This
answers a rather obvious question. Just
were the water was coming from for those crops?
It turns out that we are pumping it.
It clearly cannot last forever, but then perhaps it will be sufficient
for this particular cycle of drought.
Then
perhaps we can switch over to the Eden machine and water the entire Great
Valley forever. Conditions here are just
fine for this machine based approach,
Once the whole valley is fully watered, the aquifers will obviously
reload and hillside forests will quickly recover and remain moist enough to
avoid wild fires.
The
Eden machine is the simplest possible atmospheric water device that feeds an
adjacent tree.
California
Farmers: Drill, Baby, Drill (for Water, That Is)
| Wed Apr. 2, 2014 3:00
AM PDT
California is locked in an
epochal drought—and yet produce aisles nationwide still brim with reasonably
prices fruit and vegetables from the Golden State. How does California continue
proving half of US-grown vegetables under such parched conditions?
Peter Gleick, president of the president of the Pacific Institute,
one of the world's leading think thanks on water issues, broke it down for me.
He says that despite the drought, California farmers will likely idle only
about a half million acres this year—less than 10 percent of normal plantings,
which are about 8 million acres. And most of the fallowed land will involve
"low-value" crops like cotton and alfalfa (used as a feed for the
dairy and beef industries)—not the stuff you eat directly, like broccoli,
lettuce, and almonds.
In the the Central Valley—California's most important growing region, which spans 450 miles
along the center of the state—the drought is a massive inconvenience, but it
hasn't cut farms off from water. Under ideal conditions, the great bulk of
irrigation water flows through an elaborate network of canals and aqueducts
that divert water from rivers (largely fed by Sierra Nevada snowmelt) to farms.
But lately, because of the drought, those diversions have largely
stopped. The main system for getting water to the regions farms, known as the
Central Valley Project, "allotted farmers only 20 percent of their share
last year—and none this year," the San Jose Mercury Newsreports.
Known as "surface water," because it's drawn from
aboveground sources like rivers and streams, this source of irrigation isn't
without controversy. Even in good precipitation years, California agriculture
has gotten so ravenous for water that environmentalists charge that farms
aren't leaving enough to feed coastal ecosystems. The state's once-prolific
salmon runbarely persists; the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a critical engine of
biodiversity,stands at the edge of biological collapse.
But surface water at least represents the annual ebb and flow of
water resources. To make up for it in down years, farmers turn to what is
essentially a fossil resource: groundwater. This is the stuff that sits under
land in aquifers, which store water that has leaked down from the surface for
millennia.
There's a financial metaphor that works here. To live off surface
water is to live off your paycheck. When you get a raise, you can spend more.
But when your paycheck drops, you have to cut back, economize. To rely on
groundwater, though, is to live off of savings. Every draft you take is one that
you won't be able to replenish, at least not easily.
And in California, Gleick says, farmers drop wells to draw
groundwater from under their land with little or no regulation—some counties
have imposed quotas on withdrawals, but there's no statewide policy. So the
drought has sparked a veritable water-drilling frenzy, especially in the
southern part, called the San Joaquin Valley. This excellent San Jose Mercury News article show that in some ag-heavy counties in that region
like Tulare and Fresno, the number of well permits granted annually doubled
between 2011 and 2013.
When
one farm drops a well and begins siphoning water, the water table drops,
"forcing neighbors to drill ever deeper or risk going dry."
The Mercury
News piece shows how drilling begets drilling—a kind of
hydrological arms race. When one farm drops a well and begins siphoning water,
the water table drops, "forcing neighbors to drill ever deeper or risk
going dry." The piece also reiterates a point I made in my recent post on Wall Street's push into buying up farmland: It's not
family-scale farms driving the well frenzy. Rather, it's large companies
dropping in monocrops of water-thirsty pistachio and almond groves to cash in
on surging demand for nuts in Asia. TheMercury
News points to a recent land deal by Trinitas Partners, a
Silicon Valley-based private equity firm, plow up 6,500 acres of "rugged
eastern Stanislaus County land from grazing to almonds," and a push by
Paramount Farms, the globe's largest almond and pistachio producer—owned by the
bottled-water (Fiji) and pomegranate (POM Wonderful) magnates Stewart and Lynda
Resnick—to convert 15,000 acres of in Madera County from row crops to nuts.
Already, ecological damage is piling up. As I reported before, a 1,200-square-mile swath of the Central Valley—a landmass more
than twice as large as Los Angeles—has been sinking by an average of 11 inches
per year, a 2013 US Geological Survey found. USGS hydrologist Michelle Sneed
told me that and her team were "really shocked" when they realized
the extent and scope of the subsidence, which they discovered by chance while
they were working on a different project. And other areas of the Central Valley
are likely sinking, too, she says. Such rapid sinking damages roads, railroad
tracks, bridges, and pipelines, she adds. Then there the irrigation canals that,
in good precipitation years, carry surface water to farms, decreasing the need
for groundwater pumping. They're the "most sensitive infrastructure to any
elevation changes," Sneed said, because they're gravity-driven, engineered
to carry water steadily downward, not traverse random ups and downs. And
gnarled-up irrigation canals mean more pressure on farmers to revert to
groundwater—causing yet more sinkage. Such damage is already happening on the
ground—the Mercury News piece
quotes a farmer complaining that sinking land is "damaging the irrigation
pipes that deliver water to his farm."
No one
knows how long the region can withstand such massive water losses—but they
can't go on forever.
No one knows how long the region can withstand such massive water
losses before its aquifers finally go dry. But they can't go on forever. Gieick
calls unmitigated pumping a "recipe for disaster." Back in 2011,
scientists from NASA and the University of California-Irvine, used satellite
to estimate the rate of
withdrawal from the region's
water table. They were alarmed enough to warn of "potentially dire
consequences for the economic and food security of the United States." In
February, the team released an update, finding that the withdrawal rate had accelerated dramatically
since the previous study—hardly an encouraging sign.
So that's how the Central Valley keeps cranking out food amid
drought. The big growing region in the southern end of California, the Imperial
Valley, is in a kind of permanent drought—that is to say, it's a desert, Gleick
of the Pacific Institute explained to me. It relies on irrigation water
diverted from the once-mighty Colorado River, which snakes its way from the
Rocky Mountains its namesake state through Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona,
and finally to Mexico. Gleick says that the Imperial Valley, source of 80
percent of the winter vegetables consumed in the United States, got its full
allotment of water from the Colorado this year—meaning that the drought had
zero impact.
But the river doesn't just make the California desert bloom to
provide your winter salad. It also provides drinking water to 30 million people
along its path, and also irrigates cropland in Arizona and Mexico. But that
demand, along with a 14-year drought in the broader region, has reduced the
river's flow to a "murky brown trickle" in some places, the New York Times' Michael
Wines reported in January. And climate change models suggest that the
river's flow will drop by as much as 45 percent by 2050. Because of a 1922
pact, California and its farms will get first dibs on this critical resource,
often dubbed the "lifeblood of the Southwest," as it declines. But
even if that arrangement fills your salad bowl for the next few decades, the
river's troubles will trickle to the people and ecosystems that rely on it
downstream.
None of which means you have to worry about where your next peach
or kale bunch comes from, at least not anytime soon. Water doesn't just flow
downward; it also flows to powerful interests that have the political heft to
command it, as California's farming sector, increasingly moving under the thumb
of large and well-heeled companies, certainly does.
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