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John Azevedo stretches the water that helps produce the milk on his dairy farm west of Patterson.

He is experimenting with drip irrigation lines for feed corn that used to be flood-irrigated. The water that chills his milk tanks is reused in nozzles that cool the cows on summer days. Azevedo is one of 16 farmers featured in a new report from Dairy Cares, a statewide industry program that encourages water and energy conservation and other practices.

Ongoing drought conditions have contributed to the 29 million tree deaths in California, a number that is still on the rise. In addition to millions of oak trees in the state being killed off by sudden oak death disease, bark beetles have also played a large role in taking out the timbers.

“The tree mortality that we’re experiencing, it’s really unprecedented,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Director Ken Pimlott said in a video for the California State Association of Counties (CASC). “Unless you get into the Sierra Nevada, and particularly the central and southern Sierras, you don’t necessarily understand the gravity of it.”

More than $30 million in funding through the Bureau of Reclamation’s Title XVI program were awarded today by Deputy Secretary of the Interior Michael L. Connor. The money will support seven projects that will provide clean water to California communities and promote water and energy efficiency.

“With California in its fifth year of drought, these investments will build resilience for local communities struggling with limited water supplies — an effort that is more important than ever as the dangers of drought escalate in the face of climate change,” Deputy Secretary Connor said.

The winter El Nino, once described as a “Godzilla” weather pattern threatening to drench the coast with rains and put a dent in the Southland’s years-long drought, is officially over, forecasters announced Thursday.

Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center said the El Nino pattern, characterized by warming ocean temperatures, dissipated by the end of May “as indicated by the expansion of near-to-below average surface temperatures across the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.”

California water regulators will re-examine the way they determine water rights violations in the wake of the State Water Resources Control Board’s dismissal of a proposed $1.5 million fine to a water district east of the San Francisco Bay area.

Officials issued the fine to the Byron Bethany Irritation District at the height of the drought last summer, but the water board on June 7ww affirmed two hearing officers’ earlier ruling that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the district took water it wasn’t entitled to under its century-old water right.