California's drought has forced farmers like Bill Dietrich to make some hard choices about which crops to water and which crops to let die. This almond orchard still struggles along on salty ground water. Photo: William Marsden/Postmedia News MENDOTA, Calif. – It’s a windy, hot and very dry day on the road to Mendota.
The temperature readout in the car hits 39 C. Flat empty, brown fields stretch toward the distant coastal mountains. Tiny dirt devils race across the landscape. Two tractors, enveloped in clouds of dust, plow under a withered crop.
Then suddenly, as if by magic, the brown turns green and we enter a modern Garden of Eden. Endless fields of lush orchards and verdant crops line the road. Concrete canals brim with still water. Fruit and vegetables over-flow roadside produce stands. It’s hard to believe that California is experiencing its worst drought on record.
But this is no hoax. The impression of plenty may be real but it is also a mirage. Behind this blooming desert lies the grim reality of critically persistent water shortages caused by a drought now in its third year. What you don’t see are reservoirs (http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action) at record lows; farmers forced to cut off water to crops and orchards and lay fields fallow; unemployment at 45 per cent; the threat of total disaster if the drought continues into next year.
“I classify this year’s farming on my orchards and my neighbour’s orchards as a catastrophe,” Jim Jaspers, 70, said as he drove past some of his 2,000 acres of mostly almond trees some 30 kilometres north of the small town of Mendota. “I have never experienced anything like this.”
Jaspers, who also operates an almond processing plant, ships his nuts all over the world including large amounts to Canada.
Like thousands of other farmers in the Central Valley, the drought has forced him to cut off water to almost 20 per cent of his orchards so he can concentrate his irrigation on younger trees. This means that older trees, which take at least three years to produce a first crop and then last for up to 30 years, have been left to die.
“We are trying to keep our younger ones going,” he said. “If the drought continues, meaning that we don’t get rain and snow here in California for another 12 months, we’ll be over in that young orchard with no leaves and no crops.”
California’s damned lakes and reservoirs are all suffering record low. The San Luis reservoir is at 23 per cent capacity and getting lower by the day. Photo: William Marsden/Postmedia News
The Central Valley, with its deep and rich topsoil, runs almost 600 kilometres from the Cascade Mountains in northern California to Tehachapi Mountains in the south. It produces about 25 per cent of the U.S. table foods on only one per cent of its farmland. Comb the full list of fruits, vegetables and nuts known to mankind and for most of it the Central Valley ranks number one, or close to it. So if this valley goes dry, prices will skyrocket as the world’s agriculture adjusts to a new reality.
Almonds are a prime example. The valley produces 82 per cent of the world’s crop. Because of the drought, prices have almost doubled to $3.50 a pound. If it continues into next year, “without a doubt, we’re going to $5 a pound,” Jaspers said.
Drought in the Central Valley is not as you might expect. Modern watershed engineering can localize it and postpone its nastier effects. Lack of rain or snow does not immediately harm everybody.
California’s vast, engineered water delivery system of canals, aqueducts, dams and reservoirs, sees to that. It annually transports about 34 million acre-feet of water from the mountains to the arid valley. (That’s more than enough water to meet the demands of every Canadian.)
Transformed over the last 60 years from wetlands, flood plains and desert into lush farmland, the valley is considered the largest man-made alteration of surface land in the world. Studies show that the amount of water pushed around the state is so huge that each year it doubles the amount of water vapor in the air, dumps an average 15 per cent more summer rain in other states and increases the Colorado River runoff by 28 per cent. But without a winter of dense mountain snow, the valley will die.
California’s drought has forced farmers to fallow thousands of acres of cropland. Photo: William Marsden/Postmedia News
The allocation of water is decided by two state and federal agencies. They dictate how much water each of the state’s 600 water and irrigation districts annually receive. The present drought is so bad that most of the districts in the central part of the Central Valley — such as Jaspers’ district — have received zero water allocation.
This means that farmers have to get by with whatever surplus allocation they have from the previous year. They also bid for water – inevitably at inflated prices — from districts that have surpluses. Many farmers are forced to dig wells and pump ground water even though this water is often salty.
One almond farmer paid $2.1 million to a neighbouring farmer for water just to keep his orchard alive for another year. If there is no water next year, he will be broke.
Buying from other farmers can be chancy. Jaspers’ Del Porto Water District last year paid $18 million US to farmers north of San Francisco Bay not to grow rice only to have the state agency use rice farmers’ water allocation to feed the wetlands of the Bay Delta.
As competition for water grows, nothing raises a valley farmer’s ire more than the thought of the state watering the delta eco-system to keep its wetlands and native species alive while their fields lie parched and empty.
“How many jobs does that shrimp provide,” Jaspers asks. “How much taxes does it provide?”
Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, says that’s not the point.
“Do you know what they call water used by somebody else in California?” he asks. “Waste. So when you hear people complaining about other people wasting water, you sort of have to keep that in mind.”
He said California’s diverse environment is what makes the state attractive to the 95 per cent of the people not engaged in agriculture. “How much less is the attraction of California that has basically denuded itself of a basic eco-system,” he asks. “It is hard to quantify that but it is nevertheless quite important.”
When a drought subsides, farming can always be brought back. That’s not so for ecosystems, he said. Yet only five per cent of the original 750,000 acres of tidal delta wetlands remain.
Farmer Bill Dietrich said that while the drought has crushed some farmers, the people who are really hurt are workers. “They are not working because there is no need for them because the fields are all blank.”
Farmers have been forced to fallow about 200,000 of 600,000 arable acres in the Westlands Water District. Located in central California, it’s the largest water district in the state with Mendota at its centre. Yet they have zero water allocation. Unemployment is 34 per cent and is expected to rise to 45 per cent.
To feed their families, workers depend on state-run food banks that travel from town to town in two-week cycles.
Juan Beltran, 53, is an unemployed tractor driver with a family of eight. Only one of his sons is working. He picks melons.
In good years, he said, as he carried boxes of food to his pickup truck from the Mendota food bank, “people would come knocking at the door to offer me work. Now, there’s nothing.”
Rosa Maya, 27, was laid off earlier this month. Her husband has only part-time work. And she has a five-year-old to feed. Without the food bank she couldn’t get by. “Because of the drought there’s not enough work,” she said. “It’s the worst that I have seen it.”
wmarsden@postmedia.com
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