Saving California’s Rural Water Users

Despite its status as an agricultural superpower, eclipsing every other U.S. state in farm output, California’s farming sector wields relatively little influence in Sacramento. When you evaluate the state’s GDP components, the sectors that dominate are financial, IT, and services, at around a half-trillion each, followed by manufacturing and government at around $400 billion and $300 billion, respectively. Against that economic power, the value of California’s agricultural output – loosely estimated somewhere around $60 billion – is a rounding error.

It’s not just money, it’s population. California’s top ten counties for agricultural production – Fresno, Tulare, Monterey, Kern, Merced, Imperial, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Santa Barbara, and Kings – are home to 5.2 million people. And even if every voter in those ten counties sent state legislators to Sacramento who were fully committed to protecting agriculture, they would only represent 13 percent of the electorate.

The conventional wisdom in Sacramento remains committed to water rationing and the elimination of up to one million acres of California’s irrigated farmland, estimated today at around 8.5 million acres. Losing 12 percent of the richest farmland in the best climate in North America is bad enough, but for a look at the future, consider how much worse these policies are already playing out for farmers in smaller and more remote parts of the state.

In California’s far north, Siskiyou and Modoc counties have a combined population of just over 50,000 people. But out of this sparsely populated region, farmers grow high quality alfalfa, barley, garlic, horseradish, onions, potatoes, sugar beets and wheat.

Unfortunately, the water they rely on from the upper Klamath River is reduced every year, along with the acreage these farmers can plant. More information about the unrelenting attacks on farmers in this forgotten corner of the state can be found here, and here, and here. Since those reports were written, dams on the mid-Klamath River have been destroyed. We may now expect demands for more water to flow “unimpeded” from the upper Klamath downstream, even though historically, when the upper Klamath reached even moderate flood stage, excess water overflowed and poured into the wetlands of the Tule Basin, which also recharged aquifers that the farmers rely on for irrigation.

In another forgotten corner of the state, the Potter Valley Project diverts water stored in Lake Pillsbury from the upper Eel River through a tunnel to the headwaters of the Russian River. Already, these diversions have been cut from about 150,000 acre feet per year to only about 40,000 feet in recent years. That represents about one-half of one percent of the total flow of the Eel River, but it may not last. Scott Dam is next on the list of dams to be destroyed, with the approval process well underway. Once it’s gone, the latest agreement will reduce diversions to the Russian River to 32,000 acre feet per year, one fifth as much.

In remote places like Modoc, Siskiyou, or Mendocino counties, the might arrayed against a few thousand farmers and ranchers is overwhelming. They face state and federal agencies that, to judge by their actions, are committed to destroying dams and driving farmers and ranchers out of business. And it’s not just government agencies that have decided to rewild the state. Alongside billionaires who share the rewilding agenda, government agencies award grants to NGOs, conservancies, and tribes. These groups then support targeted demolition of water infrastructure, denial of water allocations, and de facto evictions in locales where there aren’t enough farmers and ranchers living there to mount sufficient resistance.

California’s farmers should not assume that what happens in the remote reaches of the state can’t happen, on a much bigger scale, in their own backyard.

For example, in Idaho, environmentalists claim that four dams on the lower Snake River — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite — must be removed as part of any recovery plan for endangered salmon and steelhead. These are big dams; their four reservoirs have a combined storage capacity of over 1.6 million acre-feet. Replacing the irrigation infrastructure, offsetting the losses in waterway transportation, and replacing the more than 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity would cost an estimated $30 billion or more.

The threat posed by the prospect of removing bigger dams, such as the ones on the Snake River, is compounded by the failure of proponents of removal to support major new water-supply infrastructure. And that is where California’s farmers and their representatives – the Farm Bureau, the Association of California Water Agencies, and trade organizations representing everything from grapes, almonds, and walnuts, to tomatoes, alfalfa, strawberries and rice – need to achieve new levels of solidarity.

California’s farmers and water agencies should unite to aggressively advocate for state and federal funding for expanded water supply infrastructure, focusing on practical project proposals. They should strive for unity with urban water agencies that serve and can influence millions of voters. They should eliminate any zero-sum mentality, by supporting desalination for coastal urban cities with as much fervor as they support surface storage, achieving big-gulp capacity out of the delta, dredging, and all projects that will guarantee massively increased annual yields.

At the same time, they must recognize that the destruction of small regional farm economies on California’s outskirts are harbingers of what’s coming their way. They should support these embattled farmers in their efforts to survive. They should urgently fund and publicize multiple expert studies to counter the biased, paid for analyses coming from state agency staff, NGOs, and the consultants they hire.

There are alternative policies, equally committed to environmental health, that do not require the destruction of California’s peerless farm economy. But to restore the necessary balance will require unity.