California dairy producer, Ray Prock, says the quote often attributed to Mark Twain, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting,” captures the ongoing California water crisis. California’s agriculture sector is likely to experience the biggest impact of the record-breaking drought. The economic toll on agriculture was estimated at $2.7 billion in 2015, the worst year of the last drought, according to the University of California-Davis.
The drought’s impact on California farms is uneven, depending on the source in the state’s over tapped water distribution system.
Prock, who runs a 600-cow dairy in Denair, is starting to see the effects of the current drought in such areas. His current share in water allotments is 8 inches less than his normal 42 inches. “In our situation, we have added several infrastructure improvements on our dairy facility to be more efficient with our water use,” he says.
Improvements such as tailwater ponds to reuse runoff helps Prock handle lower water allocations, allowing him to still grow the feed his dairy herd relies on. In the past decade, Prock purchased a farm in Klamath Falls, Ore., which has also allowed them to grow their own alfalfa. “Although the Klamath Basin is a hotbed of water issues, we are fortunately not a part of that irrigation system,” Prock adds. “So, the drought is not as hard on us compared to others.”
According to the director of regulatory and economic affairs with California Milk Producer Council, Geoff Vanden Heuvel, the water issues in California are both complex and very location specific.
“Droughts are not uncommon in California,” Vanden Heuvel says. “Groundwater use has never been regulated and now is. This will have profound impacts on certain parts of California agriculture.”
A longer-term issue is the ongoing lack of storage capacity in the golden state to collect runoff from the winter snowpack. “In the majority of California, it has been decades since storage capacity has significantly increased,” Prock states.
A few years ago, a two-pronged approach to manage water was proposed, along with ballot propositions for bond funded infrastructure and the same time a groundwater management program. “These were two separate but parallel concepts that depended on each other to work,” Prock says. “Well as California goes the infrastructure piece had the ball dropped but the regulatory groundwater management program is still moving forward.”
However, the long-term effect is a greater disaster waiting to happen because the groundwater is often used to backfill surface water in drought years. “If we have less surface water and are regulated to use less groundwater, it’s a double whammy we need to be prepared for,” Prock adds.
Opportunities await to improve the conveyance infrastructure in California to utilize the water that wet years provide more fully. “Floodwaters going through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in very wet years is the only source of water significant enough to mitigate the eventual restrictions on groundwater pumping,” Vanden Heuvel remarks. “Improving Delta conveyance has always been a very politically controversial proposition and it continues to be.”
Water fights are still brewing, although California water problems are technically fixable, according to both Prock and Vanden Heuvel, their state has to muster the political will to make it happen. In the meantime, farmers wait, as their crops suffer.
