Another year of drought means another year of reduced harvest for California rice. Farmers slashed planting by 20% in the spring due to water shortages, which amounts to about 100,000 acres of idle rice fields.
“We don’t want to be cut any more than people want to be told how they can treat their back lawn or anything like that,” said farmer Tom Butler.
Residents and property owners must now follow immediate citywide changes to watering and irrigation in the wake of this week’s City Council water shortage emergency declaration.
According to a city release, the council’s declaration Monday night goes into effect immediately and is intended to limit water use by 15 percent compared to last year, in part by limiting landscaping to three times a week at most.
Staying on top of your irrigation system – especially in the midst of a drought – can mean the difference between maximizing your water efficiency and unknowingly wasting water running down sidewalks unused into the storm drain. Follow these tips for a thorough checkup.
Turn on each valve of your irrigation system and observe how quickly water begins to run off your landscaping. Note the time when each runoff occurs. For some systems, this could be immediate. For others, it may take as long as five minutes.
Make sure spray irrigation is never running for longer than eight minutes at any one time.
Take notes on your irrigation plan, and turn off your irrigation until you can fix the following issues:
Don’t allow your sprinklers to overspray your landscaping and waste water. Photo: Wikimedia
Several things can be done to minimize runoff due to irrigation. This is among the most important factors in using irrigation efficiently.
This article is part of a year-long series inspired by the 71-page Sustainable Landscapes Program guidebook. The Water Authority and its partners also offer other great resources for landscaping upgrades, including free WaterSmart classes at WaterSmartSD.org.
Recent rainfall hasn’t been nearly enough to make a dent in Lake Shasta’s precariously low water levels.
The lakebed where the water has receded still shows cracks where mud has hardened and over the summer, dust devils have swept the fine, dried silt into the air.
The drought has dropped Lake Shasta to its second worst level since the last bucket of concrete was poured for Shasta Dam in December 1945.
As Tracy Schohr goes about her day, water is always on her mind. She’s thinking of it as she rides an all-terrain vehicle around the pasture, looks up hay prices and weather forecasts, and collects data on grazing and invasive weeds for a scientific study. Schohr is a rancher and farmer in Gridley, California, where her family has raised beef cattle and grown rice for six generations. She also aids in scientific research to study drought and other agricultural issues with the University of California Cooperative Extension.
Two years ago, a pact to safeguard the West’s shrinking water supplies took effect at a ceremony high above the Colorado River.
On a terrace overlooking Hoover Dam, water officials from seven states that rely on the river had gathered to sign a deal in hopes of preventing reservoirs from falling to critically low levels.
Federal officials project more bad news for the drought-stressed Colorado River, which provides water to Las Vegas and much of the Southwest.
The Bureau of Reclamation issued a report last week saying there is a high likelihood over the next few years that California, the river’s largest water user, will join Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico in seeing cuts to its allocation.
With severe drought strangling the West, the country’s largest water provider has embarked on a multibillion-dollar project that could help them cope with increasingly frequent shortages exacerbated by climate change.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California wants to recycle Los Angeles’ wastewater, creating a new supply stream that would significantly reduce the city’s reliance on imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River.
It would mark a new paradigm in Western water infrastructure. Instead of the dam-building and constructing massive pipelines and aqueducts to connect far-flung rivers to cities, Metropolitan’s proposal focuses on producing “new” water locally. And it seeks to utilize what has historically been wasted; Los Angeles’ wastewater is currently treated and discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
The cost of getting water from the drought-stressed Colorado River is spiraling and parts of San Diego County with some of the highest bills and big water recycling projects on the horizon seem to be drawing pool noodles together.
That is, in any case, the rough sense that stuck out to me as I re-shuffled through my notes from last week’s story about huge, forecasted increases in the price of Colorado River water, which is controlled by San Diego County Water Authority.
