The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced that the organic industry continues to show remarkable growth domestically and globally, with 19,474 certified organic operations in the United States and a total of 27,814 certified organic operations around the world.

According to data released by the Agricultural Marketing Service’s (AMS) National Organic Program (NOP), the number of domestic certified organic operations increased by more than 5 percent over the last year. Since the count began in 2002, the number of domestic organic operations has increased by over 250 percent. The certified operations list is available at apps.ams.usda.gov/nop.

USDA is committed to connecting organic farmers and businesses with resources to ensure the continued growth of the organic industry. Along with programs to support conservation, provide access to loans and grants, fund organic research and education, and integrated pest management, USDA administers organic certification cost share programs to offset the costs of organic certification for U.S. producers and handlers nationwide.

Now, USDA is using funding from the 2014 Farm Bill to develop the Organic Integrity Database, a modernized certified organic operations database that will provide accurate information about all certified operations that is updated on a regular basis. The modernized system will allow anyone to confirm organic certification status using the online tool, support market research and supply chain connections, allow international verification of operator status to streamline import and export certificates, and establish technology connections with certifiers to provide more accurate and timely data. The initial launch is planned for September 2015.

Additional information about USDA resources and support for the organic sector is available on the USDA Organics Resource page at www.usda.gov/organic.

Link to news release

Note – the USDA has designated April as Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Prevention Month.

From the Growing California video series, a partnership with California Grown, here is an encore presentation of “First Line of Defense,” a story about CDFA’s Border Inspection Stations.

By Tim York and Daniel Sumner

California’s drought is raising concerns about whether fresh produce grown in the Golden State could run short, potentially raising prices nationwide. The reality is that there was little jump in produce prices last year, and consumers should expect only slight increases in 2015. To appreciate why, one must understand a bit about the geography, water infrastructure and economics of California agriculture.

The drought hasn’t affected California’s diverse regions uniformly. Most crops come from two areas: the Central Valley, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys; and the coastal region, including the Salinas Valley, which is often dubbed America’s “salad bowl.”

The Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys are home to significant production of alfalfa, silage, rice, cotton and other so-called field crops, but are also a major source of fresh produce, including peppers, melons, grapes, oranges, tree nuts and tomatoes. Farmers in these valleys have typically relied on a mix of pumped groundwater and surface water deliveries via both the Central Valley Project—a huge network of dams, reservoirs and canals—and the larger California State Water Project. Most farmers, however, will receive no water from the CVP for the second year in a row, and the SWP is delivering only a fraction of normal allocations.

This, coupled with much higher groundwater pumping costs as more and deeper wells are required, has forced many farmers to shift out of thirsty field crops. But this decreased production has minimal effects on food prices because California accounts for a small share of the supply, or because these crops affect food prices only indirectly. For example, fewer acres of corn silage makes it more expensive to feed milk cows, but the subsequent effect on the price of cheese is small. Fresh produce, which generates high revenue per unit of water consumed, continues to be planted.

In the coastal region and the Salinas Valley—where crops include strawberries, avocados, lettuce, celery, cauliflower, broccoli and wine grapes—farmers do not receive surface water from the CVP or the SWP. Instead, rainfall is stored in local reservoirs or underground aquifers. Lake San Antonio sits at 5% capacity, and Lake Nacimiento at 29%. But groundwater is still available and farmers find it economical, given the value of the produce they grow.

Roughly half of California’s water flows undiverted for human use. Another 40% goes to agriculture, and the remaining 10% to cities. The environment requires a certain baseline of water that cannot be reallocated in a drought. Urban use is small and hard to change much, though Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s recently announced 25% mandatory reduction may help some. The bulk of water cutbacks will fall on agriculture but plumbing and economics determine where they will be made.

California voters passed a $7.5 billion water bond measure last fall, with $2.7 billion going toward increased storage. Legislation allowing regulation of groundwater will be implemented gradually over the next several years. These solutions will help, eventually.

Some farmers are adjusting planting schedules and shifting crops between growing regions to adapt. Others are rerouting water from annual field crops, which can be left unplanted for a year or two, to permanent crops such as fruit and nut trees. These adjustments assure a reliable supply to consumers, but they raise prices. Even so, this is a small factor compared with other costs. Produce prices are more likely to be influenced by labor shortages and the increase in California’s minimum wage in January 2016 to $10 an hour from the current $9. Governments in the region could scare off produce farmers if they were to place tight restrictions on irrigation practices. But that seems unlikely, at least for now.

So what does this mean for consumers? Even if water remains short over the next decade, an adequate supply of fresh fruits and vegetables should not be a concern. In a global market, produce suppliers from the U.S., Mexico, Chile and beyond compete to keep prices low. The rising cost of water in California is likely to increase the cost of production over time, and that will be reflected in gradually higher retail prices. But Golden State farms will remain reliable suppliers of the produce that consumers have come to expect.

Mr. York is the CEO of Markon Cooperative, a fresh-produce food-service purchasing cooperative. Mr. Sumner is the director of the University of California Agricultural Issues Center.

 

Link to article

By Justin Gillis

CARLSBAD, Calif. – Every time drought strikes California, the people of this state cannot help noticing the substantial reservoir of untapped water lapping at their shores — 187 quintillion gallons of it, more or less, shimmering so invitingly in the sun.

Now, for the first time, a major California metropolis is on the verge of turning the Pacific Ocean into an everyday source of drinking water. A $1 billion desalination plant to supply booming San Diego County is under construction here and due to open as early as November, providing a major test of whether California cities will be able to resort to the ocean to solve their water woes.

In California, small ocean desalination plants are up and running in a handful of towns. Plans are far along for a large plant in Huntington Beach that would supply water to populous Orange County. A mothballed plant in Santa Barbara may soon be reactivated. And more than a dozen communities along the California coast are studying the issue.

The facility being built here will be the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, producing about 50 million gallons of drinking water a day. So it is under scrutiny for whether it can operate without major problems.

“It was not an easy decision to build this plant,” said Mark Weston, chairman of the agency that supplies water to towns in San Diego County. “But it is turning out to be a spectacular choice. What we thought was on the expensive side 10 years ago is now affordable.”

Still, the plant illustrates many of the hard choices that states and communities face as they consider whether to tap the ocean for drinking water.

In San Diego County, which depends on imported freshwater supplies from the Colorado River and from Northern California, water bills already average about $75 a month. The new plant will drive them up by $5 or so to secure a new supply equal to about 7 or 8 percent of the county’s water consumption.

The plant will use a huge amount of electricity, increasing the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, which further strains water supplies. And local environmental groups, which fought the plant, fear a substantial impact on sea life.

The company developing the plant here, Poseidon Water, has promised to counter the environmental damage. For instance, it will pay into a California program that finances projects to offset emissions of greenhouse gases.

Still, some scientists and environmental groups contend that if rainy conditions return to California, the plant here and others like it could become white elephants. Santa Barbara, northwest of Los Angeles, built its desalination plant a quarter-century ago and promptly shut it down when rains returned.

Australia is a more spectacular case: It built six huge desalination plants during a dry spell and has largely idled four of them though water customers remain saddled with several billion dollars’ worth of construction bills.

“Our position is that seawater desalination should be the option of last resort,” said Sean Bothwell, an attorney with the California Coastkeeper Alliance, an environmental coalition that has battled California’s turn toward the technology. “We need to fully use all the sustainable supplies that we have available to us first.”

The rising interest in desalination is not simply a matter of desperation, though that is certainly a factor in states with growing populations and few obvious sources of new water. Advocates say the technology has improved markedly over the past 20 years. While the water can cost twice as much as conventionally treated water, it is still less than a penny a gallon, and that is starting to look tolerable in parched regions.

Desalination has grown into a huge industry, with more than 15,000 plants operating around the world. Many are small and treat brackish groundwater, requiring much less energy and costing less than seawater treatment. The United States already has scores of these smaller plants.

Huge plants treating seawater have been rare here, but they exist elsewhere, particularly in chronically dry regions like the Middle East. In little more than a decade, Israel has moved from perpetual water crisis to a point where it will soon get half its water from desalination. Israeli engineers have become sought-after partners in many cities, and are involved in the Carlsbad project.

The technological approach being employed here, and in most recent plants, is called reverse osmosis. It involves forcing seawater through a membrane with holes so tiny that the water molecules can pass through but larger salt molecules cannot.

A huge amount of energy is required to create enough pressure to shove the water through the membranes. But clever engineering has cut energy use of the plants in half in 20 years, as well as improving their reliability.

Future desalination plants also have the potential to blend well with the rising percentage of renewable power on the electric grids in California and Texas. Since treated water can be stored, the plants could be dialed up at times when electricity from wind or solar power is plentiful, and later dialed down.

However, as interest in desalination spreads, California and other states confront major decisions about the environmental rules for the new plants.

Both the intake of seawater and the disposal of excess salt into the ocean can harm sea life. Sucking in huge amounts of seawater, for instance, can kill fish eggs and larvae by the billions. Technical solutions exist, but they can drive up costs, and it is still unclear how strict California regulators will be with the plant developers.

Environmental groups argue that the embrace of desalination represents a failure to manage freshwater effectively. They want much more aggressive programs focused on conservation and on reuse of existing supplies, pointing out that half of municipal water here still goes to grass and other lawn plants. These arguments have sometimes carried the day, as they did when voters in Santa Cruz effectively killed a desalination plant.

Mr. Weston, the chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority, said his agency and others in the area had gone a long way toward embracing conservation. Since 1990, water use in the county has been cut 12 percent, even as the population has jumped 30 percent.

Long worried about water scarcity, the San Diego region helped to pioneer measures that ultimately spread across the country, including low-flow bathroom fixtures, more efficient washing machines and other innovations.

But these steps have not been enough to secure the region’s water future, Mr. Weston said. Thus, the water authority decided years ago, long before the current drought began, to move forward on the desalination plant.

It is in the late stages of construction, by an artificial bay opening to the sea in Carlsbad. On a recent day, the faint smell of glue wafted through the air as workers sealed joints on huge pipes. When it goes into operation, the plant will pump water through 16,040 cylinders containing the membranes that trap salt.

Peter MacLaggan, a vice president of Poseidon Water who is overseeing the project, said the plant was in some ways a response to longstanding public interest in desalination.

“Every time California has a drought, we get letters to the editor pointing out that there’s a lot of water in the Pacific Ocean,” he said as waves broke on the shoreline in the distance. “They say, ‘Hey, guys, what are we waiting for?’”

Santa Barbara, a chic tourist destination on the coast, could face severe water shortages within a year if the drought continues. The city is on the verge of spending $40 million to reactivate the long-mothballed desalination plant there.

That step would drive water bills up sharply, acknowledged the mayor, Helene Schneider. But, she added, “no water is a worse option than very expensive water.”

Link to article

 

By Seth Nidever

Seems like everybody is jumping into the red-hot California water debate.

Ever since Gov. Jerry Brown announced on April 1 that cities like Hanford and Lemoore would be forced to conserve in a big way to cut the state’s water use by 25 percent, the accusations have been flying, with major non-California blogs, newspapers and pundits jumping into the ring last week and asking whether California agriculture – the largest private source of jobs in Kings County and a $45 billion industry statewide – is sharing the pain.

That, in turn, has sent agriculture into full defense mode, with trade and advocacy groups churning out press releases and fact sheets purporting to set the record straight.

Just last week alone, Carissa Sauer, spokeswoman for the Almond Board of California, sent out multiple emails to the Sentinel and other media outlets. The emails offered a robust affirmation of almonds against critics who say the nuts are water hogs that suck up too much out of the state’s precious-but-dwindling aquifers.

Sauer nearly apologized in a final email on Friday, promising that it would be “the last email I send you this week.”

So why all the fuss?

Part of it stems from the high value California voters place on environmental preservation. Poll after poll shows Californians overall strongly support ecosystem protection laws – including the ag pumping limitations from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta that Kings County agricultural leaders often criticize.

As a result, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources, about half of California’s dammed or controlled water supply is allocated for environmental purposes, with about 40 percent for agriculture and 10 percent for urban use.

Yet, as many point out, almost all of Brown’s mandated cuts announced earlier this month go after the 10 percent urban piece of the pie.

That has put agriculture squarely center-stage, with a blindingly bright spotlight being turned on what farmers do, how they irrigate and how much water it takes to produce each one of the staggering variety of crops churned out by the San Joaquin Valley.

For his part, Brown has defended agriculture, noting that hundreds of thousands of acres have been fallowed and thousands of jobs lost due to the drought.

For Aubrey Bettencourt, executive director of Hanford-based agricultural advocacy group California Water Alliance, all the hubbub represents an opportunity to put the public relations pedal to the metal.

“The Central Valley farmer has to speak directly to the consumer,” she said. “There has to be a more proactive approach from the farming community.”

Bettencourt went on a blitz last week, tweeting multiple times, issuing a press release and doing interviews.

One tweet included a link to a Los Angeles Times graphic showing how much water-per-ounce various foods used. The upshot? Almonds, at 48.6 gallons per ounce, aren’t the worst water-hogging protein source.

According to the graphic, that title goes to beef, which, because of the sheer amount of hay acreage needed to feed cattle, has one of the highest per-ounce water uses out there: 106 gallons.

All this was meant to put in context other stories and blog posts claiming that almonds are Water Enemy #1.

The assault on almonds has prompted some writers – including some not directly tied to agriculture – to pen reality checks. Some articles have suggested that pronouncements about California agriculture from distant publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post reveal an ignorance of the complexities of California’s economy.

“I think you’ve got a lot of reporters that don’t normally cover food and water,” Bettencourt said. “They’re diving in with 10 percent knowledge, which is just enough to be dangerous.”

Medium.com writer Steven Johnson, writing a piece in which he pointed out how many edible goodies California sends to the rest of the U.S. and the world, had this to say:

“The average New York Times reader … from the Upper West Side [of Manhattan] might want to think about the canned tomatoes, avocados and almonds in his or her kitchen before denouncing the irresponsible lifestyles of the California [residents].”

Johnson was actually trying to make a point about how much more water California agriculture uses compared to the state’s urban residents. He is among those calling for wider use of super-efficient irrigation methods.

At the Almond Board, Sauer took a different tack, arguing that almonds have one of the highest dollar values per drop of water of any crop.

By that standard, a recent University of California, Davis, study determined that the state’s almond harvest sustains 97,000 Central Valley jobs.

For Bettencourt, all of this demands that growers engage with others – including those in California’s skeptical environmental community – who are asking painful questions about the challenge drought poses to the state’s natural beauty, food productivity and way of life.

“Drought is turning up the heat big-time,” she said. “You’re seeing the shifting conversation.”

Link to story

By Ann Hayden

Finger-pointing tends to sharpen during times of crisis.

Exhibit A: California, now entering its fourth year of drought.

If you’ve followed media coverage of the drought lately – which has spiraled to new heights since Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the state’s first mandatory cuts in urban water use last week – you’ve probably heard that agriculture was “spared” the knife.

An interview with Gov. Brown on PBS Newshour perfectly encapsulates the debate:

“Well, Governor, encouraging people to decrease watering their lawns seems like literally a drop in the bucket, when 80 percent of the water … is from the agriculture sector,” the reporter starts out. “We know that it costs an enormous amount of water to have a single almond to eat … Is it time for us to start zeroing in on the largest customers or users of water?”

While it’s true that agriculture is California’s biggest water user, and that some crops require more water than others, it’s unfair and inaccurate to suggest, first, that agriculture was passed over, and second, that a small nut is primarily to blame for sucking the state dry. It’s more complicated than that.

Farmers on the front line

Until now, agriculture has borne the brunt of California’s drought.

Most farmers – along with two-thirds of California’s population – receive water allocations from the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project, a complex, interconnected system of reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping plants that deliver water, including melted snow from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, to all points south.

In 2014, those allocations dipped to near record lows – zero in some cases – due to paltry rainfall and snowpack. The diminished supplies cost farmers about $2.2 billion and eliminated more than 17,000 jobs. More than 500,000 acres of cropland were fallowed.

Beyond the nut

Then there’s the nut. If anything has come to symbolize the drought in the past week, it’s the almond, which, as you may have heard, requires a gallon of water to grow. But here’s the rub. People really like almonds, and California grows two-thirds of the world’s supply. Further, the state grows about half of the country’s fruits and vegetables, and almonds aren’t even the most water-intensive.

As Grist’s Nathanael Johnson aptly observed:

“Pointing the blame at any single crop is just too reductive. When dealing with a complex system like California’s water cycle, you have to think holistically if you hope to make positive change. While the system is complex, there’s something very simple driving California’s water system off the rails: stupid laws.”

Improve the market

He’s absolutely correct. We need to tease out the provisions that are clogging California’s water system and establish incentives that will allow the market to respond to scarcity – well before aquifers are drained and our life-sustaining ecosystems begin to gasp.

In the case of groundwater, for the water market to function optimally, communities will also need to get a better handle on the sustainable yield of their basins. This needs to begin now.

Inevitably, agriculture will need to do more to increase California’s resiliency to drought. Everyone will.

It’s time we put those pointing fingers to work on a more worthwhile task – rolling up our sleeves and getting to work on real solutions.

Link to blog post

By Mark Cowin, Director, California Department of Water Resources 

A 25 percent cutback in urban water use – as Gov. Jerry Brown imposed last week – is less a hardship on California residents than an adjustment to a new reality.

Droughts like the one gripping California now are inevitable, though climate change makes their frequency and severity unpredictable. We need to change the way we use water, especially outdoors, to cope now and into the future. Simple steps, such as not overwatering lawns, will go a long way. Replacing lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping will go even further.

Some question why the mandated water reductions did not extend to agriculture, which uses a larger share of the state’s developed water supply than homes and businesses.

Millions of acre-feet of surface water will not go to farms this year. The roughly half-million acres of farmland not planted last year (of roughly 9 million irrigated acres in the state) will likely expand this year. The state’s two biggest water projects already have cut deliveries by between 50 percent and 100 percent.

Thousands of other farmers with long-standing water rights and good supplies even in dry years are on notice from the State Water Resources Control Board that water may be left in streams and rivers to meet the most basic needs for people and native fish – and that they should think hard before planting crops in this fourth year of drought.

If this drought deepens so that it becomes difficult to provide water for essential human needs, the state ultimately could use its authority to further limit agricultural water use. But we should stretch urban supplies as far as possible before we take that drastic action.

Agriculture is the economic engine of rural California, and the entire state enjoys the variety of safe, nutritious food that California farmers produce. There are many gallons of water, applied by a farmer, behind each of our meals.

Some argue that California agriculture uses too much water to grow crops for export such as almonds and pistachios, and suggest the state ban such crops.

Where should the state draw that line? Should the state judge the worthiness of crops based on water use? Nutritional value? Profit per acre-foot of water used? Is broccoli acceptable, but not wine grapes? How do we account for the tremendous waterfowl habitat created by rice fields?

It is not the proper role of the state to tell farmers what to grow. Those who plant almonds, pistachios and other permanent crops take the risk that they can keep orchards and vineyards irrigated year after year. Some of those bets may not pay off.

Other critics argue that the governor should halt groundwater pumping to prevent the depletion of aquifers. Groundwater is a concern, and we need better management. But we are not going to run out of groundwater this year or next.

Where overpumping is causing subsidence, local governments can pass ordinances to restrict pumping. New state laws already are forcing local governments to organize themselves to put plans in place in the next five years for sustainable pumping and recharge.

California has always leaned on its tremendous groundwater resources in dry years. To swiftly and unilaterally restrict farmers from that resource would only worsen economic devastation – unnecessarily, in most cases. Groundwater is a highly localized resource and needs to be managed as such.

This drought has the power to divide us, but it may also bring us together. A 25 percent cutback is not too much to ask in a state where overwatering is often the biggest problem plaguing lawns.

We don’t we use the same kinds of phones or drive the same kinds of cars as we did a generation ago. Why shouldn’t we also modernize our landscapes?

Come the next inevitable drought, the change will do us good.

Link to story

By Vauhini Vara

The view from where I’m sitting, in San Francisco, is of the small patio in front of the house whose bottom floor my husband and I rent. Beyond the patio stands a fence hugged by a plant sprouting delicate white-and-purple flowers, and beyond that, there’s a terraced garden where our former landlords planted shrubs and succulents. I’m aware that California is in the midst of its worst drought in decades—I’ve read and written about it, and I’ve seen the same bleak photographs that anyone with an Internet connection can see—but, from this vantage, its effects aren’t at all apparent. Nor have a series of recent home water-use restrictions affected us much, since our landlords pay our water bill and handle the gardening, such as it is; in any case, my husband and I consume little water. This puts us in line with much of San Francisco, one of the places that uses the least water, per resident, in the state. And yet, the city is subject to many of the new restrictions. When we went out to dinner with my husband’s visiting parents over the weekend, the waiter kept taking forever to refill our water glasses, because the state had approved regulations that restrict restaurants to offering water only if customers request it. I kvetched a little at this: Shouldn’t the state be imposing its rules on the real water abusers?

I haven’t been the only one to complain. California’s drought, which began in 2011, is suddenly turning a lot of uninterested laypeople into the most serious of water experts, each certain that someone else is to blame. The sinners tend to fall into at least one of three categories, depending on who is doing the categorizing: selfish Californians whose yards are over-landscaped, selfish farmers whose crops are over-produced, and selfish environmentalists whose pet causes are over-indulged. Studies exist to support the cases against each of these groups: there’s the one showing that richer, more sprawling parts of Los Angeles are using more water than poorer, denser parts; the one showing that agriculture is using up most of the state’s water; and the one showing that environmental demands are responsible for making much of our water unavailable for human use.

The reason that these perceptions and statistics are so mixed relates to the complexity of California’s water situation. The state has access to both surface water, from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and other aboveground places, and to groundwater, which people—particularly farmers—pump from underground. Of all the water that is typically used, about half goes toward environmental purposes, according to the Public Policy Institute of California—for instance, because it is found in protected “wild and scenic” rivers, or because it is used to preserve wetlands and the habitat within streams, or because it’s circulated in order to maintain the quality of water sent to agricultural and urban users. Half of the state’s water sounds like a lot. But, according to P.P.I.C., more than half of the water designated as environmental is concentrated in rivers along the state’s north coast, which are cut off from major agricultural and urban areas and couldn’t be used for other purposes anyway. Elsewhere in California, more water is reserved for the environment than for cities and towns, but less than for agriculture.

Those inclined to blame farming for abusing the state’s water resources sometimes cite a statistic holding that agriculture takes up eighty per cent of the state’s water, but, to be clear, that’s eighty per cent of human use, which doesn’t count environmental use. (The other twenty per cent comes from municipal use.) Much has been made, too, of the fact that large farms were excluded from an executive order signed by Governor Jerry Brown last week requiring municipalities across the state to reduce their water use by a total of twenty-five per cent, compared to 2013 levels, by February next year. Some have suggested that the exemption may be politically motivated; the agriculture lobby is powerful in California, and one man in particular, a farming magnate named Stewart Resnick, is a major Democratic donor who has made campaign contributions to Brown and other influential politicians. When I ran that argument by a spokesman for Brown, he replied, in an e-mail, that “reducing this to politics . . . simplifies very complicated / multi-layered issues and ignores all of the action / impacts that preceded” last week’s executive order.

It’s not unusual, of course, for politics to influence policy decisions, and the farm lobby’s influence may well have played a role in shaping Brown’s executive order. But the spokesman was alluding to the fact—elided in some critics’ analysis of the situation—that farms, like cities, have already been hit by water restrictions. Farms and cities get their water differently. In cities, local water agencies generally send surface water and groundwater to residents and businesses through pipes; during the drought, that water has continued to flow, though some agencies have restricted how residents can use it. (For instance, lawn watering has been restricted, in many places, to twice a week.) Farms, on the other hand, are allotted rights to surface water based on a complex seniority system. During this drought, many junior rights holders—but not senior ones—have had their access to surface water diminished or shut off. Big swaths of farmland have gone fallow as a result—about five per cent of agricultural land statewide. It’s worth noting, however, that farmers have two additional options for acquiring water. They can buy water rights from one another, and they can pump as much groundwater as they like. As a result, the state’s groundwater has been depleted considerably. Governor Brown recently signed a law restricting groundwater use, but it doesn’t require that groundwater basins become sustainable until 2040, though certain planning milestones have to be met before then. The drought has compelled some experts to suggest that timeline be significantly accelerated.

That brings us to cities, which will bear the immediate brunt of the regulations in Brown’s executive order, even though they use far less water than the environment or agriculture. There’s a simple logistical reason for this, beyond the political explanations: when it comes to imposing short-term water restrictions, cities provide some of the lowest-cost opportunities. That’s because about half of the water used in urban areas goes toward watering lawns and other residential and commercial landscapes—things that have little social benefit, compared with environmental uses, which help the planet and its residents, and agricultural functions, which nourish people around the world and boost California’s economy and provide jobs. On Tuesday, the state sketched a preliminary plan for how cities will be told to meet the mandated statewide reduction of twenty-five per cent; it calls for big water guzzlers—including Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, and Palos Verdes, where a disproportionate number of houses sit on large, elaborately landscaped lawns—to decrease their water consumption by thirty-five per cent, while communities that already use water efficiently would be asked to make smaller reductions. San Francisco, for its part, whose residences tend to have small or nonexistent lawns, would face only a ten-per-cent decrease.

The state also revealed figures showing that water use in cities was only three per cent lower in February than in February of 2013—a figure that Felicia Marcus, the chairwoman of the state water-resources control board, called “totally disheartening” on a call with reporters. (Last year, cities were asked to reduce their water use voluntarily.) The state asked some communities in Southern California, which actually saw an increase in water use, to explain themselves. They responded, according to the board, that the hotter weather had inspired more landscape watering (“not a great reason,” Marcus said), and that economic growth and tourism had prompted more general water use.

As the drought continues, the state may well have to further adjust how it treats the use of water for environmental and agricultural purposes. In the meantime, reducing outdoor irrigation in municipalities is “the low-hanging fruit,” Marcus said. While it may appear to those of us in cities as though we’re being targeted, and it might feel good to complain about others, the situation is complex and the reality less satisfying: we all need to change.

Link to story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Philip Bump

In the wake of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision to enact mandatory restrictions on the use of water given the state’s ongoing, historic drought, people nationwide have become obsessed with almonds. Not in the sense that people are buying and eating lots of almonds, mind you. In the sense that suddenly everyone with even a tenuous connection to the Internet is an expert on the water usage of various agricultural products.

Each almond, you may have heard, requires one gallon of water to grow. Which, you may also have heard, is part of the reason why agriculture uses a stunning 80 percent of California’s water — and yet was not asked by Brown to curtail its usage at all.

Here’s the problem. The factoid about the almonds lacks context; a lot of other foods use much more water by weight. The one about how much water agriculture uses, meanwhile, is surprisingly subjective. Including water reserved for environmental purposes, agriculture only uses about 41 percent of the state’s water. And that figure almost certainly doesn’t capture what is happening on the ground in California agricultural areas over the past 24 months.

There’s a city in central California about an hour southeast of Fresno called Visalia. To get there, you fly into Fresno Air Terminal, FAT, and head south on the 99, between neatly planted rows of eucalyptus trees and past several smaller farming towns, including Selma, the raisin capital of the world. The air smells like manure and dust, and, if you’re like me, it will trigger your allergies. The region consistently has among the lowest air quality in America.

Visalia is in the northwest corner of Tulare County, where Mark Watte owns a farm and dairy. Watte — whose name my phone kept autocorrecting to “water” — has about 1,000 milk cows and grows alfalfa, corn and wheat as feed. He added pistachio trees about a decade ago and and recently, almonds. After struggling to keep up his output last year, he expects to have to cut back this year.

“It’s going to be 40 to 50 percent” that won’t get water, he told me by phone. “We have some crops that we just won’t irrigate. Alfalfa’s one of them. We’ll just quit irrigating it in the summer and if we don’t get water, we won’t irrigate.” The effect on his bottom line? He’ll use what water he gets to protect his highest-value crops, like those nut trees. So he expects to see a 25 percent decrease in income.

That phrase — “get water” — is an important one. Watte pays for the water he uses and, in most years, controls how much he buys. When there is no water, though, he can’t. And recently, there hasn’t been much water.

On the east side of the Central Valley are the Sequoia Mountains. (When you disembark at FAT, you walk through an artificial forest meant to welcome visitors who plan to visit the mountains’ giant redwoods.) In normal years, snow falls in the mountains in the winter and then melts during the spring and summer, collecting in rivers. One of those rivers is the Kaweah, which originates up in the mountains and then collects in a man-made lake east of Visalia. The lake was formed when the county built the Terminus Dam in the 1950s in response to flooding that swept through Visalia in the 1930s. Now, it’s a key part of the region’s water system.

It’s a complicated, intricate web of natural and man-made systems (to provide water). Lake Kaweah and Lake Success (formed by another dam) are in the Sierra foothills. Their water flows into rivers and canals, and is then shunted into smaller waterways. Those waterways are usually ditches, owned and maintained by about 20 ditch companies, who are to agricultural water what the delivery guy is to your pizza place: The ones who get it to your door.

The dam and lake are maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. But most of the water in the lake is the property of farmers and ditch companies, having decades ago bought storage in the lake. There’s an organization comprised of the companies and some farmers, that meets in the spring and decides how and when to release water from the lake. In good years, water can flow out of the lake, into rivers, and into ditches for 60 to 90 days, from June through August. In bad years, like 2014, it’s 20 days.

Normally, as I said above, snow falls in the Sierras and melts slowly to fill the lake. Thanks to the lack of snowfall in the Sierras over the summer and the months of little rain on the valley floor, this year the lake could end up well below normal, perhaps only reaching 70,000 acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is the standard unit of measurement, representing the amount of water that can cover a one acre area one foot deep.) The lake can hold 185,000 acre-feet.

Farmers pay for a certain number of acre-feet to flow into their irrigation systems, sometimes going into storage ponds, water batteries on their land. Ditch companies and government bureaus sell water to farmers, opening and closing gates to allow the proper amount to flow into their property.

Jeff Tashjian, who grows lemons and oranges on the east side of Tulare County — and who is my brother-in-law — has seen how the price of water has changed over the course of his two decades in the business. “I can remember when water was, 50, 60 dollars an acre-foot,” he told me. The price varies by location: Farms uphill from the water source pay more, because it needs to be pumped. Farms further west from the source pay more, too, since it’s more expensive to shunt it over there.

When there’s less water, the law of supply and demand also kicks in. “Last year, they had a little water left over, and they were telling the farmers it was around $400 an acre-foot,” said Tashjian. Farmers bought it to store, in case of emergency, like a well going dry. Then the company got hold of more water. “If you want some,” he was told, “it’s $1,500 an acre-foot.” Buying water in hard times, in other words, can be as much as 30 times more expensive.

The preventive measures make sense. Groundwater levels had already been dropping over time, as the graph above shows. The aquifer from which water in the area is drawn has had two million acre-feet more withdrawn than it should have, according to Watte. “The only way we can pump less water is to farm less land,” he said. “That’s looming.”

But worse drought means less water through the system of ditches and canals, which means more pumping groundwater. More pumped groundwater means wells run dry. Jeff Ritchie, who farms a wide array of crops ranging from walnuts to cotton, said that the drought is the worst he’s seen. “We’re having to go in and drill deeper to take the place of the ones that are dry,” Ritchie told me. When the canals and rivers are flush with water after heavy rain- or snowfall, the groundwater is replenished, as is seeps into the ground. With the drought, that doesn’t happen.

There’s one other way in which agriculture east of Visalia gets water: The Friant-Kern Canal. It’s marked on the map above, and brings water down from the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River, past the outskirts of Visalia, and down to Bakersfield. Tashjian gets water for some of his fields from the Friant; it’s the one that saw the spike in prices in 2014. Such north-south water projects are legendary for their contentiousness in California history, of course. Last year, The Atlantic thoroughly (and fascinatingly) detailed the state and history of that system.

In Tulare County, the problem is slightly more localized. For the first time ever last year, the Friant allocated zero percent of its contractually obligated water for irrigation in the area. Earlier this year, the Bureau of Reclamation announced that it expected another “zero allocation.”

A state decision in February not to allow increased pumping for agriculture met with protest from farmers who get water through the Friant system. State Water Resources Control Board Director Thomas Howard argued against the pumping, given the historically low population levels for certain types of fish. Which offers a nice anecdote for answering the question of how much water is used for what.

Agriculture uses 80 percent of the state’s water only if you exclude water that is reserved for environmental purposes. A report from the Public Policy Institute of California explains what that water is used for: “water in rivers protected as ‘wild and scenic’ under federal and state laws, water required for maintaining habitat within streams, water that supports wetlands within wildlife preserves, and water needed to maintain water quality for agricultural and urban use.” It’s everything that’s not in the bottom half of the circle above. Agriculture uses far, far more water than urban areas, but it, too, has constraints.

The limitations placed on water use for environmental purposes clearly frustrated the farmers that I spoke with. In part, that’s due to a long series of legal and political battles, which the farmers feel as though they usually lose. (They aren’t without their allies; California Republican Carly Fiorina blamed environmentalists for the state of the drought.) But the tension is particularly sharp given recent critiques of water use by agriculture.

“We do what the rest of the world can’t do so well,” Watte said. “We grow processing tomatoes. Almonds. Pistachios. Table grapes. Garlic and onions. All of these things that we supply a significant amount of the nation and the world’s supply. What would they rather have us do with that water?”

“Garbanzo beans don’t take much water,” he added. “Should we just grow garbanzo beans?”

In response to the almond critique, the Los Angeles Times created a graphic showing how much water it took to grow an ounce of various types of food. Almonds are low on the list. Beef, which requires crops be grown and then fed to the animals, as on Mark Watte’s farm, uses much more per ounce. The number of ounces of almonds produced for market, though, means they use more water statewide, as Bloomberg notes. Scale is important.

Where the blames falls for agriculture’s water use is open to interpretation. According to Watte’s data, making a cheeseburger — the lettuce, tomato, bun, cheese and meat patty — uses 698.5 gallons of water. “Who is the real consumer of that water?,” he asks. Is it the farmer? The produce itself? His implication, of course, is that it is you.

The farmers I spoke with have been and are making changes aimed at reducing their water consumption. After all, it’s expensive. Historically, walnut trees are flooded, because the roots like deep moisture. That meant literally flooding the grove and letting the water seep into the ground. (Which, at least, helps rebuild ground water.) Newer groves have microdrip systems, which costs more to install, a few thousand dollars per acre, but reduces the amount of water that’s used.

That holds for other crops, too. “Ten years ago, a common yield [of processing tomatoes] would be 40 tons to the acre using 36 to 40 inches of water,” Watte said. “Now they’ve doubled their yield using 24 inches of water.”

Tashjian’s citrus trees used to use furrowed irrigation, in which water would be turned on from a tap and rows of ditches would be filled with water until it seeped into the ground. It took five to six days to irrigate his entire crop. Now, he has buried irrigation lines running between the trees, with fan jets that are set to particular pressures and patterns. The irrigation only takes one day, saving both water and electricity.

Still, he’s considering other ways to cut down on water. Maybe moving the irrigation lines underneath the trees, so the water is shielded from evaporation better. (This is the Central Valley of California, after all, where temperatures routinely head north of 100 degrees in the summer.) That switch, though, might affect the trees. He’s also thought about running the irrigation at night, but that could mean being slower to detect problems. This isn’t just a drought problem for him. It’s also an economic one.

Asked to explain why he wasn’t mandating reductions from agriculture, Gov. Brown told ABC News last Sunday that “they’re not watering their lawn or taking long showers — they’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world.”

“If you don’t want to produce any food and import it from some other place, theoretically, you could do that,” he said. “But that would displace hundreds of thousands of people and I don’t think it’s needed.”

Incidentally, the amount of water used in California in February was down only 2.8 percent versus 2013, the lowest figure since last July. Some places, including cities down south, saw their usage go up. Wealthy Southern Californians use three times as much water as the non-wealthy, according to one study. Perhaps they deserve a nickname.

I propose: “Almonds.”

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