Misguided Water Policy Puts California Agriculture at Risk [Opinion]

California is only one state, but when that one state produces more than half the nation’s fruit and tree nuts, policy changes can ripple through the entire U.S. fruit-grower community.

Advertisement

The most recent example came recently when the state Water Resources Control Board called for doubling the water flow down several rivers that form in the Sierra Nevada and stream through perhaps the most productive farmland in the world, the San Joaquin Valley.

I’m not going to get into the technical aspects of this misguided policy. But many experts have testified — and in turn have been ignored by many state officials — that the approach of increasing the flow will not make the rivers natural again.

Returning to nature is a foolish approach anyway, because who’s to say exactly what is natural? How far do you go back in time? Perhaps an attempt at recreating an ice age? Of course that’s preposterous, but so is a band of bureaucrats trying to answer a philosophical question.

This so-called “unimpaired flow strategy” is intended to save salmon but does nothing to address the loss of habitat for native species and predators who have made the Sacramento Delta their playground. What it will do, according to the Almond Alliance of California, is threaten an industry heavily dependent on irrigation water — an industry that provides about 100,000 jobs.

Top Articles
Have a Plan For Climate Change? Why Fruit Growers Need To Act Now

Part of this is a public relations problem, and that’s where you — or anyone who cares about farming — comes in. Because state officials think this plan might succeed, what with the average urbanite starting to believe such propaganda as the state’s almond growers use 10% of the state’s water. It’s tricky because the 10% figure is correct; it’s all in the spin.

What people who hear that figure fail to realize — just as the PR machine intended — is that the 10% figure is based on the state’s irrigation water, not the total amount available for all uses.

Farmers certainly don’t get 100% of the state’s water, they actually get less than half, just 41%. The almond industry uses 10% of that, or about 4% of the state’s total.

That’s still a lot of water; I’m not trying to hide the fact almonds do use a lot. But so do other crops. A key fact to remember — and share with your non-ag friends — is that it generally takes a liter of water to produce a calorie of food crop. Producing a calorie of meat or cheese takes a heck of a lot more, but that’s a story for another day.

Another 10% of the state’s water goes to urban uses. That leaves 49% for the aquatic environment, which seems fair. Hey, I like fish, who are incidentally getting quite a bit more water than are the growers devoted to producing our food supply. I just like people more.

After the hearing, Assemblymember Adam Gray (D-Merced) said the state Water Board had essentially ignored both sound science and public opinion by adopting radical new requirements to seize critically needed San Joaquin Valley water supplies.

“This is what theft looks like,” he said.

When the next drought comes, there’s going to be a war over water; arm yourself with facts.

0