n WATER
“California has pretty
much reached the limits
to how much water it can
divert if we care about
having fish.”
emeritus, UC Davis
Newly planted almond trees on a
San Joaquin Valley farm are watered
with a drip irrigation system seeking
efficiency in a time of drought.
When desperate to keep their trees alive, some farmers may
pay as much as $2,000 per acre-foot, Mount says, but many
farmers in the Central Valley can’t afford a long-term rate
higher than $200 per acre-foot. The PPIC has also estimated
that the state’s new groundwater rules, by curbing unlimited
pumping, could result in the fallowing of half a million acres
of irrigated farmland.
TOO MANY WATER-INTENSIVE CROPS
The farmers most likely to throw in the towel first are those in
the western San Joaquin Valley — in the lightly populated re-
gion along Interstate 5 — where growers depend on import-
ed water for which they must pay. That farmers are growing
such water-intensive crops in such arid places is the result of
misguided 20th century engineering, says Jon Rosenfield, a
senior scientist with Baykeeper, an environmental watchdog
group in Oakland. Rosenfield says dams and other storage
and conveyance infrastructure created an illusion of water
security and reliability. “We’ve tried to impose predictability
on a system that’s inherently very variable,” he says.
This false promise of a steady water supply has led to the
overplanting of water-intensive crops, especially nuts and
other tree fruits that require water every year. “There’s no
way we should be growing so many tree crops in a climate
that’s so unpredictable,” Rosenfield says. “But our current
policy encourages that kind of risk-taking.”
Over the past 20 years, the almond industry has grown,
and grown and grown. In 1995, almond orchards covered
less than 500,000 acres in California. Today, they occupy
almost 1.4 million acres, and the rate of growth is not slow-
ing. This has drawn criticism from other users, who say the
almond industry has created a significant strain on shared
water supplies.
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Because they must be watered almost constantly —
even after producing plants are mature — grapes, nuts and
other tree crops are partially responsible for a loss of f lex-
ibility in how water is managed in California. But Richard
Waycott, CEO of the Almond Board of California, says his
industry’s farmers are trying to produce food with a mini-
mum of impacts. “The hope is to strike a balance between
urban needs, the environment and agriculture,” he says.
Almond farmers have reduced the amount of water it
takes to grow each almond by 33 percent in the last 20 years,
he says, and the industry aims to increase those savings to
50 percent by 2025. Moreover, almond farmers, who pro-
duced $5.6 billion in nuts in 2017, according to state crop
records, have donated $100,000 to the UC Davis Center for
Watershed Sciences for f loodplain restoration projects,
Waycott says.
The authors of a paper published last year in the jour-
nal Agronomy addressed the risks of investing in trees and
grapevines in a time of rapid climate change. “Permanent
crops are among the most profitable commodities in Cal-
ifornia,” the authors, led by scientists from UC Merced
and UC Davis, wrote. “They are most commonly grown for
more than 25 years, which makes them more vulnerable to
impacts of climate change.”
Andrew, of the Department of Water Resources, defends
almond farmers, explaining they have been pragmatic by
growing whatever is most profitable. “They invested in
these orchards that make more money for the amount of
water they apply,” he says. “Of course, the tradeoff is, with
these annual crops, if you got into a drought, you could just
not plant them, but with almonds and grapes, you have to
keep the water coming.”
~ Peter Moyle, biology professor