{"id":9787,"date":"2015-12-01T09:31:40","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T16:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/?p=9787"},"modified":"2015-12-01T09:31:40","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T16:31:40","slug":"california-considers-its-farming-future-in-midst-of-drought-from-national-public-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/index.php\/2015\/12\/01\/california-considers-its-farming-future-in-midst-of-drought-from-national-public-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"California considers its farming future in midst of drought &#8211; from National Public Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe title=\"NPR embedded audio player\" src=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/player\/embed\/457795109\/457795110\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Transcript<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>MICHEL MARTIN: If there is a piece of fruit, a vegetable or even a nut or two on your dinner table tonight, there&#8217;s a good chance it was grown in California. That state has endured four years of extreme drought. And while some of California&#8217;s agriculture industry is suffering, a few farmers have found a way to adapt and even thrive in the dry conditions. Ben Bergman of member KPCC has this report.<\/p>\n<p>BEN BERGMAN, BYLINE: Tom Rogers&#8217; 175-acre orchard right in the middle of California might very well be the farm of the future, a future where almonds are likely to be the state&#8217;s number-one crop.<\/p>\n<p>TOM ROGERS: These were some of the first almonds planted in this area, and this has been a good crop for us.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: In the &#8217;70s, Rogers&#8217; father made a prescient decision. He ditched the low-value cotton, cord and alfalfa his father grew and planted almonds. Thanks to strong demand from Asia, they&#8217;ve become a very lucrative crop. The downside is the trees require constant watering.<\/p>\n<p>ROGERS: It&#8217;s a scary time. I mean, we&#8217;re very concerned about what&#8217;s going on.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: Because Rogers now relies 100 percent on groundwater.<\/p>\n<p>ROGERS: By comparison, other years, groundwater amounted to maybe 10 to 25 percent of our annual water usage.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: And do you have an idea how much groundwater is left?<\/p>\n<p>ROGERS: No. I&#8217;m going to be very honest &#8211; my bottom line answer is I have no clue how long the water&#8217;s going to last.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: So this year, Rogers made a major investment, installing a precise high-tech irrigation system that lets him stretch what little water he has as much as possible. In the middle of a row of almond trees, Rogers pulls a soil moisture probe out of the ground.<\/p>\n<p>ROGERS: And up on top is a rain gauge and wind speed indicator. The panel out there measures the amount of sunlight.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: All the data gets uploaded to the Internet every 15 minutes, which allows Rogers to specify exactly how much water the trees need. Instead of getting soaked once a week with sprinklers, his nearly 15,000 trees get tiny doses of water every day.<\/p>\n<p>HEATHER COOLEY: In essence, they&#8217;re spoon-feeding the tree.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: Heather Cooley is with the Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank. More efficient irrigation techniques and a shift towards more valuable crops like almonds are big reasons why despite spending her life studying water in California, Cooley is bullish on the state&#8217;s agricultural industry.<\/p>\n<p>COOLEY: We can continue to have a very strong, robust agricultural sector in California using less water than we do today.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: In California&#8217;s Central Valley, fifth-generation farmer Philip Bowles has been installing more drip irrigation every year, and he&#8217;s happy with the results. He&#8217;s cut his farm&#8217;s total water use by about 25 percent in the last decade while doubling the per-acre yield.<\/p>\n<p>PHILIP BOWLES: Water&#8217;s a big expense for us. We don&#8217;t want to use any more than we have to.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: Bowles is tired of farmers getting a bad rap these days for using 80 percent of the state&#8217;s water. Everyone needs to eat after all, and he says people are making much too big a deal out of the drought.<\/p>\n<p>BOWLES: The system that we have can be adapted. It doesn&#8217;t have to be blown up. It doesn&#8217;t have to be abandoned. There&#8217;s still, you know, a lot of water in the state, and people overlook that.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: And it&#8217;s not just farmers who think that way. A team of researchers led by Jay Lund at the University of California, Davis used computer modeling to see what would happen if there was a 72-year mega-drought. Lund says they were surprised how minor the overall impacts would be.<\/p>\n<p>JAY LUND: California, particularly with its very large infrastructure system that can move water around pretty well relative to other states, can accommodate some pretty big water shocks.<\/p>\n<p>BERGMAN: Scientists recently announced it&#8217;s been more than 500 years since California has been this dry. Yet, last year, California&#8217;s agriculture industry had its second-highest revenues ever. For NPR News, I&#8217;m Ben Bergman in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2015\/11\/29\/457795109\/drought-turns-spotlight-on-future-of-california-farms\">Link to NPR<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transcript MICHEL MARTIN: If there is a piece of fruit, a vegetable or even a nut or two on your dinner table tonight, there&#8217;s a good chance it was grown in California. That state has endured four years of extreme &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/index.php\/2015\/12\/01\/california-considers-its-farming-future-in-midst-of-drought-from-national-public-radio\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\r\n<title>California considers its farming future in midst of drought - from National Public Radio - CDFA&#039;s Planting Seeds Blog<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/index.php\/2015\/12\/01\/california-considers-its-farming-future-in-midst-of-drought-from-national-public-radio\/\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"California considers its farming future in midst of drought - from National Public Radio - CDFA&#039;s Planting Seeds Blog\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Transcript MICHEL MARTIN: If there is a piece of fruit, a vegetable or even a nut or two on your dinner table tonight, there&#8217;s a good chance it was grown in California. 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