Drought
From: Edward Ortiz, Sacramento
Bee
A number is written in red marker
on a white board in Ed Sills' office in Pleasant Grove. It marks the day, May
5, when the last rain fell on the 3,000 acres where Sills grows organic rice,
beans and popcorn.
In a normal year, Sills gets
allocated 2 acre-feet of water per acre from the South Sutter Water District.
This year he is getting half that. He has responded by switching 190 acres of
his rice land to popcorn and dry beans, which will require less water.
From: Mike Dunbar, Merced
Sun-Star
Here's a best-case scenario:
In the name of helping endangered
fish, the state takes 40 percent of the water flowing down the Tuolumne,
Stanislaus and Merced rivers and sends it to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,
leaving a third less for irrigation. Farmers start pumping more groundwater for
their trees and vines. After a couple of droughts, there isn't enough
groundwater left, and the trees and vines begin dying. Everyone loses. Meanwhile,
south valley farmers get guaranteed water deliveries from the new gigantic
tunnels near Sacramento. With this reliable supply, their trees and vines
flourish; their land prices rise and they make huge profits when there's no
competition from nut farmers to the north.
From: Dale Kasler, Sacramento
Bee
This town calls itself the
"Apricot Capital of the World," but the slogan is out of date.
Nowadays, it's almond orchards that dominate the landscape in this part of
Stanislaus County, along with much of the rest of the San Joaquin Valley.
Almonds have become California's
miracle food. Growing consumer demand has driven up prices and created a
profitable $4 billion-a-year crop. In dollar terms, almonds are California's
leading agricultural export, leaving the state's exalted wineries in the dust.
In response, farmers have planted hundreds of thousands of acres of new trees
in the past 20 years.
From: Beth Brookhart-Pandol,
Bakersfield Californian
So writer Froma Harrop rides
around in a truck with Lois Henry for a day to see Kern County farming and has
concluded that we plant way too many crops here ("Even in drought, there
are fortunes to be made," May 6). "What gives is a byzantine system
of allocating water to a farming empire built where it shouldn't be -- in a
desert. In Louisiana and Mississippi, water for cotton falls from the heavens.
Under these dry skies it comes from engineers," she wrote.
Yes, and engineers also gave you
the computer you typed that story on -- you didn't build it at home I imagine
-- but I digress. Rain does fall on Louisiana cotton, but FYI, we grow far
superior cotton here, one that makes your bath towels and sheets soft and one
that gives a high rate of return to a cotton industry in this valley that,
until recent times, created thousands upon thousands of jobs for many
residents. And, just a side note, folks like you didn't like when we planted
cotton here because it was a farm program crop. "Why are you planting
subsidized crops?" was the cry 25 years ago.
Water Storage
From: Sarah Null, UC Davis: californiawaterblog.com
In California, we ask water
managers to do the near-impossible task of managing rivers for both
environmental and economic objectives, which are often at odds. Where we have
repeatedly failed to stem or reverse environmental problems, environmental
regulation can drive water management.
California's Bay Delta - a water
source for 25 million people and about 3 million acres of farmland - is a prime
example. No sooner did Gov. Jerry Brown declare a statewide drought emergency
in January than enforcers of the Endangered Species Act ordered big cuts in
Delta water exports to protect the delta smelt, a native species on the brink
of extinction.
Groundwater
From: Bettina Boxall, Los
Angeles Times
In a one-page ruling, an Orange
County Superior Court judge last week swept aside environmental challenges to
Cadiz Inc.'s plans to pump groundwater from beneath the Mojave Desert and sell
it to Southern California suburbs..
The May 1 decision by Judge Gail
Andler cleared one set of obstacles to the controversial project. "We're
grateful for that result," Cadiz Chief Executive Scott Slater said.
"We're going to keep our head down and keep going about things the right
way."
From: Staff, San Francisco
Chronicle
The change is noticeable to
anyone who has driven California's Central Valley over the past decade. Neat
row crops of tomatoes, sunflowers and cotton and wide fields of alfalfa are
giving way to almond and pistachio orchards and vineyards. It's a
straightforward tale of economics - nuts and grapes produce higher profits than
hay. But these permanent crops are much more dependent on groundwater. To find
out how this story of a changing landscape might play out in California's
future, we need to look deeper. We need to go underground.
From: Lois Henry, Bakersfield
Californian
The state will likely pass some
kind of groundwater regulation this year. How could it not? As surface supplies
have dried up, water users are sucking down the state's aquifers faster than a
kindergartner on a banana milkshake. In Kern County, the subbasin is being
overdrafted by an average 780,000 acre-feet per year, according to conservative
estimates. That means users are taking out 780,000 acre feet more than is being
replaced. That can't last.
In response, legislators have
spit out at least two groundwater bills, so far, and the Department of Water
Resources recently issued a report painting a grim picture of groundwater supplies.
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