You are now in California and the U.S. category.

Marysville, Calif., farmer Brad Foster stood at the eroded edge of the Feather River recently and contemplated how he was going to pull his water pumps out of the soggy, collapsed river bank. “We’ll have to recover them somehow,” said Foster, 58, who owns about 500 acres of walnut orchards in Yuba County. “Those are stationary pumps. They’ve been there 50 years.” In all his years of farming, Foster said he’d never seen such severe and widespread erosion along the winding waterway. “This is not normal,” he said.

Following five years of severe drought conditions, California is now in the midst of one of the wettest winters in recorded history – the effects of which can been seen locally in the Tuolumne River Watershed. So far in the 2017 precipitation year, which began in September, several months have already exceeded their historical averages, and last month proved to be no exception with over 15 inches of rainfall in the Tuolumne River Watershed. This amount is nearly 10 inches more than monthly historical average of 5.99 inches for February. Last year, the Tuolumne River Watershed only received 1.59 inches of precipitation during the same time period.

On rich Delta farmland just outside Tracy, Suzanne Womack spent her childhood on more than 600 acres dating back to 1961. “I moved there when I was 3 years old,” said Womack. “I learned to ride horses there.” Now, for years, her attention has turned to preserving her land against what she calls poor maintenance by the state linked to the massive Clifton Court Forebay fed by the Delta’s Old River, right next door.

Images from the state Department of Water Resources show round-the-clock work the week of March 11-17, 2017 at Oroville Dam. A giant fracture developed in Oroville Dam’s main spillway during a heavy storm earlier this year. Five days later, water flowed over the dam’s emergency spillway for the first time, nearly causing the hillside below to fail. Approximately 188,000 downstream residents were evacuated for two days.

Despite the wet winter and far-above-average Sierra Nevada snowpack, California forests remain at risk from tree mortality, bark beetle infestations and overgrown landscapes, according to presentations at the 2017 California Farm Bureau Federation Leaders Conference.(Left) Timber operator and Tuolumne County Farm Bureau President Shaun Crook during the California Farm Bureau Leaders Conference in Sacramento. Photo/Ching Lee. During the event, foresters and forest landowners discussed all those issues and communicated concerns directly to Randy Moore, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest regional forester, who participated as a guest speaker.