As California’s drought worsens, state water officials are preparing to take emergency action to conserve.
The state water board is voting later this morning on new water restrictions that could impact thousands of farmers. If passed, the emergency regulations would restrict anyone from diverting water out of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries.
The cotton’s gone.
The alfalfa barely exists.
“Can you even call this a farm?” asked Nancy Caywood, standing on a rural stretch of land her Texas grandfather settled nearly a century ago, drawn by cheap prices and feats of engineering that brought water from afar to irrigate central Arizona’s arid soil.
Along the California-Oregon border, the Klamath Basin is in the midst of a record drought, pitting farmers against native tribes with historic water rights who are trying to protect endangered fish.
Farmers on the western edge of the parched San Joaquin Valley have little or no ground water resources this year. The South San Joaquin Irrigation District and Oakdale Irrigation District have legal rights to 200,000 acre feet of water sitting behind New Melones Reservoir beyond this year’s needs of the farms and urban customers they serve. The two districts want to help the farmers who will face a difficult choice: Let tens of thousands of acres of productive orchards die and leave cropland fallow or else accelerate groundwater pumping to exacerbate dropping aquifers the State of California has identified as a pressing issue.
Growers are dealing with severe cutbacks in the surface water deliveries they normally receive from reservoirs.
The lack of steady irrigation has already impacted spring cropping decisions made by farmers.
As the Southwest prepares for what’s forecast to be another mercilessly hot and dry summer, tensions over water scarcity are rising like the mercury.
Farmers are facing bleak growing seasons and the possibility of farm failures in several areas due to cutbacks in water allocations for irrigation, creating friction between the ag community and cities on the dwindling water supply in the region. Rural communities in Nevada and elsewhere, already wary of incursions by urban areas into their water supplies, are on high alert as the water crisis deepens.
Normally, the biggest vegetable grower in Sonoma County, Humberto Castañeda Produce, grows heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, watermelons and other crops on 180 acres outside of Santa Rosa. But this year, Humberto Castañeda and his son, Gabriel, are farming only 17 acres after receiving a fraction of their normal allotment of water from the city of Santa Rosa.
“I could plant the whole farm and have water that might last me for a month,” said Gabriel, 27, who is managing the farm Humberto founded in the 1980s for the first time this season. “After that the plants are going to die.”
Tensions have been building in Klamath Falls in recent weeks over a drought that is devastating farmland, fish deemed sacred to native tribes, and wildlife. The Klamath Basin, along the Oregon-California border, has a complex history. Drought and fights over water aren’t new.
The Sunizona community, in the south-western US state of Arizona, is just a speck on the map. A few hundred homes dot the landscape along dirt roads and for a few miles along a state highway that leads to the foot of the Chiricahua mountains near the New Mexico border.
Cynthia Beltran moved to Sunizona with her seven-year-old son last autumn even though the area lacks functional drinking water wells, because it was all she could afford. She cannot afford the $15,000 (£10,000) cost of deepening her well, which dried up last year, and had been paying for a local firm to deliver water in a tanker. But at $100 a week it became too expensive, so now she will be relying on a friend to help her fetch water from her mother’s well.
Joe Del Bosque is leaving a third of his 2,000-acre farm near Firebaugh, California, unseeded this year due to extreme drought. Yet, he hopes to access enough water to produce a marketable melon crop.
Farmers across California say they expect to receive little water from state and federal agencies that regulate the state’s reservoirs and canals, leading many to leave fields barren, plant more drought-tolerant crops or seek new income sources all-together.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
