Farmers face low water year; reservoir levels drop as California braces for dry conditions
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 14, 2008 at 6:36 amAfter a great start to the snow season, the driest March & April on record reduced the snowpack to only 67% of normal. State Water Project contractors have been told to expect only a 35% allocation, and the Central Valley Project is only slightly better, with contractors alloted 45% of their normal water. From the Capital Ag Press:
For farmers in some areas of the state, actions already have been taken in order to deal with less water.
Sarah Woolf, spokesperson for the Fresno-based Westlands Water District, said last year’s conditions led to the fallowing of 200,000 of the 600,000 acres served by Westlands, the state’s largest irrigation district. “Our growers made a lot of decisions in the winter regarding how much acreage they could and could not plant based on the Wanger decision and the knowledge that our water supply was going to be short because of that decision.”
The Wanger decision is a federal court ruling handed down last year that will limit water exports from the Bay-Delta in order to protect endangered delta smelt populations.
Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition, agreed that acreage is being scaled back around the state. “People started making these decisions last Sept. 1 after the Wanger decision,” he said. Water, he said, is being shifted from annual to permanent crops.
Looking at the snowpack and the reservoir levels leads Wade to believe the state may be in the second year of a drought - but no one wants to say the word, he added. The question is, what will conditions be in 2009 if the state’s water storage has been depleted, Wade said. He estimated conditions could look similar to those in 1990 or 1991. What’s shocking, said Wade, is it only took California two years to get into a critical situation.
Read the full text of this article from the Capital Ag Press by clicking here.
Comments
Leave a Reply