pay farmers and ranchers to use less
water. The four states are re-implementing the program amid
talks with California, Arizona, Nevada and the federal
government to come up with more permanent water reductions by
2026.
Colorado River managers [last week] decided to continue a water
conservation program designed to protect critical elevations in
the nation’s two largest reservoirs. The Upper Colorado
River Commission decided unanimously to continue the federally
funded System Conservation Program in 2024 — but with a
narrower scope that explores demand management concepts and
supports innovation and local drought resiliency on a
longer-term basis. … The System Conservation Program is
paying water users in the four upper basin states — Colorado,
New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — to voluntarily cut back with
$125 million from the Inflation Reduction Act. According to
Upper Colorado River Commission officials, nearly $16.1 million
was spent on system conservation in 2023.
… Recent floods left more than a third of California’s table
grapes rotting on the vine. Too much sunlight is burning apple
crops. Pests that farmers never used to worry about are
marching through lettuce fields. Breeding new crops that can
thrive under these assaults is a long game. Solutions are
likely to come from an array of research fronts that stretch
from molecular gene-editing technology to mining the vast
global collections of seeds that have been conserved for
centuries. … Here’s a quick look at some of the most
promising.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox says he isn’t surprised by a new report
showing that mitigating dust from the Great Salt Lake would
likely cost at least $1.5 billion in capital costs, but it
highlights why the state is “so passionate about getting more
water” into the drying lake. The Utah Office of the Legislative
Audit General released a report on the state’s “critical
vulnerabilities” this week, which notes Great Salt Lake dust
mitigation is “estimated to be at a minimum $1.5 billion in
capital costs with ongoing annual maintenance of $15 million,”
increasing in cost as more of the lakebed is exposed.
It’s been 20 years since the largest water agencies in Southern
California agreed on a historic deal: San Diego would buy water
from Imperial Valley farmers. More importantly, though, the
deal outlined exactly how much water these agencies could claim
from the Colorado River and reduced the amount of water
California took from the river. It quantified the
water (why it’s called the Quantification Settlement Agreement)
and put a price on water rights for the first
time. … Voice of San Diego and CalMatters will be
gathering top water officials from Southern California, Nevada
and Arizona to discuss the past (the historic 2003 settlement)
and the future (the needed deal for the Colorado River)
at 2023 Politifest, Oct. 7 at University of San
Diego.
Dirt roads neatly bisect acres and acres of vibrant green
plants here: short, dense alfalfa plants fed by the waters of
the Colorado River, flowing by as a light brown stream through
miles of narrow concrete ditches. But on a nearby field, farmer
Ronnie Leimgruber is abandoning those ditches, part of a system
that has served farmers well for decades. Instead, he’s
overseeing the installation of new irrigation technology, at a
cost of more than $400,000, and with no guarantee it will be as
dependable as the open concrete channels and gravity-fed
systems that have long watered these lands. … What
Leimgruber is pursuing on his acreage is part business savvy
and part guarding against a drier future. Like many farmers in
this region, he’s figuring out how to keep growing his crops
with less water. Two decades of drought have shrunk the
Colorado River, which feeds farms in the Imperial Valley, an
agricultural oasis fed solely by the 82-mile All-American
Canal, which delivers river water to this arid Southern
California region.
Searching 150 Best Quotes About Agriculture for something
appropriate to discuss The Future of Agriculture and Food
Production in a Drying Climate, this comment stood out — “At
the very heart of agriculture is the drive to feed the world.
We all flourish…or decline…with the farmer.” That core concept,
“the heart of agriculture”, resonated with Bobby Robbins, a
cardiologist by trade whose day job is President of the
University of Arizona in Tucson. Living in the Northern
Sonora Desert, Robbins has watched a changing climate threaten
food and agriculture systems in the arid Southwest. “The
agriculture industry needs innovative research-based solutions
to continue producing food year-round,” he said in announcing a
high-IQ Commission to tackle the job.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Santa Cruz Senator John Laird’s SB 756
into law on Friday, according to the governor’s office. The
bill addresses three issues regarding the State Water Board.
First, its ability to participate in the inspection of
unlicensed cannabis cultivation sites with law enforcement;
second, its ability to inspect these sites for violation of
water rights laws (including illegal diversion and/or use); and
third, its ability to serve various types of legal documents
and provide notice to unlicensed cannabis cultivation sites.
In 2015, when California was deep into a severe drought, state
Senate Bill 88 tightened requirements for reporting water use.
This posed a challenge for growers in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta’s 415,000 acres of farmland, where many
irrigation systems are fed by siphons instead of pumps and so
lack electricity to run water meters. Alternative power
sources proved troublesome. … So when former Delta
Watermaster Michael George suggested that [farmer]
Brett Baker look into OpenET, a new online platform that
uses satellites to track how much water plants consume, Baker
was primed to make it work. That was in 2020. This year marked
the launch of an OpenET-based website for reporting water use
in the Delta, and 70 percent of growers there have already
adopted it.
Cassie Cerise lives on her family’s ranch on Missouri Heights,
a mesa above Carbondale named for the home state of some of the
area’s earliest settlers. Like her parents and grandparents,
she runs cattle and irrigates hay and alfalfa fields — some by
sprinklers, others by flood — with water from Cattle Creek. But
this season, Cerise and her husband, Tim Fenton, decided to let
about 73 acres go dry and get paid for the water they aren’t
using as part of the federally funded System Conservation
Program, which is aimed at addressing the crisis on the
Colorado River. According to Cerise’s contract with the Upper
Colorado River Commission, which oversees the program, not
watering her fields this season will save about 83 acre-feet of
water.
The increasingly unpredictable climate is making growing grapes
an increasingly risky and costly business. France recently lost
an estimated $2 billion in wine sales after extreme weather
decimated the harvest. In 2022, California farmers lost an
estimated $1.7 billion to the drought alone, according to a
study conducted by researchers at the University of California.
And despite California’s abnormally wet winter in 2023, which
helped replenish reservoirs and groundwater aquifers, experts
warn that the wet weather won’t make up for decades of
diminished rain and extended periods of drought. How much water
a vineyard needs to produce great wine varies considerably, and
while there is an increasing effort to dry farm, the vast
majority of California vineyards are irrigated.
Last week, the state Water Board heard a petition to retain
minimum water flows for the Scott River, a key Klamath
tributary. The petition was brought by the Karuk Tribe, the
Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the
Environmental Law Foundation. The board eventually directed
staff to reinstate the emergency regulations for both the Scott
and Shasta rivers, a major win for the petitioners who say
flows must be maintained to protect endangered salmon. The
board also directed staff to begin work on permanent regulation
for flows in the Shasta and Scott rivers. … The petition
was filed in May and centered around an expected end to
emergency drought minimums. The lapse began on Aug. 1, with
water levels in both rivers dropping below these minimums
since.
Climate change — and changing political winds — are prompting
shifts in strategy at California’s largest agricultural water
district. Westlands Water District, which occupies some 1,100
square miles of the arid San Joaquin Valley, is in the midst of
an internal power struggle that will determine how water fights
unfold across the state. After years of aggressively
fighting for more water, Westlands is making plans to live with
less. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned in the valley, promising
to “open up the water” for farmers in the then-drought stricken
state. Its leaders are now sounding a more Biden-esque note:
They are planning to cover a sixth of the district with solar
panels to start “farming the sun” instead of thirsty crops like
almonds and pistachios.
It was exactly the sort of deluge
California groundwater agencies have been counting on to
replenish their overworked aquifers.
The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential Pacific storms
to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the Sierra Nevada at
a near-record pace while runoff from the foothills gushed into
the Central Valley, swelling rivers over their banks and filling
seasonal creeks for the first time in half a decade.
Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in one of the
state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an opportunity to
capture stormwater and bank it underground. Enterprising agencies
diverted water from rushing rivers and creeks into manmade
recharge basins or intentionally flooded orchards and farmland.
Others snagged temporary permits from the state to pull from
streams they ordinarily couldn’t touch.
Across a sprawling corner of southern Tulare County snug against the Sierra Nevada, a bounty of navel oranges, grapes, pistachios, hay and other crops sprout from the loam and clay of the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater helps keep these orchards, vineyards and fields vibrant and supports a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy across the valley. But that bounty has come at a price. Overpumping of groundwater has depleted aquifers, dried up household wells and degraded ecosystems.
Innovative efforts to accelerate
restoration of headwater forests and to improve a river for the
benefit of both farmers and fish. Hard-earned lessons for water
agencies from a string of devastating California wildfires.
Efforts to drought-proof a chronically water-short region of
California. And a broad debate surrounding how best to address
persistent challenges facing the Colorado River.
These were among the issues Western Water explored in
2019, and are still worth taking a look at in case you missed
them.
Groundwater helped make Kern County
the king of California agricultural production, with a $7 billion
annual array of crops that help feed the nation. That success has
come at a price, however. Decades of unchecked groundwater
pumping in the county and elsewhere across the state have left
some aquifers severely depleted. Now, the county’s water managers
have less than a year left to devise a plan that manages and
protects groundwater for the long term, yet ensures that Kern
County’s economy can continue to thrive, even with less water.
As California embarks on its unprecedented mission to harness groundwater pumping, the Arizona desert may provide one guide that local managers can look to as they seek to arrest years of overdraft.
Groundwater is stressed by a demand that often outpaces natural and artificial recharge. In California, awareness of groundwater’s importance resulted in the landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014 that aims to have the most severely depleted basins in a state of balance in about 20 years.
The message is oft-repeated that
water must be conserved and used as wisely as possible.
The California Water Code calls water use efficiency “the
efficient management of water resources for beneficial uses,
preventing waste, or accomplishing additional benefits with the
same amount of water.”
This printed issue of Western Water examines
agricultural water use – its successes, the planned state
regulation to quantify its efficiency and the potential for
greater savings.
30-minute DVD that traces the history of the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and its role in the development of the West. Includes
extensive historic footage of farming and the construction of
dams and other water projects, and discusses historic and modern
day issues.
There are two constants regarding agricultural water use –
growers will continue to come up with ever more efficient and
innovative ways to use water and they will always be pressed to
do more.
It’s safe to say the matter will not be settled anytime soon,
given all the complexities that are a part of the water use
picture today. While officials and stakeholders grapple to find a
lasting solution to California’s water problems that balances
environmental and economic needs, those who grow food and fiber
for a living do so amid a host of challenges.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, features
a map of the San Joaquin River. The map text focuses on the San
Joaquin River Restoration Program, which aims to restore flows
and populations of Chinook salmon to the river below Friant Dam
to its confluence with the Merced River. The text discusses the
history of the program, its goals and ongoing challenges with
implementation.
As the single largest water-consuming industry, agriculture has
become a focal point for efforts to promote water conservation.
In turn, discussions about agricultural water use often become
polarized.
With this in mind, the drive for water use
efficiency has become institutionalized in agriculture
through numerous federal, state and local programs.
