Ag Policy Blog
California Drought and Focus on Agriculture
After California Gov. Jerry Brown directed the first mandatory statewide water restrictions for his state last week, attention in the news immediately turned to agriculture being largely excluded from Brown's executive order.
As media nationally have reported, Brown's order affects roughly 20% of water usage in California with his call for 25% mandatory cuts in cities across the state. The order does not affect agriculture, which uses about 80% of the state's water.
"Largely missing from Brown’s appeal was the one industry that uses more water than anything else in this state but has already been brutalized by the drought – agriculture. As Californians mulled Brown’s unprecedented order, some wondered why farms were not being asked to sacrifice more," reported the Sacramento Bee. http://dld.bz/…
As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, farmers believe they have been hit far harder than urban Californians in the drought thus far. When it comes to surface water from the major canals, the state has cut its allocation to farms to 20% while the federal allotment was dropped to zero.
“Agriculture has already borne the brunt of the drought,” said Chris Scheuring a water attorney for the California Farm Bureau, citing the 400,000 farm acres left fallow last year due to water shortages. “How do you order somebody who is already at zero to go to a 25 percent cut? It’s kind of a mathematical impossibility.”
P[L1] D[0x0] M[300x250] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]
“Zero percent allocation — it means the irrigation ditch is dry,” Scheuring added.
In that same San Diego article, the director of Food & Water Watch in California called on restricting water to intensive crops such as almonds and pistachios, which have taken off in acreage over the past decade.
The New York Times immediately rolled out a string of articles examining different aspects of California's drought. On Monday, the NYT looked at how farmers have survived the loss of those surface-water allocations by turning more to groundwater. Lawmakers in California voted last year to force tighter controls by groundwater districts, but gives those groundwater regulators decades to create such controls. In the meantime, certain areas in the state's Central Valley have seen water tables fall by 100 feet or more just since 2009.
"Growers with older, shallower wells are watching them go dry as neighbors drill deeper and suck the water table down. Pumping takes huge amounts of electricity to pull up deep water, and costs are rising. Some farmers are going into substantial debt to drill deeper wells, engaging in an arms race with their neighbors that they cannot afford to lose," the Times wrote. http://dld.bz/…
Brown defended his actions regarding agriculture in a Sunday interview on ABC's "This Week." Brown noted agriculture has already been significantly impacted by the drought. Cutting back farmers even more would displace thousands of farm workers. Moreover, California farmers are responsible for a large share of the country's fruits and vegetables.
If you don't want to produce any food and import it from some other place, of course you could do that," Brown told ABC. "But that would displace hundreds of thousands of people and I don't think it's needed."
Brown did indicate on ABC that the state's old water-rights system may need to be changed.
Follow me on Twitter @ChrisClaytonDTN.
© Copyright 2015 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.
Comments
To comment, please Log In or Join our Community .