Combining $3 million each from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) have made possible a $6 million pilot grant program for joint applications involving funding for both agricultural water suppliers and agricultural operations.  The grant funding provided in this joint program is intended to address multiple goals including: 1) water use efficiency, conservation and reduction, 2) greenhouse gas emission reductions, 3) groundwater protection, and 4) sustainability of agricultural operations and food production.

Water advocacy leaders in California are calling for the state government to permanently invest in water infrastructure–noting that over 300 California communities are affected by unsafe drinking water. Among the chemicals found in the drinking water of these communities are uranium, nitrates, and arsenic. Jennifer Clary from Clean Water Action said during a statewide conference call this week that agricultural communities on the Central Coast specifically are breeding ground for nitrates. “In Monterey County, about 40 percent of the private wells that have been tested over the last two years have exceeded the nitrate standards,” Clary said.

Two major California canals – the California Aqueduct and the Delta-Mendota Canal – have been significantly impacted by subsidence which the state says is caused by groundwater pumping in the Central Valley. Land subsidence happens, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, when large amounts of groundwater have been withdrawn from certain kinds of rocks, such as fine-grained sediments. The water is partially responsible for holding the ground up. With the absence of that water the ground sinks. One of the concerns of this phenomenon is that once an aquifer collapses in upon itself it can no longer refill.

Going, going, but not gone yet.  About 47 percent of California still faces a drought, and the conditions are severe in 11 percent of the state, according to the most recent weekly report from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Some 83 percent of the state was in the monitor’s second-most severe category one year ago. The dramatic changes in the drought map comes amid a rainy season marked by a series of moisture-packed atmospheric rivers that drenched the parched West Coast and dumped copious amounts of snow in the Sierra Nevada. All of this rain has ended the drought in most of Northern California.