Our Water Policies are Nuts!

Californians pray for welcome increases in rainfall this fall as predicted by climatologists with the approach of another El Niño: “NOAA's [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] National Weather Service indicates El Niño is likely to emerge in next few months. Forecasters favor a weak-to-moderate event. Typical El Niño impacts in the U.S. include above-average rainfall in the West and suppressed hurricane activity in the East, although neither is guaranteed and largely dependent on El Niño's strength.”  “Weak-to-moderate” tells even the optimists that California’s drought is anything but over. With California water-impaired, the rest of the country can expect a continuing rise in food prices.

As the California’s legislature embellishes local water-saving ordinances with potential fines of up to $500 as day for water-wasters, certain parts of the state are actually using more water than in recent years: “Updated results of a state board survey show that statewide, urban water use in May increased 1% compared to the May average of the previous three years… That rise was mostly driven by an 8% jump in coastal Southern California… In most other hydrologic regions, May use declined. The biggest drop was in the Sacramento River area, where it fell 13%.” Los Angeles Times, July 15^th. We really are facing some very serious longer-term, water-shortage-nasties that are unlikely to improve any time soon.

What if this direct Western states’ reduction in rainfall is, as too many scientists believe, more or less permanent? More or less? Some cyclical weather patterns (including El Niño and La Niña) will continue, changing the levels of water deprivation up or down, but the overall annual rainfall in the Western United States does seem have to have experienced a rather permanent downward reset from global climate change.

“One prominent paleoclimatologist, the University of California-Berkeley's B. Lynn Ingram, warns that California won't likely return to 20th-century levels of rainfall anytime soon. That means reliance on pumping will likely harden with time. Researchers at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling recently found that between the start of the drought in November 2011 and November 2013, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins lost 20 cubic kilometers of groundwater, a level it called ‘severe.’ The researchers warned of ‘potentially dire consequences for the economic and food security of the United States.’

“‘We're on a one-way trajectory toward depletion, toward running out of groundwater,’ Jay Famiglietti, a University of California hydrologist told NPR. ‘So it's not unlike having several straws in a glass, and everyone drinking at the same time, and no one really watching the level.’” MotherJones.com, July 14^th. The southern reaches of the Midwest’s once-massive Ogallala Aquifer (impacting Kansas and north Texas particularly hard) are also virtually bone dry as drought in that grain-producing region reaches catastrophic, long-term conditions.  If we know this is the new “re-set,” beyond investing in water harvesting and desalinization facilities, what can individual farmers do about this reality?

The lesson is all-too-obvious by looking at one particular California crop that is highly water-dependent: almonds.Farmers have been planting almond trees like crazy over the past decade. The result: The United States Department of Agriculture tells us that farmers in California have outdone themselves in the production of this delicious crop. They have tripled their almond production since 2000 to 2.1 billion pounds this year. Yum! Who doesn’t like almonds? They are abundant and reasonably-priced.

But there’s a catch. Every single almond (each nut!) requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce!!! Read that again. Of course, California farmers want water to continue this lucrative business, but there are other “need more water than standard grasslands” crops growing in California fields. California is the vegetable capital of the United States, but crops like tomatoes, eggplants, peas, lentils, beans… and at to near the top of the water-use table, fruit nut trees of just about any variety… create unique challenges for the future. And if you’ve driven through farm country all over California, you’ve probably seen endless miles of farms growing these wondrous crops. Rice is a tad worse than fruit and nut trees (you need flooded rice patties), but rice is not exactly typical California crop.

With billions of dollars invested in California’s legendary orchards, obviously California farmers have a huge investment to protect. For those driving down the highways noted above, you probably have also witnessed angry signs excoriating federal and state water policies posted by enraged farmers stuck with water rationing. You may have seen bone-dry fields as farmers have been forced to make difficult choices on which crops get the little bit of water that they can draw. Governor Jerry Brown has declared a statewide water emergency, and conservation measures are required everywhere.

As flooding hits eastern and northern states while fires and drought embrace the west, it seems painfully obvious that America’s entire agribusiness is going to have to shift, more rapidly than farmers could possibly have envisioned five short years ago, into new crop selections based upon the rather permanent (and still changing) weather patterns across the land. Failure to adjust will only increase the pain. However, there are some very big questions about who pays for the costs of the transition? It’s expensive for ordinary crops, but orchards are really, really expensive to repurpose, and the destruction of trees that take years to grow until they are productive is particularly distressing.

The example of California almond farming is the emerging story of the future of California agriculture. And it’s not just the crop yields that are suffering. “The ecological implications are potentially dire. In a huge swath of the almond-intensive San Joaquin Valley, the ground has literally been sinking by an average of 11 inches per year, a 2013 US Geological Survey study found. The culprit: over-pumping of aquifers. Such subsidence, as its known, threatens vital infrastructure like bridges, roads, and irrigation canals. In an interview last spring, one of the study's authors, USGS scientist Michelle Sneed, told me that the ongoing switch from row crops like vegetables to nuts plays a role in subsidence. You can fallow fields of annual vegetables during droughts, but almond trees need a steady supply of water for years.

“Meanwhile, groundwater depletion is also making the Sierra Nevada and Coast Mountain ranges slowly rise—enough to potentially trigger earthquakes, a 2014Nature paper found. Then there's the bee problem—growing 80 percent of the globe's almonds in a few tightly packed swaths of California creates massive pest pressure and requires fully 60 percent of the nation's managed honeybees for pollination. As beekeepers learned this spring, hauling in 1.6 million honeybee hives into an area dripping with insecticides is a recipe for disaster.... Looming over it all is the whole question of how long California farmers can continue the unchecked siphoning of water from the state's aquifers. No one knows for sure—but there's no doubt that something has to give.” And it’s not just California that has to change; the nation’s entire agricultural usage needs a ground-up review and readjustment.

I’m Peter Dekom, and pretending that climate will come back to what it once was simply makes the ultimate cost of required readjustment that much more expensive.