The Western Agricultural Processors Association held their annual meeting in Monterey. The Association had several speakers including California Farm Water Coalition President and CEO Mike Wade. Wade gave an update on the state’s water outlook which has been relatively bad news for the last five years.

Wade says on top of challenging water conditions, the coalition was shocked to see two new proposals that look to limit even more of the available water that could be moved south. “Yeah, unusual proposals we are seeing this year from the national fisheries agencies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),”

The Obama administration is awarding $48 million in grants in 13 states, mostly in the West, to help farmers and others conserve water and energy amid drought and climate change.

The money will pay for improvements to irrigation and water delivery systems as well as provide technical assistance for planning and engineering conservation measures. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the grants Thursday in Brighton, just outside Denver. He was in Colorado to speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen on Friday.

 

California and Victoria, Australia, are both drought-prone states that face major challenges in managing freshwater-dependent ecosystems and native species during dry times. Both states have experienced intense controversy over balancing water for environmental needs and agricultural and urban uses. But while California’s environment has suffered greatly during its latest drought—with many species pushed to the brink of extinction—Victoria avoided serious biological losses during an even longer drought. Equally important, Victoria enacted a suite of policy changes that improved water management for all sectors, not just the environment, and reduced conflict.

The water level in Lake Shasta, California’s largest reservoir, had plunged to less than a third of normal by the end of last year. Then came the El Niño rainfall, which by April had tripled the volume of water in the lake. The story is similar in Trinity Lake, part of the same network of federal projects in the far northern portion of the state that regulate the flow of water to the Sacramento River on its journey south toward the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay.

It would be easy to think California may not have a lot to learn from farmers in places like the Great Plains. After all, the Golden State is a leader in so many things: computer technology, environmental policy, social justice issues, lifestyle and culinary trends.

But farmers in the Great Plains and other parts of North America have mastered something that is only beginning to creep into California: overhead irrigation. This is the class of crop irrigation tools that includes those giant, crawling center-pivot sprinklers we see from the airplane window as bright green crop circles far below.