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California’s sewage treatment plants produce billions of gallons of wastewater every year, nearly all of it dumped into rivers or the Pacific Ocean like garbage. And this is how it’s done all over the U.S.and most of the world. But what if we began looking at treated sewage, instead, as a valuable resource? That’s what David Jassby and his co-authors Kurt Schwabe and Quynh Tran at the University of California, Riverside, did in a recent study published by the journal Environmental Science &Technology.

The ravages of drought and wildfire over the past couple years in California should be mitigated somewhat by help available through the 2014 Farm Bill. Val Dolcini, administrator of the Farm Service Agency (FSA) toured fire- and drought-damaged locations in California as part of a federal effort to ensure farmers have adequate risk management tools at their disposal. Dolcini, who several years ago was promoted into the lead FSA position after serving as California’s FSA director, spoke recently with Western Farm Press to share some of the programs available for California and Arizona growers.

 

As California works to improve its official accounting of water for a range of purposes, one major area lacking widely accepted quantification is the consumptive use of water for agriculture, particularly evapotranspiration (ET) from crops.  In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, such estimates are important, along with other hydrologic flows, for a variety of water rights, operational, and regulatory purposes. Consumptive use is the proportion of water removed that cannot be reused elsewhere in a basin. For crops in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, this is mostly evapotranspiration.

Do you think you could reduce your water use by 40 percent? What if we asked for even more than that? This is the type of rationing we can expect during a severe drought if a new proposal from the State Water Resources Control Board is implemented. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is the retail water provider for San Francisco and the water provider for 26 wholesale customers in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties. Today, 85 percent of the water we deliver to our customers comes from the Tuolumne River.

California’s major reservoirs are holding 69 percent more water than a year ago, the U.S. government announced Friday, but regulators warned that drought conditions continue to plague the state. In its annual inventory of water in storage, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said the six key reservoirs owned by the federal government’s Central Valley Project held a combined 4.9 million acre-feet of water as of Oct. 1, the beginning of the “water year” that runs through next September. That figure compared with 2.9 million acre-feet a year earlier.