WATER
When they were introduced to the
pond, they were about a quarter-inch
long, “just out of the gravel,” he says.
Six weeks later, when they were
pulled, they were 3 inches. Studies
show that fish in the Sacramento River
show nothing like that kind of growth
over the same period of time.
If the Nigiri Project experiment at
River Garden Farms proves as suc-
cessful as it promises to be, farms
with access to the nearby Tule Canal
will be able to fatten up juvenile fish
and release them into the canal,
which empties into the Yolo Bypass
under the causeway between Sac-
ramento and Davis. River Garden
doesn’t have access to that canal, and
the U.S. does not yet have the pump
technology that would allow Corn-
well to pipe the fish to the river, a few
hundred yards away. That’s why he
is hosting another experiment that
would allow him to get
food to the fish.
A couple miles from the Nigiri
Project site, Cornwell pulls his pickup
truck onto another levee to check
out another f looded field. This one,
within view of the big River Gar-
den farmhouse that has stood here
since 1915, consists of nine ponds of
three sizes. California Trout is using
the ponds to measure how long its
biologists need to leave water on the
ground to produce optimal bug densi-
ty. The ponds are filled and drained at
various intervals, and the California
Trout scientists measure zooplankton,
phytoplankton, planktonic crusta-
ceans and other critters.
“This is fish food,” Cornwell says.
“We are reactivating the floodplain.”
He foresees pumping the “zoop soup”
into the river that runs along 15 miles
of his 15,000-acre farm. “This whole
section of the river is a food desert,”
he says, explaining his hope that rice
farmers in the Central Valley might
help bring California’s rivers back to
life. “In my opinion, this is reconcilia-
tion ecology.”
Up and down the state, similar
initiatives are poised to launch — if and
52
comstocksmag.com | May 2020
when Newsom’s voluntary agreements
framework yields results, pumping
millions of dollars into the nascent
fish-technology ecosystem.
Whiskey’s for drinking,
water’s for compromising
A couple weeks after his inauguration
in January 2019, Gov. Newsom re-
moved Felicia Marcus as Water Board
chair and replaced her with Joaquin
On Feb. 19, President Donald
Trump traveled to Bakersfield to tell
cheering supporters he was delivering
on a campaign promise. Days earlier,
his administration’s Bureau of Rec-
lamation changed its rules, sending
more water to farmers in the southern
San Joaquin Valley — in direct opposi-
tion to California’s initiative. Newsom
responded with a lawsuit, and the
voluntary agreements process that
“It’s not as simple as
‘Let’s just cut agriculture
off and retire a bunch
of farmland.’ There may be
points in time when it’s
appropriate to take large
amounts of water and move it
south. But there are also times
where it’s not appropriate.
Mother nature is more
complicated than we knew.”
KIM DELFINO
CALIFORNIA PROGRAM DIRECTOR,
DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE
Esquivel. Although the move was
seen as a kind of course correction,
Esquivel, a board member since 2017,
had voted with Marcus and the 4-1
majority to send more water to the
environment.
The voluntary agreements pro-
cess continued with increased vigor,
according to all reports, under new
Natural Resources Secretary Wade
Crowfoot and new CalEPA chief Jared
Blumenfeld. Until they fell apart.
had proceeded through 2019 and into
2020 stalled immediately.
Gary Bobker, director of The Bay
Institute, has mixed feelings about
the process being at least temporarily
abandoned. Bobker, who has been
involved in California water politics
for more than 30 years, is among
the many environmentalists who
would prefer the Water Board simply
enforce the standards it established
in 2018.