Water cutbacks changing Central Valley agriculture

From the Sacramento Bee:

“For a long time, water was almost taken for granted,” said Mark Borba, his Lincoln Navigator whooshing past a field studded with railcar-sized cotton bales.

Borba, 57, has farmed the deep loam southwest of Fresno since 1976. For most of his first 15 years in the business, taxpayer-subsidized water flowed full bore from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. With rich yields of cotton and other crops, Borba built his operation to 23,000 acres. At its peak, his irrigation water could have serviced two cities the size of present-day Folsom.

Today, though, the Delta is in trouble. Fish populations are crashing, and scientists have been unable to explain why. Water quality is poor. And the exported water that farmers like Borba had come to count as almost a birthright is in jeopardy as never before.

Last summer, state and federal officials throttled back the big Delta pumps, citing an imminent threat to the Delta smelt, a tiny fish protected by the federal Endangered Species Act. Last year’s dry winter left reservoirs depleted, with deliveries for 2008 expected at half of maximum. Earlier this month, a federal judge laid out a fish-protection plan likely to trim pumping by an additional 15 percent to 30 percent.

“This is by far the most serious condition that I can remember going into a water year,” said Dan Nelson, executive director of the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, a coalition of water districts that depend on Delta water.

Even as proposals for billions of dollars in new reservoirs and a Delta bypass swirl at the Capitol, most forecasts predict permanent cuts in the water pumped south to Borba and his neighbors. “A lot of guys are saying, ‘Do I hunker down and try to wait this out somehow, or do I really change what I do?’ ” Borba said.

To read the rest of this story from the Sacramento Bee, click here. An interesting story that unfortunately, at the time of this posting, I can’t read the second page of it unless I am a member of the Sac Bee’s press club (of which I am not).

Central Valley agriculture photo by flickr photographer dadoll. Click on the picture to see it enlarged and to visit the flickr website for more great photos from dadoll & others.

Comments

Admin

• Log in

Credits

Powered by Vertigo & WordPress
WordPress Themes by Brian Gardner