With surface water allocations down and costs up, Merced County’s new irrigation season is reflecting the impacts of statewide drought. Merced County isn’t alone. The nearby Fresno Irrigation District (FID) announced Tuesday that the ongoing parched weather, including a record-dry January and February, led the Board of Directors to postpone its planned start of water deliveries.
The optimism spurred by heavy snowstorms in December has melted away, and the 2022 water year is now looking bleak.
After facing the driest recorded January and February in state history, California Department of Water Resources reported that statewide, the snowpack stood at 63% of average for the date last week after conducting the agency’s third manual snow survey of the year.
Prior to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s State of the State speech, there is one item to examine that serves as a building block for all the issues the governor will address – water.
Despite unexpected storms in late 2021, California is braced for another year of drought.
The water we do have must move throughout the state by way of a complicated system of reservoirs, dams, canals, pipes and treatment plants. That movement is managed by an equally complicated network of federal, state and local officials.
A small bucket loader scraped Wahweap Bay’s expanding strip of red mud and gravel, its operator smoothing the shoreline where concrete workers were busy chasing a lake in retreat.
To the left, where the bay had long offered kayakers and water skiers a loop around Lone Rock, the monumental slab now rose from dust flats instead of from flat water. To the right, in the channel that leads to Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River’s sunken bed, formerly submerged islands and peninsulas mapped out a warming climate’s continuing transformation of one of America’s great water stores and pleasure grounds.
A desert flooded by impounded waters in the last century has visibly reasserted itself in this one.
With California entering a third year of drought and its reservoirs at low levels, the federal government has announced plans to deliver minimal amounts of water through the Central Valley Project, putting many farmers on notice that they should prepare to receive no water from the system this year.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the project’s dams and canals, announced a zero-water allocation for irrigation districts that supply many farmers across the Central Valley. Cities that receive water from the project in the Central Valley and parts of the Bay Area were allocated 25% of their historical water use.
On a chilly morning 5 miles north of Fruita, Lowell King, standing at the edge of a cornfield, reaches down, grabs a clump of dirt, and starts tearing at the soil with his meaty fingers. King eventually points to a tiny white spot in the dirt. “Anytime you can see stuff almost like that mold right there, that’s fungi,” he says. “And there’s all this other good stuff, and these roots intertwined; that’s what increases your water infiltration.”
King, who’s been farming in the Grand Valley since 2005, is illustrating an important principle of a concept known as regenerative agriculture — a technique he says could help Colorado stretch its dwindling water supplies. But adopting that philosophy also requires rejecting deeply entrenched conventional farming methods, such as tilling fields to prepare the ground for planting.
Snow levels in California have fallen from their December glory after an extraordinarily dry January, stoking fears that the drought will not only continue but worsen in a third difficult year.
State officials, who will conduct the second snow survey of the season Tuesday, will find snowpack in California’s mountains measuring just shy of average for this time of year. While average is better than the modest accumulation seen the past two winters, it’s a disappointing drop from the 160% of average recorded a month ago.
A massive water pipeline being laid in southern Kings County is sparking fresh fights between local farmers and the county’s biggest player in the water industry.
Wednesday, the Tulare Lake Canal Company, which operates the eponymous canal, sued Sandridge Partners, the diversified farming and water giant owned by John Vidovich, alleging Vidovich’s pipeline will interfere with its property rights and damage its ability to deliver water to its users.
Tulare Lake Canal holds dominant rights of way over its canal space and some adjacent property.
Despite the rain and snow that closed out 2021, California could be entering a third drought year as weeks of dry winter weather open the new year.
The state has experienced drought in 15 of the last 20 years, according to UC Davis. Experts say California is in the grip of a “megadrought.”
“It looks like, with a warming climate and climate change, it’s going to become more like this,” said Jay Lund, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences.
Water has been traded in the Western U.S. for decades, but as the region faces intensifying regulations, shifts in crops and drought concerns, water markets are evolving to reflect the changes.
“The idea of water moving between uses and large distances has changed over the last 30 years. In the last five years especially, there have been big changes,” said Matt Payne, principal with WestWater Research, a Boise-based economic consulting firm specializing in water market research, pricing and trading.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
