Even as the worst drought in decades ravages California,
and its cities face mandatory cuts in water use, millions of pounds of
thirsty crops like oranges, tomatoes and almonds continue to stream out
of the state and onto the nation’s grocery shelves.
But
the way that California farmers have pulled off that feat is a case
study in the unwise use of natural resources, many experts say. Farmers
are drilling wells at a feverish pace and pumping billions of gallons of
water from the ground, depleting a resource that was critically
endangered even before the drought, now in its fourth year, began.
California
has pushed harder than any other state to adapt to a changing climate,
but scientists warn that improving its management of precious
groundwater supplies will shape whether it can continue to supply more
than half the nation’s fruits and vegetables on a hotter planet.
In
some places, water tables have dropped 50 feet or more in just a few
years. With less underground water to buoy it, the land surface is
sinking as much as a foot a year in spots, causing roads to buckle and
bridges to crack. Shallow wells have run dry, depriving several poor
communities of water.
Scientists
say some of the underground water-storing formations so critical to
California’s future — typically, saturated layers of sand or clay — are
being permanently damaged by the excess pumping, and will never again
store as much water as farmers are pulling out.
“Climate
conditions have exposed our house of cards,” said Jay Famiglietti, a
NASA scientist in Pasadena who studies water supplies in California and
elsewhere. “The withdrawals far outstrip the replenishment. We can’t
keep doing this.”
Cannon
Michael, a farmer who grows tomatoes, melons and corn on 10,500 acres
in the town of Los Banos, in the Central Valley, has high priority
rights to surface water, which he inherited with his family’s land. But
rampant groundwater pumping by farmers near him is causing some of the
nearby land to sink, disturbing canals that would normally bring water
his way.
“Now, water is going to have to flow uphill,” said Mr. Michael, who plans to fallow 2,300 acres this year.
In the midst of this water crisis,
Gov. Jerry Brown and his legislative allies pulled off something of a
political miracle last year, overcoming decades of resistance from the
farm lobby to adopt the state’s first groundwater law with teeth.
California, so far ahead of the country on other environmental issues,
became the last state in the arid West to move toward serious limits on
the use of its groundwater.
Last week, Mr. Brown imposed mandatory cuts
in urban water use, the first ever. He exempted farmers, who already
had to deal with huge reductions in surface water from the state’s
irrigation works. Mr. Brown defended the decision on ABC’s “This Week”
on Sunday, saying, “They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables
of America to a significant part of the world.”
In
normal times, agriculture consumes roughly 80 percent of the surface
water available for human use in California, and experts say the state’s
water crisis will not be solved without a major contribution from
farmers.
California’s
greatest resource in dry times is not its surface reservoirs, though,
but its groundwater, and scientists say the drought has made the need
for better controls obvious. While courts have taken charge in a few
areas and imposed pumping limits, groundwater in most of the state has
been a resource anyone could grab.
Yet
putting strict limits in place is expected to take years. The new law,
which took effect Jan. 1, does not call for reaching sustainability
until the 2040s. Sustainability is vaguely defined in the statute, but
in most basins will presumably mean a long-term balance between water
going into the ground and water coming out. Scientists have no real idea
if the groundwater supplies can last until the 2040s.
“I
wish we could do it faster,” Mark Cowin, director of California’s
Department of Water Resources, said in an interview. “I wish we would
have started decades ago.”
But
Mr. Cowin noted that the state, after neglecting groundwater management
for so long, had a lot of catching up to do. Years of bureaucratic
reorganization and rule-drafting lie ahead. “This is the biggest
game-changer of California water management of my generation,” Mr. Cowin
said.
In
the near term, as the drought wears on and the scramble for water
intensifies, farmers are among the victims of the drilling frenzy, as
well as among its beneficiaries.
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.
“You
see the lack of regulation hurting the agricultural community as much
as it hurts anybody else,” said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural
Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.
Against
this backdrop, water-thirsty crops like almonds are still being planted
in some parts of the Central Valley to supply an insatiable global
demand that is yielding high prices.
The
land devoted to almond orchards in California has doubled in 20 years,
to 860,000 acres. The industry has been working hard to improve its
efficiency, but growing a single almond can still require as much as a
gallon of California’s precious water.
The
expansion of almonds, walnuts and other water-guzzling tree and vine
crops has come under sharp criticism from some urban Californians. The
groves make agriculture less flexible because the land cannot be idled
in a drought without killing the trees.
Not
even the strongest advocates of water management foresee a system in
which California farmers are told what they can plant. As the new system
evolves, though, the growers might well be given strict limits on how
much groundwater they can pump, which could effectively rule out
permanent crops like nuts and berries in some areas.
“We
want to be careful in dealing with this drought not to go down the
command-and-control route if we can avoid it,” said Daniel Sumner,
professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of
California, Davis. “It interrupts the flexibility, the creativity and
the resilience that people in agriculture have already been using to
deal with severe water cutbacks.”
So far, the over-pumping of groundwater has helped farmers manage through three parched growing seasons.
They
were forced to idle only about 5 percent of the state’s irrigated land
last year, though the figure is likely to be higher in 2015. The farmers
have directed water to the highest-value crops, cutting lesser crops
like alfalfa.
They
have bought and sold surface water among themselves, making the best
use of the available supply, experts like Dr. Sumner say. And the
farmers’ success at coping with the drought has meant relatively few
layoffs of low-income farmworkers.
Still,
costs are up and profits are down for many farmers and the thousands of
small businesses that depend on them, spreading pain throughout the
Central Valley and beyond. “It’s been a tough couple of years, and it’s
just getting tougher in rural parts of California,” said Dave Kranz, a
spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, a growers’
organization.
Because
groundwater has helped keep production up, replacing a large proportion
of the surface water farmers have lost, the drought has not led to big
price increases at the national level, even for crops that California
dominates.
Once
the drought ends, a growing population and a climate altered by
human-caused global warming will continue to put California’s water
system under stress, experts say. A major question is how to manage the
groundwater to get Californians through dry years.
Meeting that goal may have as much to do with how surface water is managed as with how much is pumped from the ground.
Several
California experts used the metaphor of a bank account to describe the
state’s groundwater supply. Deposits need to be made in good times, they
said, so that the water can be withdrawn in hard times.
Yet
for decades, California farmers have been overdrawing many of the
state’s water-holding formations — its aquifers — even in years when
surface water for irrigation was plentiful, the equivalent of
overdrawing a checking account.
That
will need to change, the experts said, with pumping being limited or
even prohibited in wet years so that the underground water supply can
recharge. Some land may need to be flooded on purpose so the water can
seep downward.
The
need for groundwater recharge may ultimately limit how much water
farmers can have from the surface irrigation system, even in flush years
— the same way that deposits in a bank account limit how many fancy
dinners one can eat. Yet in a state where irrigation rights have been
zealously guarded for generations, such limitations may not go down
easily.
“It
would be silly to think you are not going to have any fights,” said
Denise England, the water expert for Tulare County, toward the southern
end of the Central Valley. She cited an aphorism of the West: “Whiskey’s
for drinking, and water’s for fighting over.”
