Water Supply
From: Chris Fenstermaker,
Sacramento Bee
Re "Vineyards gulping
water" (Letters, July 24): The letter writer rightly worries about the
impact on groundwater supplies as more and more land is devoted to vineyards
near Galt. His estimates of water requirements for vines remind me of my
concern for water every time I drive down Interstate 5 to Los Angeles.
Coalition response...Chris Fenstermaker needs to be more careful when he tries to compare one
farming region in California with another. Water use on a vineyard in Galt is
pretty much the same as it is for the orchards he complains about along I-5.
The fact is for 20 years almost 4,000 farms on the San Joaquin Valley's
Westside have faced water supply cuts from 40 percent, to 60 percent to as much
as 90 percent by a federal bureaucracy that has dismissed the impacts of its
decisions on the people who live and work there. The food-producing capability
of the Westside is important to California consumers and to the state's economy.
It provides jobs and economic stability. Perhaps Mr. Fenstermaker should be
thinking more about the impacts on society of a large segment of the population
being unemployed.
Fisheries
From: John McManus, Modesto
Bee
Steve Knell and Jeff Shields of
the Oakdale and South San Joaquin Irrigation Districts miss some basic facts in
their July 19 op-ed calling for predator eradication to help salmon ("Stop
studying salmon and start doing something").
Coalition response...It is unbelievable that someone like John McManus who heads the Golden
Gate Salmon Association could possibly ignore the largest single controllable
force affecting the future of California's salmon industry.
He seems to think that predators
will curb their diets if diversions from rivers are curtailed. I guess he
assumes that the feeding frenzy in the Tuolumne River will go away if water
delivered to cities and homes and to farms that grow the food we eat is
reduced. A federal survey recently revealed that 93% of the juvenile salmon in
the Tuolumne were eaten by predator fish. Not surprising, at a time when salmon
populations reached their lowest, the numbers of bass that feast on baby salmon
have skyrocketed ( http://www.farmwater.org/centrarchids.pdf).
Why isn't McManus talking to the
bass industry about that?
Water Supply
From: Alex Breitler, Stockton
Record
From the bathtub rings around our
reservoirs, to the salty Delta lapping up against our levees, there is ample
evidence that in the span of just two years California's water supply has
shifted from wealth to want.
The state has not formally
declared a drought, but water managers are using words like "dire" to
describe the situation - particularly if next winter disappoints.
From: Antoine Abou-Diwan,
Imperial Valley Press
A little more than halfway
through his term as president of the Imperial Irrigation District Board of
Directors, Matt Dessert is appealing for cooperation from the agricultural
community, saying that time is of the essence if it wishes to help the IID
tackle the many water-use issues it faces.
From: Todd Fitchette, Western
Farm Press
If there was one thing that
struck a chord with a group of cotton growers from the southern Plains states
of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas touring California recently it was the incredible
amount of regulations California farmers must deal with on a daily basis to
produce food and fiber.
For instance, visiting growers
heard about California's water woes and how farmers who depend on irrigation
water from the California State Water Project receive a scant 20 percent of
their promised allocation of water to produce crops. The result of that is no
more evident than in the vast amount of fallow land tour participants saw along
the western side of the San Joaquin Valley.
"Farmers in Texas wouldn't
tolerate this," said Donald Kirksey, a cotton grower from Lorenzo, Texas
From: George J. Janczyn,
Groksurt's San Diego
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
has agreed to contribute funding in the amount of $1,025,000 in fiscal year
2013 for a San Diego Watershed Basin Study proposed by the City of San Diego
along with two other local agencies.
There are uncertainties
associated with Northern California and Colorado River water (regulatory
restrictions and dry conditions, respectively) upon which the San Diego region
relies for 70-90% of its needs. While previous work has been done to address
the potential gap between supply and demand from the above causes, the
potential climate change effects were not taken into account. The proposed
watershed basin study would analyze those effects.
Technology
From: Staff, Bakersfield
Californian
FarmsReach, an online
information-sharing and business platform for farmers, just launched a new
Water and Irrigation Toolkit with resources recommended by successful farmers
and specialists in water and irrigation.
Bay Delta
Conservation Plan
From: Press Release, San Diego
County Water Authority
The San Diego County Water
Authority's Board of Directors on Thursday provided guidance to staff on the
scope of its proposed analysis of alternatives for fixing water supply
reliability and ecosystem problems plaguing the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Bay-Delta in Northern California.
To date, the Water Authority has
not endorsed any specific project proposal for improving water conveyance
through or around the Bay-Delta, which provides about 20 percent of the
region's water supplies. In recent years, the Bay-Delta has become less
reliable as a supply source and its habitat has deteriorated, increasing concerns
over ecosystem viability.
From: Maven, Maven's
Notebook
At the July 23rd meeting of
Metropolitan's Special Committee on the Bay-Delta, Dr. David Sunding presented
the economic case for the BDCP to committee members, arguing that the benefits
of the project far outweigh the costs. During his presentation, he discussed
how the benefits to water contractors were calculated, addressed the differing
baselines between the EIR/EIS and the analysis in BDCP's Chapter 9, and
responded to some of the comments on the analysis by interest groups that have
been received so far.
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