Water Pricing
From: Mason Gaffney, Mary
Manning-Cleveland, Huffington Post
It's sounding again like the
drought of 1976-77: "Shower with a friend." "Put a brick in your
toilet tank." "Fix your leaky faucet." "Replace your lawn
with a cactus garden." And then the pictures: denuded ski slopes, boat
docks resting on the bottom of empty reservoirs, dry brown furrows stretching
to the horizon.
Despite all the focus on urban
water conservation, agriculture consumes some eighty percent of California
water. California is basically a dry state, subject to periodic severe
droughts. So, how come the largest water user is cow pasture, watered with
giant sprinklers sending great sprays into the atmosphere? How come farmers
irrigate those long brown furrows by flooding them, losing great quantities of
water to evaporation, and bringing harmful salts to the surface? And how come
some farmers even grow rice in flooded paddies, seeding them from airplanes?
Why do we see so few elementary efforts to conserve water, such as drip
irrigation or mulching fields to protect the soil? Why are irrigation canals
not lined and covered to prevent water loss?
Coalition response... Characterizing something that is as complex as California's
agricultural industry in simplistic terms fails to help people understand the
very logical and appropriate nuances of why farmers do what they do.
The often-repeated statement that
farms use 80 percent of the water doesn't give credit for the water we've set
aside for the environment. Without the large quantities dedicated to
environmental purposes (48 percent, according to the Department of Water
Resources) California's fish and fauna wouldn't survive. We can't forget about
the environment, and we don't.
Everyone, not just farmers, gets
his or her water for free. That's right, free. The cost people pay is to cover
the cost of treatment and delivery. Farm water doesn't need to meet drinking
water standards. It's not available 24 hours a day at the turn of a faucet.
Those things cost money and people who have access to clean drinking water all
the time are paying for them.
Farmers have also spent enormous
amounts of money on improved water use efficiency. In the last 10 years farmers
have spent almost $3 billion upgrading irrigation systems on more than 2.4
million acres. That has helped almost double production while applied water use
has declined by 14.5 percent. Interestingly, one of the photos used with this
blog was taken on President Obama's recent visit to the San Joaquin Valley.
Those furrows are irrigated with a highly efficient sub surface drip irrigation
system. Things aren't always as they seem.
Levees
From: Alex Breitler, Stockton
Record
We may be in the midst of
drought, but the state this month is launching what will likely be a
controversial study of Delta levees - specifically, which ones should receive
public funds to make them more resilient in the face of future floods.Officials
want to prioritize the levees to determine which ones get the money, and, by
extension, which of the low-lying agricultural islands protected by those
levees are most important.
Delta
From: Matt Weiser, Sacramento
Bee
Property owners in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are celebrating a legal victory involving a
controversial proposal to build two giant water diversion tunnels, though state
officials say the ruling is unlikely to delay the project significantly.
A California appellate court in
Sacramento ruled Thursday that the California Constitution bars the state from
entering private land to do environmental studies unless it first condemns the
affected land through its powers of eminent domain, and pays landowners
accordingly. The court also upheld an earlier ruling in the same case that
requires eminent domain before engaging in soil testing studies.
From: Bettina Boxall, Los
Angeles Times
A California appeals court has
sided with landowners fighting the state over test drilling for a proposed
water tunnel system in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
In a 2-1 decision, an appeals
panel ruled Thursday that the state needed to go through the eminent domain
process to gain access to private property on which it wanted to take soil
samples and conduct environmental surveys.
The testing is necessary for the
design and construction of two 30-mile tunnels that the state proposes to build
as part of a delta replumbing project. To obtain soil samples, workers drill
200-feet-deep holes, a few inches in diameter, which are later filled with
cement.
From: Ian Schwartz, KOVR 13
Landowners scored a victory today
as an appeals court ruled against the state doing testing on private property
for the Delta tunnel project.
The state wants to build two
30-mile tunnels to send fresh water around the Delta to Central and Southern
California. A lot of testing is needed on private property for the $25 billion
project, and landowners say the state overstepped its bounds and didn't
compensate them.
"You can't just demand
access to property just because you think you might someday want to do a
project there," said Sacramento farmer Russell van Loben Sels.
Water Supply
From: Marina Gaytan, Merced
Sun-Star
Exchange contractor officials are
rallying residents to protest against potential reduction or outright cessation
of water deliveries to thousands of land owners on the West Side.
According to information provided
by officials before an emergency community meeting Wednesday, the State Water
Project and Central Valley Project filed a Temporary Urgency Change Petition
with the California State Water Resource Control Board.
From: Rick Elkins, Porterville
Recorder
Local irrigation districts are
really feeling the pinch of the drought as they struggle to meet demands of
water users.
Sean Geivet, general manager of
three water districts, is really feeling the pinch as he tries to meet the
needs of three areas, including users in the Terra Bella Irrigation District
that are being hit the hardest. Geivet is manager of the TBID, Porterville
Irrigation District and Saucelito Irrigation District.
From: Rick Elkins, Porterville
Recorder
As a sign of the times, the
Porterville Irrigation District spent the most of three hours Tuesday
discussing water, or the lack there of. Issues discussed Tuesday involved the
question of allowing water in the district to be moved out of the district.
This unprecedented drought has
created serious conditions throughout the state and in the Orange Belt. More
and more growers are seeking water they don't think they will have this summer
as the federal Bureau of Reclamation has announced it will not send any water
to east side growers. In many areas, growers have wells to fall back on, but
not everywhere.
From: Sunne Wright McPeak,
Sacramento Bee
While California's current
drought is the providence of Mother Nature, the severity of the impacts is the
consequence of decades of failed leadership by state administrations. Water
supplies for everyone and everything - families, fish, farms and factories -
are unreliable because state officials have repeatedly ignored and delayed
implementation of a succession of broadly supported plans that would work for
all regions.
There would be enough water to go
around in most years if the state had sufficient facilities to capture, convey
and store a lot more water in wet times than is physically possible today.
Hydrographs for the last century show that only about three years out of every
20 are "average" with the balance being either "wet" or
"dry."
From: Tony Perry, Los Angeles
Times
Thomas Cox, a third-generation
Imperial Valley farmer, is driving his pickup along the gravel roads that
separate large fields of lettuce, broccoli, onions and wheat. The discussion
turns, as it often does in the Imperial Valley, to water. "Without
water," said Cox, 27, "our ground would be useless."
But with copious amounts of
water, the Cox family and others have turned half a million acres of desert
into one of the most bountiful farming regions in the world - a fact unchanged
by the drought gripping much of California.
Water
Management
From: David Guy, Water | Food
| Environment
History is replete with ideas
that were ahead of their time. Sagacity in the context of agricultural water management
is one such idea. As California wrestles with this dry period, the
relationships between surface water use and both groundwater and surrounding
environmental values becomes more acute. I propose that California would be
well served by revisiting the concept of sagacity as a tool that better
reflects these important relationships.
Sagacity emerged in 1997 when
professors from California Polytechnical State University in San Luis Obispo
wrote a paper: "Irrigation Sagacity: A Performance Parameter for
Reasonable and Beneficial Use." Although the paper received considerable
attention at the time, the concepts in the paper seemed to disappear over the
ensuing years. For the past several decades, there has been a zeal for pure
mathematical and engineering efficiency in water resources management that
disregarded the context in which water is used; the larger dynamic surrounding
water management for various beneficial purposes; and the relevant tradeoffs
that water resources managers face every day. During this time, our societal
values in water have evolved and policy leaders are increasingly recognizing
the tradeoffs water resources managers face. Inherently, the zeal for precision
in efficiency has led to unintended consequences in many areas, where, for
example, the environment and groundwater resources have suffered as a result of
pure mathematical efficiency.
Transfers
From: J.N. Sbranti, Modesto
Bee
Irrigation districts provide
water that's key to agricultural prosperity in the Northern San Joaquin Valley,
but some of those districts also have been cashing in on the region's water
resources.
They've sold nearly $140 million
worth of water to out-of-district agencies during the past decade. At the same
time, they've pumped nearly 1.5 million acre-feet of groundwater - that's 487
billion gallons - from the region's aquifers.
From: Ian James, Desert Sun
A red padlock atop a closed canal
gate is keeping water from flowing to a 97-acre field, leaving scraggly
remnants of alfalfa that will soon wither in the baking sun.
This field is one of many across
the Imperial Valley being left dry and brown as a result of the nation's
largest agricultural-to-urban water transfer. Landowners are being paid by the
Imperial Irrigation District to fallow their farms, while increasing flows of
water are diverted to cities in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley.
Bay Delta
Conservation Plan
From: Jim Lichatowich, San
Francisco Chronicle
In the water crisis that
Californians now face, state leaders are necessarily focused on relieving the
immediate effects of the drought on citizens. But the salmon and the commercial
and sport fishermen who depend on them must be part of the short-term remedial
steps.
In the late 19th century, the
salmon were a valuable commodity, which made the conflict between the salmon's
need for habitat and the Forty-Niners' destructive exploitation of watersheds
that washed whole hillsides into rivers in the search of gold seemingly
intractable. Spencer Baird, the U.S. fish commissioner, offered a way to
resolve the conflict. He said hatcheries would make salmon so abundant that
harvest regulation and habitat protection would be unnecessary. Who could
resist such a painless solution?ve suffered as a result of pure mathematical
efficiency.
