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Water flows through the Dos Amigos pumping plant on the San Luis Canal portion of the California Aqueduct near Firebaugh, California - Source: Reuters -
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California almond farmer Marvin Meyers has moved into banking -
water banking that is.
In the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, the world's most productive
agricultural region, Meyers bought land to collect water in wet
years and recharge a shallow aquifer.
The water authority takes his supply for nearby farmers and
gives him credit to irrigate from a canal at his orchard 24 km
away.
It cost Meyers $13.3 million and lots of headaches, but now he is
the envy of farmers facing a third year of drought, drastic water
cutbacks and billions of dollars in losses.
Worse may lie ahead, as climate change leads to longer droughts and
depletes the mountain snowpack that now provides a steady stream of
water until late in the farming year.
Yet, for all his vision, Meyers's bank of last resort will run dry
if the drought persists for three more years.
"I do all I can, but really it is just Band-Aid farming," said
Meyers, who grows 3.6 million kgs of almonds for the likes of
Hershey's chocolate and German marzipan makers.
His Band-Aid shows how fragile the water future is for California's
$66 billion farm industry - source of half of US fruit, vegetables
and nuts, 80% of the world's almonds and one-third of its canned
tomatoes.
If the state cannot learn to farm with less water and build
infrastructure to capture more, the economic impact will be
dramatic.
Farming accounts for only two percent of the state economy but
its demand for equipment, transport and other services means its
demise would be widely felt.
When California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a drought
emergency last month, state officials said as many as 95,000
agricultural jobs would go.
Total economic losses could reach $5.7 billion.
Up to a third of the 1.2 million hectares normally irrigated
with federally supplied water will be left fallow.
No place is worse off than the parched San Joaquin Valley, where
crops rely on water that travels hundreds of miles from the
snow-capped Sierra Nevada.
But farmers up and down the state, from San Diego to Sacramento,
are making hard choices.
Some are paring trees back to stumps and keeping the roots alive
with minimal water; others are letting older trees die.
Row crops, like lettuce and tomatoes, will not be planted without water.
And farmers say they are having tough conversations with their
children about their inheritance and livelihoods.
The man-made drought
"I am third generation and I have a nephew and a son," said San
Joaquin almond farmer Mike Wood, 53.
"Frankly, I don't believe it will be here when they are ready to
go."
Perhaps, this year's shock therapy will bring together warring
parties at the water table - farmers, cities, government, taxpayers
and environmentalists - to plot a future that allows California to
maintain its agricultural dominance.
"If you look at California, things happen with crisis and we are in
one right now," said Richard Howitt, a resource economist at the
University of California, Davis.
Like the late 1970s and early 1990s, farmers have to contend with
Mother Nature's drought.
But now they also have what they call the man-made drought -
restrictions on the amount of water they can pump from the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, imposed to protect a fish species,
the delta smelt.
The once-mighty water infrastructure is old and insufficient, with
new canals and storage facilities years if not decades away from
completion.
Meanwhile, the state's population may double by 2050, heralding
bigger water battles between cities and farms.
With such daunting short-term challenges, few farmers can think
about the longer-term impact of climate change.
Some models show California's water supply dropping 24% to 30% over the century, mostly after 2050.
Others expect rain patterns to vary wildly, making farming
tougher.
New US Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned that climate change could
melt the Sierra snowpack and wipe out California farms by century's
end.
"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what
could happen," Chu told the Los Angeles Times in February.
"We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California."
Some wonder whether California's vast agriculture industry
should have been allowed to grow in the first place.
The San Joaquin Valley, 60% of the state's prime farmland, gets
little rain and its groundwater was mostly pumped out by pioneers
decades ago.
Thanks to massive dams built in the 1930s and the California
Aqueduct canal system in the 1960s, the valley exploited its rich
soil and Mediterranean climate.
Successful farms also attracted industry, like the tomato
processing plants that move 11 million tons a year - double Italy's
output.
But farmers struggle with a widely held perception that they have
squandered the state's water, living far beyond California's
hydrological means.
The water think-tank, the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, said
farming uses 80% of the state's water, half in inefficient flood
irrigation, while cities get the rest.
"Agriculture can no longer own the water of California without
drastically changing their practices or water is not going to be
available for people, for cities, for industry," said Natural
Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke.
Farewell cotton, hello storage
San Joaquin Valley farmers complain that environmentalists ignore
their progress in conservation and smart irrigation.
In western parts of Fresno County, which leads the nation in
farm production, drip and sprinkle irrigation is ubiquitous.
"The Westside farmer is the most refined, high-tech irrigator there
is," said Meyers. "We don't waste a drop."
Still, the Pacific Institute says farmers can do better.
"It's ironic because I do a lot of international water work and
there's no other place on the planet where, in my opinion, the
agricultural sector is so insistent that they can't do better,"
said Peter Gleick, institute president.
Farmers also point to reductions in water-intensive crops like
cotton or rice in favour of vegetables, fruits and nuts that use
water more efficiently.
Cotton now covers just 81,000 hectares compared to 405,000
hectares in the past.
Farmers and the state government agree infrastructure rather than
conservation is the key to their future.
"We have to look at the things we can invest in at the state level
that give us more predictability of a water supply that is
deliverable, has high quality and protects the environment," said
state agriculture secretary, AG Kawamura.
Farm interests and the state want a peripheral canal built around
the delta to deliver water to farms and cities while observing
pumping restrictions for fish conservation.
When it comes to increasing water storage, the large, remote dams
of the past offer no solution.
However, diverting precipitation toward depleted aquifers, as
Meyers is doing on a small scale, can help build water reserves for
droughts.
Regions which often compete for water are beginning to work
together to recharge common supplies.
Amid the doom and gloom, UC Davis' Howitt says he remains
unfashionably slightly optimistic.
Salvation could come, he says, by swapping to higher value
crops.
"We can downsize in land area and water use, but because we grow
crops that wealthier people like to eat, we can actually offset
much of this downsizing by expanding the fruits, nuts and
vegetables," he said.
