California has been the nation’s
leading agricultural and dairy state for the past 50 years. The
state’s 80,500 farms and ranches produce more than 400 different
agricultural products. These products generated a record $44.7
billion in sales value in 2012, accounting for 11.3 percent of
the US total.
Breaking down the state’s agricultural role in the country,
California produces 21 percent of the nation’s milk supply, 23
percent of its cheese and 92 percent of all grapes. The state
also produces half of all domestically-grown fruits, nuts and
vegetables, including some products, such as almonds, walnuts,
artichokes, persimmons and pomegranates, of which 99 percent are
grown in California.
Overall, about 3 percent of employment in the state is directly
or indirectly related to agriculture.
Water transfers, trades and sales doubled this year as drought
left San Joaquin Valley farmers scrambling for supplies. …
[Sam Boland-Brien, program manager at the State Water Resources
Control Board’s Division of Water Rights] said he’s seen
about twice the amount of transfers this year compared to an
average water year.
The Valley’s best hope to renovate its water infrastructure has
been put on the shelf for now. Senate Bill (SB) 559, the State
Water Resiliency Act of 2021, was moved to the state Assembly’s
“inactive file” on Sept. 8. … As written SB 559 offered
a holisitic, statewide approach to help restore the conveyance
capacity by created a fund to provide up to $785 million to
repair key parts of the state’s water infrastructure.
Almonds in California are no longer sustainable at current
levels. That’s the consensus of recent headlines describing the
prolonged historic drought — and increasing restrictions on
water use — currently impacting the state’s $6 billion industry
and its efforts to produce 80 percent of the world’s
almonds. The U.S. Drought Monitor is showing California
to be slowly approaching 90% of the state categorized as being
in ‘extreme’ drought —especially in the Central Valley.
This year’s wine harvest is well underway throughout
California, and vintners in some parts of the state say they’re
feeling the effects of climate change more acutely than ever.
The drought has left grapevines parched. Fruit yields
are dramatically low. Vines look visibly stressed. In some
vineyards, all of the grapes seem to be ripening all at once,
presenting winemakers with a logistical impossibility. And the
threat of wildfire — which, by this time last year, had ruined
grapes up and down the state with pernicious smoke — remains on
everyone’s mind.
New groundwater agencies in the Sacramento Valley are currently
finalizing plans to manage their groundwater basins for
long-term balance, as required by the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA). Successful stewardship demands good
information not only about groundwater conditions, but also
about surface water availability. To help build shared
understanding of surface water for agriculture—the valley’s
main water-using sector—we produced a new dataset showing how
access to this vital resource varies across irrigated farmland
in the Sacramento Valley and the Delta.
A bill that would have created a program to help farmers find
new life for farmland idled by coming groundwater restrictions
had its own phoenix moment last week in the Legislature when it
was simultaneously killed and reborn — this time with
money. AB 252, authored by Assemblymembers Robert Rivas
(D-Salinas) and Rudy Salas (D-Bakersfield), died in the state
Senate last week but much of its content was reborn in a budget
bill with $50 million attached.
As an ongoing water shortage that’s hurting ranchers and
dairies in the North Bay, the Marin County Board of Supervisors
will consider extending a local emergency declaration of
drought conditions at its meeting Tuesday. Much of the state is
facing parched conditions after two consecutive dry years and
Marin County is no exception. The county’s two largest water
suppliers, the Marin Municipal Water District and the North
Marin Water District, have declared water shortage emergencies
and put mandatory conservation measures in place.
It’s always alfalfa season in Arizona. In most other parts of
the country, the perennial crop grows tall enough to harvest
just a few times a year. But in the sun-drenched Southwest, the
irrigated fields allow the crop to grow year-round, to the tune
of 8.5 tons harvested for every acre and $397 million a year.
All farmers need to do is add water. At least that’s been the
case for the many decades that alfalfa has boomed and bloomed
in the Arizona desert, providing feed to the region’s
megalithic dairy industry. Now, accelerating climate change and
depleting water availability could change this.
About 2,700 wells across the state are projected to go dry this
year. If the drought continues, 1,000 more will go dry next
year. In 2014, the California Legislature enacted a package of
new laws that aimed to stop groundwater over-pumping, but as
CalMatters’ Rachel Becker reports seven years later, little has
changed for Californians relying on drinking water wells.
Depletion of their groundwater continues. Pumping is largely
unrestricted, and there are few, if any, protections in place.
To fill the post of chief agricultural negotiator at the United
States Trade Representative’s office, the Biden administration
dipped into California’s hot, dusty, drought-plagued San
Joaquin Valley and plucked out an almond-industry lobbyist.
… Biden is favoring the $6 billion almond industry at a
particularly fraught time in its history. The ever-expanding
groves of California’s Central Valley churn out nearly 80
percent of the globe’s almonds. -Written by Mother Jones reporter Tom
Philpott.
On Aug. 3, the State Water Resources Control Board completely
eliminated 2021’s surface water supplies for farms in much of
the state. It has impacted farmers like John Moore III, who
grows pistachios at Moore Farms in Arvin. … While
California is prone to drought, the last reservoir in the state
was completed in the 1980s. The state’s population has grown
tremendously since then. Moore says the state wouldn’t be
in this situation if more infrastructure was built.
The Biden administration announced Monday its plan to nominate
Elaine Trevino, president of the Almond Alliance of California
and former deputy secretary for the California Department of
Food and Agriculture, to be the next chief agricultural trade
negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Four years after California created a legal, regulated
marijuana industry that’s largely shepherded by contentious
growers, its public lands continue to be decimated by criminal
cultivators associated with Mexican drug cartels. That
much was clear as federal investigators ended several major
probes over the summer, the incidents involving large-scale
plant and wildlife destruction from the central to northern
Sierra.
Unless you have a personal connection to the Central Valley or
work in agriculture, chances are you haven’t been able to speak
directly to a farmer about how they’re experiencing this year’s
historic drought. Recently on KQED Forum, three
farmers from the Central Valley, where roughly 40% of the
nation’s fruits, vegetables and nuts are grown, shared just how
little water they have to work with, how they’re adapting, and
what the drought means for their industry long term.
Murders of environment and land defenders hit a record high
last year as the violent resource grab in the global south
continued unabated despite the pandemic. New figures released
by Global Witness show that 227 people were killed in 2020
while trying to protect forests, rivers and other ecosystems
that their livelihoods depended on.
A federal jury awarded the city of Pomona $48 million in
damages to be paid by a foreign corporation for contaminating
its groundwater with a toxic chemical mixed with fertilizer and
sold to citrus farmers for decades. On Sept. 7, the city won
its case against the American subsidiary of a multi-billion
dollar Chilean company, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile,
known as SQM. The case, which began in 2011, bounced between
courts until the city won after presenting its full argument
recently in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The longer it takes for two new wells to be dug in Cantua Creek
and El Porvenir in western Fresno County, the deeper in debt
the towns are mired. Now, with the drought, those well projects
are in a race against dropping groundwater levels as farmers,
cut off from surface water supplies, are leaning more heavily
on the aquifer. The well projects started in 2018 and
aren’t scheduled to be completed until sometime next year.
Many rely on the Klamath River Basin on the California border,
especially with the historic drought in the West. Things got
heated this summer between the area’s tribes and ranchers.
… Over the past week, our colleagues over at The
Indicator have been reporting on the historic drought in the
West. They spent some time with ranchers on the front lines,
including the Klamath River Basin. Sally Herships and Ashley
Ahearn report.
Central Valley water-quality regulators released a final report
Friday concluding oil field wastewater from central Kern
County, when blended with other water sources, can
safely be used to irrigate a variety of locally grown
crops. The report, based on five years’ work and
incomplete in some respects, found no evidence of risks to
human health from watering tree nuts, citrus, berries, tubers
and other ag products with the saline water that comes up from
the ground along with oil and which contains small
concentrations of toxic chemicals.
The bustle of birds and insect pollinators is the first thing
you notice at Full Belly Farm in Guinda, about 100 miles
northeast of San Francisco in the Capay Valley, where Judith
Redmond and her partners started farming four decades ago.
… Farmers have always labored at the mercy of the
elements, but climate change has brought overlapping calamities
of wildfires, drought, prolonged heat waves and power
outages.
The California recall election is fast approaching, and
candidates are not wasting time. GOP frontrunner Larry Elder
made a second stop in the Central Valley this week, focusing on
crime and water shortages during a one-on-one with farmers. …
Jacobsen said farmers are hurting across the Valley and want
state leaders to take action and help solve the water crisis.
With the gubernatorial recall election looming, the Republican
contender Elder said he wants them to know he’s listening.
Environmental groups failed to justify blocking the federal
government from funding groundwater pumping in the Sacramento
River Valley pending a preliminary injunction hearing, a
federal court in California ruled. There’s no evidence that
pumping will immediately occur without injunctive relief,
according to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of California. And even if it did happen, there’s no evidence
irreparable harm would occur between that time and the
preliminary injunction hearing, Judge William B. Shubb said
Tuesday.
The Oakdale and South San Joaquin Irrigation Districts have
joined in a lawsuit challenging the State Water Resources
Control Board’s authority to prevent the two water agencies
from diverting and storing Stanislaus River runoff in Donnells,
Beardsley, New Melones and Tulloch Reservoirs. The state water
board, in an emergency drought order issued Aug. 20, declared
that OID, SSJID and 4,500 other water rights holders in
California must immediately stop diverting water due to
unprecedented drought conditions.
The major arteries of California’s water-delivery system are
crumbling, but a proposal in the state Legislature to spend
$785 million fixing them is dead for the year. The legislation,
SB 559 was pulled off the table this week by its chief author,
state Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger), after an Assembly
committee stripped the funding and made other changes to the
legislation. Hurtado’s decision turns SB 559 into a two-year
bill that could be revived next year.
California farmers and ranchers have no shortages of stress
this year. They face drought and water supply cuts, devastating
wildfires and pandemic impacts. There are also labor shortages
and financial pressures from fluctuating commodity prices or
trade disruptions. These impacts inspire serious discussions in
agricultural communities about looking after farmers’ mental
health.
If you could save gallons of water, improve your health, and
leave our Earth a little healthier, would you do it? If your
diet is mainly meat-focused, you can effect big changes by
beginning to transition to a diet that is plant-based. This is
because pound for pound, meat has a much higher water footprint
than vegetables and legumes. -Written by Georgi LaBerge, board member of
Sustainable San Mateo County and CityTrees and the former mayor
of Redwood City.
The Upper Sacramento River was again at risk of devastation
after a Union Pacific train derailed recently at Cantara Loop,
reminding many of the disastrous spill over 30 years ago in the
same location. Luckily this time, no spills of any kind
occurred, but this further strengthens the argument that this
pristine stretch of river requires protection. Disastrous spill
In July 1991, a 97-car Southern Pacific train derailed at the
Cantara Loop near Mt. Shasta and dumped 19,000 gallons of
herbicide metam sodium into the Sacramento River.
Some San Joaquin Valley farmers could someday have a new “crop”
to sell — their groundwater. In the face of looming
groundwater pumping restrictions, some groundwater agencies are
looking at internal markets to give growers a way to save water
and still earn a profit.
San Francisco, along with a handful of Central Valley
irrigation districts, is suing the state for enacting drought
restrictions that are keeping thousands of landowners and
suppliers from drawing water from rivers and creeks. The
lawsuit, filed late last week in Fresno County Superior Court,
claims that the State Water Resources Control Board — drought
or no drought — does not have the authority to suspend the
draws of those with the most senior claims to California’s
water.
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a Northern
California county from enforcing water permit laws aimed at
cracking down on illegal marijuana farms, finding the
restrictions might be intended to drive a minority Asian
community out of their homes. … Siskiyou County passed two
ordinances in May 2021 requiring permits to extract and move
groundwater off site and to transport water by truck.
For decades, farm labor has kept unincorporated communities
alive throughout the Central Valley. But the drought is making
it hard to stay. The dearth of essential resources — clean
water, adequate housing and fair employment wages — has
crippled towns that are easily overlooked and triggered a slow
exodus to bigger places.
A bust of an illegal cannabis grow site within Sonoma Coast
State Park has weeded out an even bigger problem for the North
Bay suffering from a drought year — water theft. “Cannabis
plants require so much water to grow,” California State Parks
Cannabis Watershed Protection Program Assistant Chief Jeremy
Stinson told the Business Journal, following his team
uncovering the illegal grow site in Bodega Bay that netted two
arrests, 1,500 plants, 1,000 pounds of trash, pollutants and
water diversion lines.
Lawmakers accused almond growers of over-planting and livestock
ranchers of unsustainable practices, while others sought policy
ideas to help small family farmers.
At the end of the growing season, as the Sacramento Valley
transitions from summer to fall, we shift from the agronomic
season to the bird season as waterfowl, shorebirds, raptors and
other birds traveling along the Pacific Flyway begin to arrive
as part of their annual migration. Birds and other species
using the Pacific Flyway are reliant upon varied land uses in
the Sacramento Valley that include ricelands and managed
wetlands (both privately managed wetlands and public refuges
and state wildlife areas) to meet their habitat needs.
Like many farmers across California, Zack Andrade’s business is
being choked by an extraordinary two-year drought. Water cuts
could soon erase about a quarter of the irrigation he depends
on to grow leafy greens, carrots and beets on his family’s farm
in the rolling hills south of Silicon Valley, near Morgan
Hill. Andrade said the crisis has been made worse by
successive governors, including Gavin Newsom, who he says have
punted on damming rivers and building new reservoirs to help
California store more water during wet years.
There is hope that the unfortunate conditions of California’s
water supply this year will prompt decisive action on water
management and storage. President and CEO of Western Growers,
Dave Puglia noted that his conversations with growers have been
disheartening. There is significant concern that if California
gets another dry year, many farmers will not be able to
recover. The dire circumstances of the current water year
underscore the imperative need for an updated approach to water
management.
They all remember when the San Luis Valley brimmed with water.
South of San Luis, Ronda Lobato raced the rising floodwaters in
San Francisco Creek every spring to fill sandbags that
protected her grandparents’ farm. North of Center, potato
farmer Sheldon Rockey faced so much spring mud that he had to
learn to extract his stuck tractor. Outside Monte Vista,
Tyler Mitchell needed only a hand shovel on the family farm
near Monte Vista to reach shallow underground flows in the
Valley’s once-abundant water table.
Madera County is running out of time as groundwater levels
plummet to new depths. Wells are going dry everywhere. Drillers
have months-long waitlists. Residents are scrambling for water
tanks. And farmers will soon face a reckoning after
agriculture’s footprint, particularly nut trees, has more than
doubled in the past 50 years — far outpacing irrigation
supplies.
As Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge’s last remaining
wetland reduces to a mud puddle, California Waterfowl
Association’s efforts to secure a meager supply of water for
the refuge have cleared a regulatory hurdle. On Thursday, the
Oregon Water Resources Department accepted CWA’s application to
transfer several thousand acre-feet of water from a willing
Wood River Valley rancher to the refuge’s Unit 2.
Tucked between two mountain ranges in Northern California’s
Siskiyou County, the Shasta Valley is as complex as it is
impressive. … The dearth of knowledge is perhaps most
pronounced when it comes to what scientists call the
hydrogeology of the groundwater basin –– how exactly water
moves through the volcanic rock below the ground. The movement
of that water is the economic linchpin of the valley, with
cattle ranchers, alfalfa farmers, cannabis growers, and others
all depending on it. And thousands of residents also depend on
the groundwater for their homes.
This small town [Mendota] in California’s agriculture-rich
Central Valley advertises itself as the “Cantaloupe Center of
the World.” But as relentless drought punishes California and
the West, the land is drying up and the cantaloupes are
disappearing. Farmers have let large portions of their melon
fields lie fallow as they struggle to get by on dramatically
curtailed water supplies. Some are giving their vines barely
enough water to stay alive in an effort to conserve. In other
cases, fields that have already been planted will never get
harvested because there’s not enough water for the fruit to
survive.
As climate-driven drought and wildfires rage in California, the
Biden administration is struggling to navigate the hard
politics that come with deciding who gets access to the state’s
precious — and dwindling — water supplies. … Now the Biden
administration is delaying action on the fundamental question
at the heart of California’s long-running water wars: How much
water should be reserved for species protections, at the
expense of the state’s powerful agricultural industry?
We cannot solve our most pressing environmental and natural
resource management challenges with a better understanding of
the biophysical environment of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
alone – we need social science. To address our natural resource
management challenges, we must build cooperation and
collaboration among stakeholders, find a compromise between
conflicting interests and values, and face tradeoffs that
require hard decisions about whose needs we prioritize.
Maria Olivera’s house sits on a dirt road that dead-ends at the
Friant Kern Canal, the 152-mile aqueduct quenching the endless
thirst of the San Joaquin Valley crops that feed the country.
She’s called Tooleville home since 1974, where residents have
been fighting to attain the basic human right to clean drinking
water for the better part of two decades.
As discussed in our July 28, 2021, Policy Alert, the State
Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) recently adopted the
Draft Emergency Reporting and Curtailment Regulation
(Regulation), to authorize curtailments of water diversions in
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta). The Regulation
was approved by the Office of Administrative Law and became
effective on August 19, 2021.
When Bolinas farmer Peter Martinelli decided to help coho
salmon by boosting summer water levels in Pine Gulch Creek,
which runs through his land, he had no idea that the project
would take two decades to complete. Now he’s happy he saw it
through. Coho are endangered in most of their California range,
and droughts like the one we’re experiencing now are among the
biggest threats to these coastal salmon.
Nearly 200 people in the Klamath Basin this summer reported
their wells going dry. In response, local and federal emergency
officials have delivered hundreds of the 2,500-gallon,
igloo-shaped storage tanks that can hook up to people’s homes
to get some water flowing through their pipes again. When
someone’s well runs dry, they can first try and drop their pump
deeper into their well. That’s the equipment that pumps water
from the well into pipes that run into a building.
California regulators began cracking down on water use in the
sprawling Sacramento River and San Joaquin River watersheds on
Friday, ordering 4,500 farmers, water districts and other
landowners, including the city of San Francisco, to stop
drawing water in the basins — or face penalties of up to
$10,000 a day. The move comes as the state slides deeper
into an extraordinary two-year drought. Lakes, streams and
rivers no longer have enough water for everyone who is taking
it, and dwindling supplies must be rationed, state regulators
say.
As if I’m a thirsty person craving my next drink, I keep
thinking about water. I hear the stories. A 20-acre family farm
sits fallow. Down the road, another piece of land has the same
barren look. Is the problem reasonable crop values or access to
water? Likely, a bucket of both. Fresno averages 11.5
inches of rain per year. Total precipitation from Oct. 1, 2020
to date is 6.59 inches, or 60% of normal — a larger percentage
than most parts of the state. In the canal I floated down
as a kid, not a drop of water has flowed all season.
-Written by Danielle R. Shapazian, a nurse and writer who
lives in Fresno.
“I love the smell of diesel power in the afternoon. It smells
like victory.” The line, a play on the quote from the Vietnam
war movie Apocalypse Now, is the first uttered in a July video
by Doug LaMalfa, the US congressman for Siskiyou county. In the
background, bulldozers are destroying what appears to be a
field with marijuana plants. LaMalfa’s video was a response to
a call from the Siskiyou county sheriff, who had invited
citizens in this remote region in northern California to help
his department in the fight against illegal marijuana grows.
Resources are available to help San Joaquin Valley residents
affected by drought maintain access to drinking water. A
group of organizations in the San Joaquin Valley coordinated by
the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley Water
Workgroup have developed an outreach plan and a list of
resources available to private well owners or part of a small
community who have lost or are concerned about losing access to
drinking water due to groundwater level.
According to the National Integrated Drought Information
System, all of San Luis Obispo County is currently experiencing
severe drought and 17% of San Luis Obispo County is
experiencing exceptional drought. In California, irrigation
systems are a common alternative to relying on rainfall for
agriculture. Since many crops require a certain amount of
water, farms simply can’t depend on rainwater alone in
California’s dry climate.
Summer is underway and that means splashing around Putah Creek,
hiking, camping, and… heat domes? With this excessive heat, the
thought on everyone’s minds is likely how does this severe
drought affect water resources throughout California? The
extreme temperatures coupled with the low snowpack in the
Sierra have meant fast evaporation in many of the state’s
reservoirs; not to mention a heat dome that has descended upon
much of the United States bringing record breaking heat to even
the most mild summer climates.
Cropless fields, fishless rivers, burning forests, empty
reservoirs and powerless dams — either you’ve seen the
headlines, or you’re living it. America’s West has run out of
water. For most of us, this is a reckoning moment. Water exists
in abundance. It’s cheap, free-flowing and limitless. We’re
quite literally swimming in the stuff. But suddenly, that’s no
longer true. California’s surging population and
farming-dependent economy, coupled with sustained drought,
means that demand has completely drowned out supply.
With vast swaths of the West experiencing exceptional or
extreme drought conditions and more than 90 active wildfires, a
national coalition led by the California Farm Bureau has helped
secure Senate approval for major federal investments in
critical water projects. California Farm Bureau President Jamie
Johansson applauded the Senate’s passage of legislation to fund
$550 million in infrastructure spending over the next five
years. As drought conditions continue to worsen throughout the
West, he said, “now is the time to invest and make timely
improvements in our nation’s water management portfolio.”
With an increasing focus on the multiple benefits of healthy
soils, the Budget Act of 2021 recently appropriated $50 million
in one-time funding from the General Fund to the California
Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) for implementation of
the Healthy Soils Program and $40 million for State Water
Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP) to reduce greenhouse
gases and save water. The CDFA’s Healthy Soils Initiative
promotes the development of innovative farm and land management
practices that increase water retention and infiltration …
When Stuart Woolf was growing up on his dad’s ranch in Huron,
California, he never liked working the tomato harvest. “I
thought, ‘I am never going to do this.’ Everything was kind of
wet, hot and stinky,” Woolf said. These days, though, now
as president of the 20,000-acre ranch, Woolf is prioritizing
tomatoes over some of his other crops, like cotton and almonds,
since they’re relatively less water-intensive. With the drought
desiccating California’s Central Valley, farmers like Woolf are
having to reevaluate their business models based on how much
water they can afford.
The well fixer and I were standing at the edge of an almond
orchard in the exhausted middle of California. It was late
July, and so many wells on the farms of Madera County were
coming up dry that he was running out of parts to fix them. In
this latest round of western drought, desperate voices were
calling him at six in the morning and again at midnight. They
were puzzled why their pumps were coughing up sand, the water’s
flow to their orchards now a trickle.
Pistachios have recently become perhaps the top choice for
institutional investors in Kern County agriculture, apparently
surpassing almonds. Farmland brokers say prices and demand for
local pistachio orchards — the few properties listed for sale,
anyway — have increased since about 2019 because of the
trees’ longevity, crop price stability and higher tolerance for
limited and lower-quality water supplies.
Like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — arid nations
with limited water supplies — California should consider
banning or limiting the cultivation of water-intensive crops.
At a time of severe water shortages, it makes sense to end the
cultivation for export of crops like almonds and alfalfa, a
plant mostly used to feed cows. Where does the world get 80
percent of its almonds? The Golden State. Where does Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (and Japan and China) get
much of their alfalfa? You guessed it. California. -Written by San Diego U-T columnist Chris Reed.
Officials in Lower Colorado River Basin states want to slow the
decline of Lake Mead’s water levels over the next few years by
paying Southern California farmers not to plant crops. It’s not
a plan that Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources
for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California,
considers a “drought buster,” but it will reduce lake level
decline by up to 3 feet over the next three years, he said.
If you’ve eaten sushi anywhere in the U.S., chances are the
rice came from California’s Sacramento Valley. Fritz
Durst, a sixth-generation farmer, has grown the grain and other
crops there for more than four decades. But this year, amid a
historic drought, Durst is planting only half as many acres of
rice as usual. … Farmers like Durst would be having an
even worse year if it weren’t for water siphoned from the
Sacramento River to irrigate fields. Those diversions, though,
have dire consequences for another part of the sushi supply
chain: The salmon industry.
Amid extreme drought, Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking for statewide
conservation of 15%, farmers are facing cutbacks in water
deliveries, and a mass die-off of salmon is expected. Drought
affects us all, so our response must improve the natural
systems that make our water, air and food — our existence —
possible. The State Water Resources Control Board has taken the
rare drastic step of adopting emergency regulations to curtail
diversions of water rights holders when water is not
available. -Written by Sandi Matsumoto, director of The
Nature Conservancy’s California Water Program, and Julie
Zimmerman, the lead freshwater scientist at The Nature
Conservancy in California.
A harvester rumbles through the fields in the early morning
light, mowing down rows of corn and chopping up ears, husks and
stalks into mulch for feed at a local dairy. The cows won’t get
their salad next year, at least not from this farm. There won’t
be enough water to plant the corn crop. Climate change, drought
and high demand are expected to force the first-ever mandatory
cuts to a water supply that 40 million people across the
American West depend on — the Colorado River.
Whenever politicians are asked about the California water wars
that threaten our well-being in Modesto and Stanislaus County,
eventually the talk gets around to something like, “Well, you
know what we really need is more water storage.” As in dams,
mostly, and also off-stream reservoirs holding water captured
in wet years for use in dry ones. They say something
similar when reporters ask about drought, and sometimes about
wildfires and climate change. -Written by Garth Stapley, Modesto Bee columnist.
As the drought deepens, industries that rely on water are
facing a desperate situation and that includes the wine regions
of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys where one producer has literally
run dry. Chris Loxton, of Loxton Cellars, spends so much time
in his Glen Ellen vineyard that he can spot the slightest
changes in his grapevines and the news isn’t good. …
Vineyards across this famous wine-growing region are beginning
to show signs of stress from lack of water.
Two motions to block the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater
Authority’s groundwater replenishment fee were shot down in
court this week. Judge Kirk H. Nakamura of Orange County
Superior Court granted motions filed by the Indian Wells Valley
Groundwater Authority to dismiss two separate actions filed by
Searles Valley Minerals and Mojave Pistachios. The actions were
aimed at stopping the collection of the groundwater
replenishment fee, which was imposed last January to fund the
cost of securing rights to water to bring to the Indian Wells
Valley Groundwater Basin.
Water restrictions in Northern California have prompted
protests from a Hmong community, who say the ordinance has led
to discrimination and a rise in racial tension in the area. The
Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last
week to hold a third hearing about the ordinances, which were
passed as emergency measures in May. … But many Hmong
residents, many of whom belong to the area’s large farming
population, said the policies disproportionately affect their
community and have led to racial profiling by local
authorities.
In the southern San Joaquin Valley town of Poplar, extreme heat
in the summer is the normal condition in which people live and
work. It is one of the poorest communities in the
state. Air conditioning in trailer homes or crowded
houses normally consists of old swamp coolers, which hardly
lower temperatures. At work people bundle up, using layers
of clothing to insulate against heat and dust.
With the drought rapidly drying up reservoirs, farmers are
desperately searching for new sources of water and some of them
are turning to a mysterious method, thousands of years old. …
[Rob] Thompson, who owns Thompson Well Location in Sonoma
County, practices the mysterious art of dowsing, locating
underground water with nothing more than a pair of bent steel
rods. He touches his rods to the ground to reset them, then
begins to move them. When they point toward water, the rods
magically cross each other, almost like they become magnetized.
Virtually all almonds in the U.S. are produced in a 20,000
square mile area in the middle of California. The hot and dry
Mediterranean climate there helps produce $17 billion worth of
crops every year. … Temperatures rarely dip below
freezing and historic rain levels have created rich soil,
providing an environment suitable for almond growth.
… Some researchers are starting to look north and ask:
Could the Potato State become a hub for
almonds? University of Idaho researchers
are finding commercial production could thrive here.
Shasta Lake is at about 30 percent of capacity, the lowest it’s
been at this time of year since 1977. KRCR spoke with Bureau of
Reclamation Area Manager Don Bader on a windy morning on top of
Shasta Dam. He says a water schedule is set in February and
adjusted as necessary. The release from Keswick Dam is about
8,000 cubic feet per second (CFS). Normally it would be 12,000
CFS. The reason that much water is flowing downriver is for
freshwater fish in the delta and agricultural diversions.
In July, the number of dry wells registered in Klamath County
was at 84. A month later, that number has climbed to 185 as
wells from the California state line all the way to Crescent
and La Pine are getting low and going dry. There are likely
more unregistered dry wells in Klamath County. The county
watermaster’s office said they receive daily calls from well
owners asking how to register. And the Modoc County Sheriff
shared a PSA on Facebook explaining what to do if someone in
that county is without well water.
When Bureau of Reclamation water managers decided not to
perform a surface flush of the Klamath River this year, they
knew there might be an explosion of a parasite that could all
but wipe out salmon populations. That’s exactly what
happened in northern California, where the Yurok Tribe depends
on fishing for income and food. Salmon are also an important
part of their culture. On the first Friday in
June … Barry McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribe’s
fisheries department, and his colleagues, fished 361 dead
juvenile Chinook salmon out of a monitoring trap on the Klamath
River.
California doesn’t have enough water to meet all demands even
in wet years, and when drought strikes the competition becomes,
to put it mildly, intense. State and federal officials who must
ration the restricted supply are beset with pleas from farmers,
municipal water systems and advocates for the environment.
However, water managers must also contend with a bewildering
array of water rights, some of which date to the 19th century,
as well as long-standing contractual obligations and laws, both
statutes and judicial decrees, on maintaining flows for
spawning salmon and other wildlife. -Written by Dan Walters, CalMatters columnist.
Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) announced that he
secured over $71 million in federal funding for 20 projects
across California in the Senate’s Agriculture, Energy and
Water, and Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee
bills. The bills were approved by the Senate Appropriations
Committee this week and now await passage by the full
Senate.
Water conservation is on everyone’s mind in California
agriculture, especially this year. One staple crop that may
have potential for future water savings is rice. Netafim, who
invented drip irrigation, is now applying that technology to
rice, which is typically grown through flooding. Here’s chief
sustainability officer John Farner.
[S]igns of this subsidence are nearly invisible to the human
eye. There are no cracks in the walls of the typical American
shops in the town’s center, nor crevices opening up in the
streets or fields: to measure subsidence, Californian
authorities had to turn to NASA, which used satellites to
analyze the geological change. And yet, over the past 100
years, Corcoran has sunken “the equivalent of a two-story
house,” Jeanine Jones, a manager with the California Department
of Water Resources, told AFP.
In the valleys of central California, the search for water has
turned into an all-out obsession as the region suffers
through a drought that could threaten the US’s food
supply. Residents have watched with dismay as verdant
fields turned into brown, dusty plains, leaving shrivelled
trees, dying plants and frustrated farmers. Much of
California, and of the broader US West, has suffered through
years of lighter-than-usual precipitation and a particularly
dry winter.
They are land rich and resource poor. Most have hundreds of
acres of fertile soil, some thousands, but little money in the
bank and – most importantly – no water. Now the young farmers
of the Klamath Basin, an agricultural community on the border
of Oregon and California, fear they might be the last
generation of their kind. … The area has struggled with
water scarcity for years – but this year has been unlike any
other. Amid a historic drought, in May the federal government
cut off all irrigation to farmers for the first time in more
than a century…
A record hot summer has laid bare a stark new reality for many
states on America’s West Coast: Amid rising temperatures and
worsening droughts, many will need to systematically rethink
the way they manage limited water supplies. … Washington
state’s official climatologist, Nicholas Bond told Zenger
that rising temperatures were impacting year-round water supply
levels by melting the state’s mountain snowpack earlier than in
past years.
Known for its starry skies, Joshua Trees and 100-plus-degree
heat, California’s vast desert has recently become a hotbed of
something else: thieves stealing California’s water. So who’s
on the receiving end of all this theft? Local investigators say
it’s often illegal pot farms. And with the parched state in a
withering drought, water managers are doubling as amateur
detectives.
In the western United States, water law developed around two
main principles: (l) the goal of full beneficial use of
water, and (2) the need to afford vested water right holders
certainty as to their rights. At the time western water codes
developed, these goals were seemingly in harmony—rewarding
those who needed the water and invested in infrastructure for
water use with rights that were enforceable against subsequent
appropriators.
The largest crop grown in the United States is not corn.
Farmers grew corn on just a paltry 14,281 square miles in
2019. It pales in comparison to the largest crop
estimated at 63,000 square miles — lawns. Experts
indicate lawns in the United States collectively would almost
cover the state of Texas. Lawns are a crop that humans
cannot eat. Except for lawns that are in parks, sports field,
and golf courses the only real purpose they serve are for eye
candy. -Written by Dennis Wyatt, Manteca Bulletin editor.
For decades, California winemakers have long thought of the
Winkler Index as gospel. Developed in the 1940s by two
professors at the University of California at Davis (U.C.
Davis), the Index uses regional climate conditions to determine
the best places to grow a wide range of wine grapes. With
increasing pressures from heat and drought bearing down on the
state, however, the Index may currently be horribly out of
date. On July 22, U.C. Davis announced it would update the
Index for the first time in more than 75 years.
A deeply troubled group of high-ranking state officials, tribal
leaders, environmentalists and fishermen met July 27 to discuss
the triple whammy that is threatening some species of Pacific
salmon with extinction — a combination of record-breaking heat,
drought and disastrous federal water policies — particularly
those of the Trump administration, which drained mountain
reservoirs of cold water, sending it to the Central Valley.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack stressed innovation
and collaboration Thursday as he visited a Fresno County farm
dealing with California’s drought. … Vilsack’s visit
comes the same week the State Water Resources Control Board
imposed an “emergency curtailment” order covering the
rivers of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed —
essentially the entire Central Valley.
Regulators on the water resources control board, which oversees
the allocation of the state’s water, voted unanimously on
Tuesday to stop diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta, a vast watershed sprawling from Fresno to the Oregon
border. … But the timing of the order, which will take
effect in two weeks, could spare many growers from
hardship as the greatest agricultural demand on the watershed
tends to fall in late spring and summer …The order, which
could affect as many as 5,700 water rights holders,
includes exceptions for uses such as drinking, sanitation and
generating electricity.
Gualala Redwood Timber LLC can proceed with its logging project
in California, a federal court in the state ruled after
agreeing with the company that one plaintiff already challenged
the environmental impacts of the project in state courts.
Friends of Gualala River and the Center for Biological
Diversity argued the Dogwood Timber Harvesting Plan that
authorized logging in a private forest on the border of Sonoma
County threatened four protected species. The species include
the California red-legged frog, northern spotted owl, the
Northern California steelhead, and the California Central Coast
Coho salmon.
When Miguel Garcia was a child in small-town Mexico, he and
those around him were constantly looking forward to escaping
the farmland. But now, after earning his Masters degree and
Ph.D., Garcia is right back in the fields teaching farmers how
to preserve water while producing their grapes. And
honestly, he isn’t mad about getting back to his
roots. The conversation surrounding water use in
California is certainly not a new one, but in recent years, the
Napa County Resource Conservation District has been running a
program geared specifically toward growers and their irrigation
patterns …
Many agricultural regulations are implemented as a safety
mechanism to help provide some measure of protection to the
environment. These efforts generally provide a public good to
the community at large. However, farmers and ranchers are
responsible for covering the cost of compliance with these
types of regulations. Professor of Agribusiness at Cal Poly San
Luis Obispo, Lynn Hamilton suggests that more public support is
warranted in helping producers cover these costs.
Two droughts in the last decade mean a rough ride for ranchers
who are selling off cows to survive. The cost of meat is sky
high during COVID but that money is being spent on the supply
chain in the form of labor at meatpacking plants. It’s not
trickling down to meat producers. But now the drought is drying
up animal feed. … Casey Stone and his family operate
Yolo Land and Cattle Company in the hills of Esparto. They run
more than 600 cows and calves and manage 7,500 acres. Two
droughts in the last 10 years and multiple wildfires are
hitting hard. Stone is about to sell off 30 to 40 percent
of his herd.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a drought
emergency in most counties across the state while experts
predict the current drought will end up being worse than the
one we experienced between 2011-2017. That historic event
was caused by nonstop hot and dry weather aggravated by climate
change. Increasing temperatures and fluctuating
atmospheric patterns reduce rainfall and devastate
farms across the Golden State especially because most farmers
can’t rely on state or federal water projects to help
supplement the lack of rainfall.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S.
Department of the Army announced plans for upcoming community
engagements to inform their efforts to revise the definition of
“waters of the United States” (WOTUS) to better ensure clean
and safe water for all. EPA and Army are committed to
developing a reasonable, effective, and durable definition of
WOTUS that protects public health, the environment, and
downstream communities while supporting economic opportunity,
agriculture, and other industries.
State regulators are suspending the ability of about 1,500
water right holders to draw from the upper Russian River
watershed, in an unprecedented bid to try to preserve as much
storage in Lake Mendocino as possible in the event of a third
successive dry winter. The order handed down Monday will affect
hundreds of grape growers, ranchers, small water districts,
towns and rural property owners. It takes effect Tuesday under
emergency regulations adopted in June by the State Water
Resources Control Board.
As California’s drought worsens, state water officials are
preparing to take emergency action to conserve. The state water
board is voting later this morning on new water restrictions
that could impact thousands of farmers. If passed, the
emergency regulations would restrict anyone from diverting
water out of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their
tributaries.
A new study has found that cannabis farms in California’s prime
growing regions, including the North Coast, rely primarily on
groundwater wells to irrigate their crop as opposed to streams,
providing more insight into the debate over water scarcity as
the state grapples with a historic drought. The Cannabis
Research Center at UC Berkeley report found that well water use
by cannabis farms is common statewide, exceeding 75% among
farms that have permits to grow in nine of the 11 top
cannabis-producing counties that include Sonoma, Mendocino and
Lake counties.
Low precipitation and heat continue to dry out the West. With
nine of the 11 Western states recording average water
year-to-date precipitations from 50%-to-80% of normal and
record-breaking high temperatures, drought is literally a hot
topic. When water is limited, the first thing to consider is
how to better conserve the water that you have. Then,
investigate alternative water sources.
With a new $20 million federal grant, UC Merced becomes part of
a multi-institutional research collaborative to develop
artificial intelligence — or AI — solutions to tackle some of
agriculture’s biggest challenges related to water management,
climate change and integration of new technology into farming.
The new institute is one of 11 launched this year by the
National Science Foundation (NSF) and among two funded by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and
Agriculture.
Regulatory pressures on California agriculture can have a
global impact on consumers. North American
Regional Head of RaboResearch Food and Agribusiness
for RaboBank, Roland Fumasi explained that the agriculture
industry ultimately exists to meet the global demand for food.
Restrictive policies enacted that put added pressure on
agricultural production can potentially have a negative impact
on billions of consumers that rely on California ag
products.
Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer made a stop in Fresno on
Wednesday to plead his case on why he’s a key candidate in the
potential recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom. Faulconer’s
talking points during the visit consisted almost entirely of
the state’s water woes as he stood outside the Department of
Water Resources office in central Fresno, where he was
accompanied by Fresno County Supervisor Buddy
Mendes.
In late June, Simon Martinez drove along one of the dirt roads
crisscrossing the parched rocky shrubland on the Ute Mountain
Ute Tribe Farm & Ranch Enterprise, a 7,700-acre agricultural
operation owned by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in the far
southwestern corner of Colorado. In normal times, he would be
driving past giant circular fields of corn and alfalfa
irrigated by 110 rotating sprinklers called pivots. But most of
the fields are barren this year, casualties of an unprecedented
drought — “the worst in 30 years,” said Martinez …
Immerse yourself in California’s key water sources this fall
with the Foundation’s schedule of engaging virtual tours.
Each tour event will run from 2:30-5:30 p.m. PT and includes:
An overview presentation of the region’s critical topics;
A guided video tour of key locations — farms,
wetlands, dams and reservoirs, wildlife habitats — to
gain a stronger understanding on a variety of water
supply issues and the latest policy developments; Live
Q&A with experts in chat rooms so participants
can dive deeper into the topics, including the drought gripping
California.
Jennifer Beretta has been working as a dairy farmer since she
was 6 and knows some of her family’s 700 cows by name. One of
her favorites, a Jersey named Harmony, has won top prizes at
the Sonoma County Fair. … But business is business, and right
now business is bad. California’s devastating drought has dried
up most of the Beretta Family Dairy’s pastures, driven up the
cost of feed and made milking cows unprofitable. The Beretta
family has sold off more than 40 of its cows this year, and
could sell more before too long.
It sounds like the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie: Water
thieves roaming scorched terrain in search of nature’s most
precious resource. But in California, water theft is a massive
reality with numbers that are hard to comprehend — and as
droughts increasingly afflict the state, so does the extent of
this illegal activity. Over 12 billion gallons of water have
likely been stolen in California since 2013, John Nores — the
former head of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Marijuana Enforcement Team — recently told CNN.
One of the greatest lessons of the pandemic is that we can meet
the challenges of existential threats when we combine the
collective power of our creativity, innovation and industry. As
the climate crisis worsens, we need to address protecting and
preserving water with the same urgency that we put into
creating vaccines. We need to act like lives are hanging in the
balance—because they are. Water is already shaping our
politics, our economy and our national security too. - Written by José Andrés, a chef, activist and creator of
the documentary Undiscovered Haiti, and Caryl Stern, executive
director of the Walton Family Foundation
Facing another summer of catastrophic fish kills, California
lawmakers and fisheries managers on Tuesday blamed a Trump-era
water policy and climate change for the sizzling water
temperatures threatening to erase an entire run of Chinook
salmon. … Chinook salmon die-offs on the state’s rivers have
happened routinely over the last two decades. But a pending
disaster on the Sacramento and Klamath rivers has elected
officials, regulators, Native American tribes and fishermen
scrambling to save the keystone species from extinction.
Tomato sauce is feeling the squeeze and ketchup can’t catch up.
California grows more than 90 percent of Americans’ canned
tomatoes and a third of the world’s. Ongoing drought in the
state has hurt the planting and harvesting of many summer
crops, but water-hungry “processing tomatoes” are caught up in
a particularly treacherous swirl (a “tormado”?) of problems
that experts say will spur prices to surge far more than they
already have. The drought threatens to imperil some of
Americans’ favorite ingredients — pizza sauce, marinara, tomato
paste, stewed tomatoes and ketchup all hang in the balance.
California’s deepening drought is creating another big problem
for authorities: water theft. Water thieves, many of them
illegal marijuana growers, are tapping into fire hydrants and
drilling unauthorized water wells, according to officials,
threatening the water supply for residents. In a recent sting
in Antelope Valley in northern Los Angeles County, federal,
state and local law enforcement officers disrupted hundreds of
allegedly illegal marijuana cultivations in the area. They
arrested 131 people and seized 65 vehicles, including two water
trucks.
Drought-plagued California is poised to bar thousands of
farmers, landowners and others from pumping water from the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed, a move that irrigation
districts said exceeds the water board’s authority. The
emergency rules would be the first time state regulators have
taken such wide-reaching action during a drought to prevent
diversions from the massive Delta watershed stretching from
Fresno to the Oregon border.
Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon
state line and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust
devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty
irrigation pipes. DuVal’s family has farmed the land for three
generations, and this summer, for the first time ever, he and
hundreds of others who rely on irrigation from a depleted,
federally managed lake aren’t getting any water from it at all.
… [T]his summer there is simply not enough, and the
farmers, tribes and wildlife refuges that have long competed
for every drop now face a bleak and uncertain future together.
A study tracking regulatory compliance costs in California was
recently released, with striking findings. Researchers looked
at data from 22 different farms of various sizes in the San
Joaquin Valley between 2012 and 2018. During that timeframe,
regulatory costs increased by 265 percent. Professor of
Agribusiness at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and co-author
of the report, Lynn Hamilton said several factors
contributed to the significant increase.
The drought in California isn’t quite fathomable to all. In
efforts to showcase the harsh reality producers are
experiencing, Western Growers has a new campaign called “No
water= No Crops.” In a series of videos, the campaign focuses
on a few California producers who are struggling with the water
shortages. Joe Del Bosque of Del Bosque Farms is one of the
farmers in the campaign. He started out his planting year
thinking he’d have enough water but that quickly changed as the
dry water year encroached.
Extreme and prolonged drought in the American west is prompting
water thieves to tap into other people’s scarce supplies. More
than 12bn gallons of water have been stolen in California in
the past eight years, according to state officials, but the
issue has been further exacerbated by the ongoing drought and
recent searing early summer heatwaves. A significant
amount of recent water theft has been blamed by the authorities
on illegal cannabis cultivation in some parts of the state.
The Klamath water rights issue dates back decades and is as
complex and nuanced as it is lengthy but when boiled down it
seems to come back to one primal animal instinct that all
living beings share: to ensure the survival of our spawn. For
the Lost River and Shortnose Suckerfish in the Klamath basin,
that continuum was disturbed somewhere along the line. The
adult fish are healthy but aging while their spawn has been
failing to thrive. Pending on their survival are the identity,
traditions, culture, and livelihood of the Klamath tribes.
In the town of Happy Valley, residents are dealing with a
crisis. California is experiencing an extreme drought, and
Happy Valley says there is a meager amount of water left in the
community. Coleen Wogoman, a resident of Happy Valley said
their small farm, Wogoman’s Farm, is struggling to stay afloat
as the lack of water striking hard for her family and their
livestock. A mix of emotions is expressed from Wogoman as she
looks upon her farmland and home for over 15 years.
Forced to reckon with a worsening drought, California’s water
regulators are preparing to forbid thousands of farmers from
tapping into the state’s major rivers and streams. It’s an
extraordinary step — and one that regulators didn’t take during
the last drought, which was considered one of the worst on
record. The State Water Resources Control Board on Friday
released an “emergency curtailment” order that would cut
thousands off from rivers and streams in the Sacramento and San
Joaquin river watersheds.
The State Water Resources Control Board on Friday released an
“emergency curtailment” order that would cut thousands off from
rivers and streams in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river
watersheds. The five-person board still has to vote on the
order Aug. 3, and it would take effect about two weeks later.
On the side of a dirt road in Gunnison County, a herd of cattle
is cooling off in the water of an irrigation ditch. Doug
Washburn, range manager for Spann Ranches in southwestern
Colorado, points at the hills surrounding the operation’s
northern headquarters. … Colorado’s Western Slope
is considered a climate hot spot where temperatures
are increasing faster than the global average. This warming has
contributed to more than 20 years of dryness,
which scientists are calling a megadrought.
A lot of the fruits, vegetables and nuts that you see in
grocery stores come from California. Growing them takes a huge
amount of water, which is a huge problem when the state is in
the middle of a drought. California’s farmers are pumping most
of that water from underground aquifers. They can’t keep doing
that, though, especially as the climate changes. NPR’s Dan
Charles has the story.
As California has imposed severe water cutbacks throughout the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta’s vast watershed, most
growers in the Delta region itself are still getting enough
water to bring their crops to harvest. With a majority of
landowners in the region holding pre-1914 riparian water
rights, the state has not curtailed their ability to pump water
from the Delta’s labyrinth of canals and waterways – at least
yet. In fact, growers whose land is on islands below sea
level have been pumping water off, San Joaquin County
Agricultural Commissioner Tim Pelican said.
Has double-digit growth within the California almond industry
ended? Will last year’s 3.1-billion-pound crop be the largest
on record? Is the industry ready to open a new chapter centered
around something other than year-over-year record crops? Every
year the news was pretty much the same from the Almond Board of
California – predictions of double-digit annual growth as
industry insiders talked up new markets and pointed to
impressive numbers from the monthly position reports.
As water resources managers work hard this summer to deliver
limited water supplies to cities, rural communities, farms,
refuges and fisheries–while also providing essential
hydropower for the state’s energy grid–there is increasing
attention to prepare for the next water year. … As we think
about water management opportunities for next year, there is an
increasing focus on groundwater recharge …
Join us as we guide you on a virtual journey through California’s Central Valley, known as the nation’s breadbasket thanks to an imported supply of surface water and local groundwater. Covering about 20,000 square miles through the heart of the state, the valley provides 25 percent of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of all fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed throughout the country.
Join us as we guide you on a virtual exploration of the Sacramento River and its tributaries and learn about the issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.
This tour guided participants on a virtual journey deep into California’s most crucial water and ecological resource – the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The 720,000-acre network of islands and canals support the state’s two major water systems – the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project. The Delta and the connecting San Francisco Bay form the largest freshwater tidal estuary of its kind on the West coast.
[La Sierra University student] Max Proebstle, who never
thought he would find a personal interest in hydroponic
farming … and about 20 other students have been
volunteering their time inside the repurposed shipping
container turned indoor hydroponic farm on campus. This method
of growing crops replaces the need for soil with plant
nutrients, artificial light and recirculating water. After
working with the new tech system, Proebstle believes it could
be a game-changer for the future of farming.
As if California’s dire dry season wasn’t already difficult,
thieves are making matters even worse. Illegal pot growers are
stealing water anywhere they can get it. That’s why the Nevada
County Sheriff’s Office has a warning that investigators are
cracking down. … But beyond stealing water, the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife is also finding the
illegal grows lead to large environmental impacts due to poor
cultivation practices and waste contaminating water
resources.
Environmentalists say the San Joaquin watershed needs more
water. So do state officials, who in 2018 ordered water users
to give a large share of water back to the San Joaquin and its
tributaries, notably the Tuolumne. But the fight to restore
this ailing ecosystem has turned political, and
environmentalists leading the effort are facing an unlikely foe
the water service provider for one of the most liberal cities
in the country.
California may only be one year into the drought, but its toll
feels much bigger to San Joaquin Valley livestock operators.
… Andrée Soares, president of Star Creek Land Stewards,
Inc [is] based in Los Banos on the west side of the valley but
her animals are often spread up and down the state doing
targeted grazing for fire prevention. Soares doesn’t know where
her animals will be in the next few months or how they will
eat.
Water is part of nearly every aspect of the farm-to-table
supply chain. So how can people eat food that takes less water
to grow, clean and prepare? Florencia Ramirez, author of
“Eat Less Water,” found that one way to cut water consumption
is by buying organic and seasonal food, whether at farmer’s
markets or your local grocery stores. But even before
making those trips, Ramirez says that the main priority should
be cutting down on food waste because food that ends up in a
landfill wastes a lot of water.
A new futures contract based on the Nasdaq Veles California
Water Index provides longer-term visibility into the price of
water, according to Roland Fumasi of RaboResearch. California
is facing another dry summer in 2021, and for agricultural
producers, that means a difficult growing season. … The
situation has put a strain on the state’s traditionally fragile
water resources, resulting in water price spikes for producers
looking to sustain their crops.
Surging temperatures across the West Coast this summer are
exposing another way that the changing climate threatens the
country’s future: the danger it poses to workers, particularly
those who work outside and in warehouses. The issue has
become such a concern that the Labor Department’s Occupational
Safety and Health Administration has put a new heat illness
rule on a list of agenda items for the Biden administration to
consider, calling it a top priority. … After a series of
deaths in the fields, California instituted what were then the
country’s most stringent protections for farmworkers, in 2005,
and has updated those laws since.
Whether the Kern River truly has spare water and, if so, how
much, has been left up in the air for more than a decade. Now,
11 years after the State Water Resources Control Board ruled
the Kern River was not fully appropriated, it will finally
start the process of getting at those two key questions: Is
water available? How much? A status conference hearing has been
scheduled by the board’s Administrative Hearing Office for Aug.
17 at 9 a.m., the board announced on Monday.
One day last spring, water pressure in pipelines suddenly
crashed In the Antelope Valley, setting off alarms. Demand had
inexplicably spiked, swelling to three and half times normal.
Water mains broke open, and storage tanks were drawn down to
dangerous levels. … It took a while for officials
to figure out where all that water was going: Water thieves —
likely working for illicit marijuana operations — had pulled
water from remote filling stations and tapped into fire
hydrants, improperly shutting off valves and triggering a chain
reaction that threatened the water supply of nearly
300 homes.
Today, as a water economist, my job is to help customers
stretch their limited water resources. This means managing
supplies wisely and getting a handle on collective demands.
Fortunately, one of our available tools is an old one: water
markets that can help reallocate the resource to the places
it’s needed most. I’ve learned a lot more about water and water
markets since I was a second-grader determined to help fish in
the San Francisco Bay. One lesson is that even well-intentioned
water markets can have bad outcomes if poorly designed or
executed, as was my first water transfer.
The Bureau of Reclamation and the Friant Water Authority
scheduled a teleconference contract repayment negotiation
session for costs of extraordinary operation and maintenance
work on the Friant-Kern Canal Middle Reach Capacity Correction
Project. The date and time of
the teleconference-only negotiation session are: July
22, 2021, from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. PDT Call
1-202-640-1187 and, when prompted, type in participant
passcode 523 487 550# The public is welcome to listen during
the session and comment after the negotiations close.
I can see my future: It’s dry, thirsty and bleak. On our farm,
we live with drought daily, working with limited groundwater
and learning to adjust and adapt, or to fail and abandon our
fields. Water will determine a farmer’s survival. I farm
organically outside Fresno, part of one of the world’s richest
and most productive agricultural oases, providing, of course,
that we have water. … A severe two-year drought is
drying out the West and Southwest from Washington to
California, Montana to Texas. Agriculture feels the impact with
crops withering and production limited. -Written by David Mas Masumoto, a farmer in Del
Rey, California.
In a vineyard flanked by scorched hills and charcoal trees, Rob
Thompson gripped two stainless steel rods, began rotating in a
circle and counted under his breath. Then he said he had
found it — water, hundreds of feet beneath the parched
ground. “This is really good,” said Mr. Thompson, 53,
scratching an ‘X’ into the ashen soil with his shoe. “This is a
deep one: 750 feet, 55 to 60 gallons a minute.” He added, “This
one I can feel.” Mr. Thompson is a water witch.
Alex Padilla made his first official visit to the Central
Valley as U.S. Senator, holding several discussions about
water. Padilla, along with other elected officials, held a
media availability at his only public event of the day — a tour
of the Dos Palos water treatment plant. There, he spoke about
the need to upgrade infrastructure for drinking water, as well
as water for farmers. Padilla says the infrastructure bill
being debated in the Senate will help with water, especially in
underserved areas.
Joey Gentry hesitates before she drives through the fields of
alfalfa and wheat that line the roads in the Klamath
Basin. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland
during a drought year,” [Gentry said.] Like much of the
American West, this dry, hilly, high-elevation landscape
straddling the California-Oregon border is experiencing a
summer of extreme drought. But when the federal government
announced in May that, for the first time ever, it would cut
irrigation water to about 180,000 acres of agriculture in the
basin, tensions ignited between farmers and the Klamath tribes.
California is back in a drought. You’ve heard it on the news,
you’ve heard it from scientists, and they’re
right — 100% of the state is in at least
moderate drought. Yet, California Governor Gavin Newsom has yet
to declare a statewide drought emergency, instead opting
for county-level declarations — 50 of 58
counties have been declared so far this
year. And if you look closer at what impacts different
regions are facing, and how they are responding, you
see important differences in water
shortage conditions across the state.
The North American monsoon has returned to Colorado, and the
rain has brought some much-needed relief to some of the driest
parts of the state — after multiple back-to-back years of
almost no summer rain. … Gov. Jared Polis has recently
declared a drought emergency for the region and the rest of
western Colorado. … The seasonal moisture from the
tropics creates afternoon cloud cover that protects …
drought-stricken creeks from baking in the sun. The rain helps
lower the risk for wildfires. The timing of the monsoon is
vital to Colorado’s ecosystem, which evolved on its schedule.
As he set goals last Thursday for the Bay Area to conserve
water, Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged the lack of metering
provides no sense of how much water is used by California
agriculture. Growers in the Watsonville area in Santa Cruz
County, however, are metered, and the meters have resulted in
significant water conservation.
Colorado’s high altitude hay meadows, a significant water user
in the state, could be re-operated to yield more than 40
percent in water savings, according to a new report. The report
is based on a major high tech research initiative to see if
ranch-scale water conservation techniques, in which farmers are
paid to voluntarily stop irrigating their fields temporarily,
could produce enough saved water to help protect the Colorado
River from unplanned shortages due to drought and climate
change.
The future of millions of waterfowl that visit the region each
fall could be up in the air if dry conditions continue.
Fourth-generation rice farmer Brian McKenzie farms about 4,000
acres and his fields are filled with wildlife. … This year’s
drought has decreased the number of birds and the number of
acres farmed. … And that has many worried about what
will happen to what is known as the Pacific flyway this fall.
Flora Bella Farms has been a fixture at the Santa Monica
Farmers market since it opened in 1991. James and Dawn Birch
have been a favorite stop for local chefs ever since they made
their first sale to Nancy Silverton. Because of the lack of
water in this year’s drought and the loss of most of their
crops, next Wednesday, July 21 will be their last day at the
market with no return day in sight. We talked to Dawn at the
market Wednesday, who told us that this is just the tip of the
iceberg.
As we careen deeper into drought, California will face
increasing impacts to urban and agricultural economies, rivers
and forests, and wildlife. In response, government agencies
will need to determine how to allocate water among competing
needs. Water users will scramble to buy and sell water — if
they can — or reduce their use. But the current lack of
information hobbles the ability to make difficult decisions
about water management. For California to cope with persistent
shortages, water rights data need to be accessible to
decision-makers and the public. -Written by Michael Kiparsky, director of the
Wheeler Water Institute in the Center for Law, Energy and the
Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in conjunction
with their state and county partners, are preparing for the
2021 cannabis enforcement season. As authorized by Fish & Game
Code section 12029, CDFW, in coordination with the State Water
Resources Control Board, or SWRCB, and the state licensing
authority, established a watershed enforcement program to
address environmental violations associated with unlicensed
cannabis cultivation. The environmental impacts associated with
illegal cannabis cultivation can have a detrimental effect on
fish and wildlife and their habitats…
Global warming has already left its mark on the backbone of
California’s water supply, and represents a growing threat to
its first developed agricultural region, state experts have
warned in a new study. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
fuels California’s $3 trillion economy, including its $50
billion agricultural industry, sustains more than 750 plant and
animal species and supplies 27 million people with drinking
water. But global warming is likely to destabilize the
landscape that made the delta a biodiversity and agricultural
hotspot …
Farmers are facing a water shortage right as we head into peak
growing season…. Solano County farmer Spencer Bei shows us
one of the wells his family uses to farm 15,000 acres. He says
he is losing pressure now as he is pumping because he is
pulling more from the aquifer due to a lack of surface water
and no rain in sight. He is one of many farmers feeling
the heat after the State Water Resources Board sent out letters
to 4,300 water-right holders saying there was no longer enough
water for them and that the remaining 2,300 with pre-1914
riparian rights could see even more restrictions soon.
The worsening drought forced a 13% cut in the projected almond
crop in California. The U.S. Department of Agriculture now
expects about 2.8 billion pounds from the August-October
harvest. The initial estimate in May was for a record 3.2
billion pounds. Some growers have opted to strip nuts from
branches so their trees can get by with less irrigation this
summer, Monday’s report said. Water is especially short in
parts of the western and southern San Joaquin Valley.
Across California, as peak wildfire season approaches, many
vintners in the state’s $40 billion wine industry are unable to
protect themselves from fires in several crucial ways.
Winemakers here were already vexed by smoke taint
… which forced many to abandon their entire
production in 2020. … Now, some are discovering
that the one fallback they’d counted on — insurance in case
their properties are damaged or destroyed by flames — is either
impossible to get or exorbitantly expensive.
[The] hot, dry, unforgiving climate [of the Mojave Desert] has
attracted more than a thousand marijuana plantations that fill
the arid expanse between the Antelope Valley and the Colorado
River. It’s an unprecedented siege that has upended life in the
remote desert communities and vast tract developments that
overlook Joshua trees and scrub. Authorities say the boom has
led to forced labor, violence, water theft and the destruction
of fragile desert habitat and wildlife. Longtime residents say
they feel less safe, claiming black-market growers act with
impunity by carrying weapons, trading gunfire with rivals and
threatening those who wander too close to their farms.
Water resource problems and management are complex, confusing,
and controversial for participants in technical, policy, and
public water deliberations. A thoughtful planning approach can
reduce confusion and structure controversies. This paper
attempts to summarize and organize various technical approaches
to water resources planning. This paper summarizes the basic
approach of rational planning, followed by brief reviews of
requirements-based, benefit-cost-based, multiobjective,
conflict resolution, market-based, and muddling through
approaches to planning.
A key message emerged when California water leaders gathered in
Modesto: Stop grumbling about drought, and get cracking on real
fixes. Rep. Josh Harder, R-Turlock, convened the Thursday
afternoon summit at the Stanislaus County Farm Bureau.
Several speakers called for new reservoirs and groundwater
recharge to hold wet-year surpluses for use in dry times
like 2021. The manager of a West Side irrigation district
invited others to follow her lead in using water recycled from
city sewage plants.
Southern California’s largest reservoir is filled to more than
80% of its total capacity, despite the fact the state as a
whole is in the second year of a severe drought. And Diamond
Valley Lake near Hemet is proving to be a key asset in making
up for the shortfall in water from other sources after another
year of below-normal precipitation.
In Cantua, a small town deep within California’s farming
heartland, the heat had always been a part of life. “We can do
nothing against it,” said Julia Mendoza, who’s lived in this
town for 27 years. But lately, she says, the searing
temperatures are almost unlivable. … Global heating is
driving stronger, longer heatwaves in the region, said Jose
Pablo Ortiz Partida, a climate scientist for the Union of
Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy
group. Researchers have been warning of such extreme
heatwaves for decades, he said, but the barrage of heat surges
that California and the western US have been alarming, he said.
Groundwater, a subject of growing concern, will be discussed
Tuesday during the Tehama County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Clay Parker, the groundwater commissioner and Red Bluff
councilman, will be delivering a report to the board with an
update on the Groundwater Sustainability Plan and the Domestic
and Agricultural Well Ad Hoc Committee. … The committee is
still in early development, although the agenda report said an
ordinance is expected to be brought before the board by the end
of the year.
The rhythmic patter of hooves skimming the earth below was a
sound Amy never tired of when she was young. Whether in the hot
sweat-inducing summer or the bone-chill frost of winter in
upstate New York, the sound was ever-present, because Amy was
always riding. … Now as the Interim Director of the
California Program at American Rivers, one of Amy’s central
goals is to work with agricultural landowners to protect and
improve habitat in wetlands and rivers.
Imperial Irrigation District officials are making a last-ditch
effort to amend or kill proposed legislation that could
fundamentally transform the governing board of the agency,
Assembly Bill 1021. At the heart of the issue is how the bill
could force the district — which provides water and power to
virtually all of Imperial County, and electricity to part of
the Coachella Valley — to add a seat representing energy
ratepayers from a small section of southeastern Riverside
County to the IID Board of Directors.
The American west has a sprawling network of dams, reservoirs
and pipelines that brings a supply of water to its cities and
farms. But overexploitation and a two-decade dry spell have put
a severe strain on the resources, with reserves dwindling to
historic lows in some areas. The situation will only get worse
in the coming decades, warn scientists, as surging populations
will boost freshwater demand and a hotter, drier climate will
bring deeper droughts and more erratic precipitation
patterns. …[N]ew water-sourcing approaches are also
needed. One such is rainwater harvesting.
An environmental group dedicated to promoting healthy waterways
around California is taking Sonoma County to court over
permitting policies it says too liberally allow people to drill
groundwater wells, potentially endangering Russian River stream
flows. California Coastkeeper, an affiliate of the locally
based Russian Riverkeeper and a dozen or so other organizations
around the state, filed the first-of-its-kind lawsuit late last
month amid the intensifying drought and a surge in well
drilling around the region.
Today the Karuk Tribe filed a formal petition with the
California State Water Resources Control Board demanding that
it use its emergency powers to curtail water use in the Scott
River to prevent the extinction of the Southern Oregon-
Northern California Coho Salmon (Coho). … The Scott
River is home to most of the native Coho salmon left
in the Klamath Basin. Coho were added to the endangered species
list in 1997. While federal agencies have forced water users on
the federal Klamath Irrigation Project along the
California/Oregon border to allow downstream flows to protect
the fish, other water users’ impacts have been ignored.
California and the Bay Area experienced the driest rainy season
on record, with average statewide precipitation reaching
126-year lows, according to Golden Gate Weather Services, a
meteorological consulting firm. The Bay Area got only 9.88
inches of rain this season, 39% of its normal amount of 25.28
inches, Golden Gate Weather Services said. That’s the least
ever, going back to 1895. California got 11.46 inches, or 49%
of its normal 23.61 inches. That’s also the least ever.
Amid California’s ongoing drought, drug cartels have been
stealing 2-3 million gallons of water a day to feed illegal
marijuana grows in the Antelope Valley, officials said. Asked
where the water was being stolen from, Rep. Mike Garcia, who
represents the state’s 25th District, said: “Right here from
our local aqueduct system. The California Aqueduct flows right
through the Antelope Valley. They’re taking it out of wells.
They’re stealing it from fire hydrants.”
As the western United States continues to face a months-long
bout with extreme drought, American farmers are feeling
catastrophic effects to their livelihoods. … John Moore,
a fourth-generation crop farmer from Kern County, California,
highlighted the misunderstanding lawmakers have toward the
agricultural community. In his mind, heeding to some Trump-era
water policies would’ve changed the entire landscape of how
farmers face droughts like these.
Lake Mead, which provides water for 25 million people in
the American West, has shrunk to 36 percent of its capacity.
One rural California community has run out of water entirely
after its well broke in early June. Fields are sitting fallow,
as farmers sell their water allotments instead of growing
crops, putting the nation’s food supply in peril. As the West
withers under extreme drought, legislators in the US House of
Representatives have introduced HR 4099, a bill that would
direct the Secretary of the Interior to create a program to
fund $750 million worth of water recycling projects in the 17
western states through the year 2027.
Except for a brief stint in the military, Paul Crawford has
spent his entire life farming in southern Oregon. First,
as a boy, chasing his dad through hayfields and now, growing
alfalfa on his own farm with his wife and two kids, who want to
grow up to be farmers. … The American west is drying out
as the region faces an unprecedented drought. Few places
are as devastated as the Klamath Basin, where Crawford’s farm
sits. Straddling the border between California and Oregon, the
watershed spans 12,000sq miles – from agricultural lands fed by
Upper Klamath Lake to tribal communities surrounding the
Klamath River.
For thousands of years, an Arizona tribe relied on the Colorado
River’s natural flooding patterns to farm….Now, gravity sends
the river water from the north end of the Colorado River Indian
Tribes reservation through 19th century canals to sustain
alfalfa, cotton, wheat, onions and potatoes, mainly by flooding
the fields. Some of those fields haven’t been producing lately
as the tribe contributes water to prop up Lake Mead to help
weather a historic drought in the American West…. As
Arizona faces mandatory cuts next year in its Colorado River
supply, the tribes see themselves as major players in the
future of water.
The drought is here, and agriculture is scrambling. Water
regulators have cut the amount that can be taken from lakes,
rivers and streams. Farmers who ordinarily get that water
either have to forgo planting some of their fields, or pump
water from the ground, or a combination of the two. Farmers
dependent on wells are also affected… Neither the state nor
the federal water projects are delivering water for agriculture
from Northern California to south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta.
The water spigots on California farms will soon be twisted
tighter. As the state faces a growing threat from drought, an
increasing number of water agencies are planning to require
flow meters on agricultural wells, part of a landmark effort to
measure and constrain pumping that used to be free and
unlimited. It’s a controversial step aimed at protecting water
supplies that could change cultivation practices in the Golden
State’s thirsty fields.
Residents in Valley Center say they are running out of water
and blaming an SDG&E project meant to reduce fire danger.
The olive trees that line Kristen Bazata’s Valley Center farm
have not been watered recently – at a time they need all the
H20 they can get. … Bazata stopped watering the trees
after noticing an alarming change when she turned on her own
faucets. “We have lower water pressure than we have ever
had,” Bazata said.
Our leaders must take bold action to adapt to our new reality
and create a system that can support healthy rivers and
wildlife, communities with access to safe drinking water and a
thriving agricultural economy. Unfortunately, that’s not what
we’re seeing today. The state’s water regulators are draining
our reservoirs and depleting our rivers to deliver vast volumes
of water to a small number of powerful agricultural interests
during a historically dry year. Protecting fish and
wildlife and water quality for Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta communities does not mean eliminating agriculture in the
Central Valley. -Written by Rachel Zwillinger, water policy advisor
for Defenders of Wildlife in Sacramento.
In the drought-stricken Klamath Basin along the
California-Oregon border, water is precious. This year, Native
American tribes and farmers are competing for this shrinking
resource. It’s an indicator of future water wars in the West.
Jefferson Public Radio’s Erik Neumann explains.
Interest from California growers in the possibility of growing
almonds commercially in Idaho has not waned. In fact, it’s
increasing. University of Idaho fruit researchers have been
conducting a major almond trial at the university’s
agricultural research and extension station in Parma since
2014. … California is the global leader in almond
production but growers there are increasingly concerned about
burdensome regulations, an uncertain water supply and expensive
land prices, Fallahi says.
With a vast portion of the United States coping with
exceptional drought this summer, conditions are ripe in many
places for harmful algal blooms, bringing additional threats to
already-stressed water systems and increased health risks for
communities. The blooms are in large part fueled by phosphorus
and nitrogen runoff from industrial agricultural operations,
which provide a feast of nutrients for cyanobacteria — a group
of aquatic, photosynthetic bacteria that grow out of control
and overwhelm their ecosystems in the presence of excess
nutrients.
The time to act is now. Climate change is already altering the
physical environment of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and
Suisun Marsh (Delta), and we will continue to experience its
effects through hotter temperatures, more severe wildfires, and
prolonged droughts. Over the long term, climate change in the
Delta is expected to harm human health and safety, disrupt the
economy, diminish water supply availability and usability,
shift ecosystem function, compromise sensitive habitats, and
increase the challenges of providing basic services. Many of
these impacts will disproportionately affect vulnerable
communities.
On Andrew McGibbon’s 90,000-acre cattle ranch south
Tucson, Arizona, the West’s punishing drought isn’t just
drying up pastureland and evaporating water troughs.
… Nearly 1,000 miles from McGibbon’s ranch, near Rio
Vista, California, the drought on Ryan Mahoney’s ranch feels
just as bad. … In the contiguous United
States, more than a third of available land is used
for pasture. That means more than 15 million beef
cattle are trying to graze this year on drought-parched
grasses, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
figures.
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a
landmark piece of legislation in the quest for comprehensive
management of California’s groundwater, required the creation
of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs), and authorized
local governments either to form GSAs separately or join with
other local governments in the same groundwater basin. This was
the genesis of 74 interorganizational agreements now examined
in a new report, which focuses on whether, given the high
stakes and history of conflict in water resources management in
California, participants were prepared for disagreements with
dispute resolution clauses in their planning.
The rise in legal cannabis cultivation in California has
brought a once-clandestine industry out of the shadows.
Legalization has begun to illuminate the industry’s impacts on
ecosystems and water—a particularly fraught issue as the state
confronts a new drought. We spoke with Van Butsic and Ted
Grantham, co-directors of UC Berkeley’s Cannabis Research
Center and adjunct fellows at the PPIC Water Policy Center, to
better understand how cannabis cultivation affects the state’s
water.
Former bond trader Alan Boyce is just the type of California
farmer expected to dive into the world’s first water futures
contract. Boyce is comfortable navigating financial tools, and
he grows irrigated pistachios, tomatoes, alfalfa and other
crops in California’s drought-prone Central Valley. But he says
the water contract is still too illiquid to benefit him.
Financial exchange operator CME Group (CME.O) launched the
contract late last year to help big California water users such
as farmers and utilities hedge rising drought risk and give
investors a sense of how scarce water is at any given time.
For the first time ever, an official Colorado River Tier 1
Shortage is expected to be declared starting January 1, 2022.
The announcement comes from the Bureau of Reclamation in August
based on projections for Lake Mead water levels for the
following January. The shortage declaration means reduced water
for some stakeholders who receive water from the Central
Arizona Project (CAP); those stakeholders who receive a portion
of their water from CAP include municipalities, agriculture,
tribes, and others.
The Delta Stewardship Council (Council) and the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation (Reclamation) are pleased to award over $10 million
to fund 16 critical scientific studies in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin River Delta and Suisun Marsh over the next three years.
… At its June 24 meeting, the Council voted to approve
$9,611,012.75 to fund 16 projects, with Reclamation
contributing over $3.42 million toward four of these projects.
The State Water Contractors will co-fund one of these 16
projects, pushing the grand total awards to over $10 million.
The diversion of water from the San Francisco Bay Delta, for
example, is one of the forces famously driving the delta smelt
to extinction. Now, a new study published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences this month shows another
counterintuitive way in which human water use in California is
putting its unique riverside woodlands at risk. By
diverting water in ways it would not otherwise flow, human
management is providing some stream-side, or riparian,
ecosystems with excess water that gives them a short-term
boost, but undermines their long-term sustainability.
As farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley struggle
to irrigate crops and weather an ever-worsening historic
drought, a bit of relief could be on the horizon courtesy of
farmers in the north Valley. But it could be all for naught if
Federal water managers don’t sign-off. What’s at stake? A
proposed transfer of 100,000 acre-feet of water from the
Southern San Joaquin Irrigation District (SSJID) and Oakdale
Irrigation District to farmers utilizing water from the San
Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority.
Severe water restrictions like these are not merely a serious
economic threat to farming operations; they are also a
contributor to rising food prices. Without adequate water
supplies, many farmers simply refrain from farming. And that’s
not a good thing in a state like California, which grows nearly
half the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Almost all
agriculture is thirsty, of course, but California agriculture
is especially thirsty. Growing a single almond requires more
than one gallon of water, while growing a single avocado
requires 60 gallons! Obviously, a major drought is not helpful.
Drought may be the sneakiest of natural disasters. Although
human history teems with people engulfed by abrupt aridity —
the Akkadians of four millenniums ago, the Maya in the ninth
and 10th centuries A.D., the Great Plains farmers of the 1930s
— even today drought is a poorly appreciated phenomenon. …
The American West is once again facing drought, one of the
worst on record. Across a vast region encompassing nine states
and home to nearly 60 million people, the earth is being wrung
dry. -Written by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times opinion columnist.
The California priority water rights system is being put to the
test, as state regulators impose emergency regulations and send
notices of water unavailability to farmers who are trying to
negotiate their crops through another drought year. Reacting to
worsening dry conditions, the State Water Resources Control
Board adopted emergency regulations last week to curtail water
diversions in the Russian River watershed in Mendocino and
Sonoma counties.
Growers are dealing with severe cutbacks in the surface water
deliveries they normally receive from reservoirs. The lack of
steady irrigation has already impacted spring cropping
decisions made by farmers. … A bill introduced by
Republican Congressman David Valadao would allow more water to
be moved south from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta while
keeping protections in place for fish such as the delta smelt
and salmon.
Forty two percent of shallow wells supplying water to community
water systems in California’s San Joaquin Valley are vulnerable
to going partially or fully dry under the state’s minimum
thresholds, finds a new report from the Pacific Institute. Most
impacted wells are shallower, and tend to be in disadvantaged
communities.
While California is known for its world-famous entertainment
industry and ever-transforming tech sector, agriculture is
the often-overlooked backbone of our diverse state
and one of its earliest economic engines.
Our state’s multigenerational farmers and ranchers
not only feed Californians, but also supply one-third of our
country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts,
while also leading the nation in milk production. -Written by Karen Ross, secretary of the
California Department of Food and Agriculture; and David
Shabazian, director of the California Department of
Conservation.
