Drought Puts Heat on Central Valley Farmers

His anxiety unrelieved by a week of intermittent rain, Larry Turnquist was out in the Central Valley mud trying to repair an old well and save his tomatoes and onions from the drought.

If $50,000 in rehab on the well can fix the damage from the 1983 earthquake in nearby Coalinga, and if the well water is not too salty, Turnquist expects to make it through the summer.

But his lima beans are history--sacrificed to the worst California drought since the 1930s--and the chances for a broccoli crop this winter don’t look good even with the unusual May rains.

“The rain helps a little. I probably can skip one irrigation,” Turnquist said. “But it’s not nearly enough.”

While cities along California’s coast weigh the merits of water conservation, farms in the Central Valley have no choice this year. Most will lose half their allotment of water from the huge reservoirs and canals that capture the state’s once-wild northern rivers.

That 50% cut in water and an exodus of cattle herds in search of grasslands to feed on makes agriculture the first widespread victim of the statewide drought, which has lingered twice as long as the last dry spell in 1976-77.

Santa Barbara, which faces severe shortages of residential water, and the Central Coast are a special case. Its crisis is due partly to the state’s dry spell, but mostly arose because the area chose not to join the State Water Project, the mammoth system of dams and aqueducts that has spared most of Southern California from the drought’s effects.

This is the first time since 1977 that irrigation water has been cut to farms. The federal Bureau of Reclamation and the State Water Project threatened cuts last year, but heavy March rains elevated the storage in key reservoirs to acceptable levels.

This year, late May rainstorms dropped enough water to raise some reservoirs slightly. Some farmers along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers will receive their usual supply of irrigation water, but most Central Valley farms will have to get by on a half-ration of water.

Despite the 50% cut in surface water, most growers say they will continue to cultivate by tapping the vast stores of ground water beneath the Central Valley and other agricultural areas. But it will make farming a more expensive pursuit this year.

For others, the well water is either not available or is tainted with salt and boron and can’t be used on valuable and sensitive grapevines and fruit trees.

“We don’t have enough water right now to keep the trees alive,” said Dan Nelson, manager of the San Luis Water District on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

Some growers of annual crops such as vegetables and cotton are consolidating their crops, leaving selected fields idle to save water for the rest of the land. In the Westlands Water District, the biggest farm water agency in the nation, more than 100,000 acres are expected to be left unplanted. Leaving all that acreage idle could cost as many as 3,000 farm jobs on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, Westlands spokesman Don Upton said.

The most acute drought threat is to orchards and grapevines, say farmers. Unlike the vegetables that are planted each year, trees and vines live for decades and represent a sizable investment. Many tree-growers feel they don’t have the luxury of waiting to see if the odds of nature--which say the drought will break this year and rainfall will return to normal--will prove accurate.

“Our strategy is to acquire water if at all possible,” said manager Gary Robinson of the Jane Avenue almond ranch near Huron.

Robinson said he plans to run two well pumps on the ranch through the summer to make up for the lost canal water, even though the electricity to run the pumps will drive the cost of irrigating from about $30 an acre foot to more than $100 an acre foot. He also is sharing the cost of another well with a neighboring farmer.

“It makes farming a lot less profitable,” he said. “But at least the trees are there and they’re producing.”

On Larry Turnquist’s 1,600 acres southwest of Fresno, a video camera lowered down his well revealed numerous breaks and obstructions; expensive to fix, but cheaper than the alternative.

Drilling a new well would cost at least $150,000 because the aquifer is so deep--1,000 feet or more below the ground. “And you can’t get a well driller today at almost any price,” Turnquist said. “They’re all busy.”

If the repaired well produces water, Turnquist said he can nurture his tomatoes into a reasonable crop. The well water on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley is too salty for his onions or garlic, but he can reserve his allotment of canal water for them. The bad water will go on the cotton he planted in place of the lima beans.

The ground water that ensures most California farms will survive the drought does not come without its own threat of catastrophe. During the 1976-77 drought, when canal water to farms was cut by 75%, so much pumping occurred in the San Joaquin Valley that wells went dry, and in some scattered areas the ground began to sink.

Even in years when rainfall and mountain snowpack are normal, farms and cities in the San Joaquin Valley extract more ground water than nature replenishes. Alarms have been sounded about the depletion of the aquifers.

This year, the ground water is expected to hold out in most areas, but the heavy pumping could lower the water table below the pumps on shallower wells and leave some farmers without water.

“We normally overdraft the Central Valley by 1.5 million acre feet in a normal year,” said Jason Peltier, executive director of the Central Valley Project Water Assn. “This year it could be double or triple that.”

Wells have already begun going dry in the Alta Water District near Dinuba, threatening fruit trees and grapevines.

“This is the worst condition I’ve seen since the 1920s,” said Larry Powell, 75, who grows peaches, plums and grapes on 80 acres near Dinuba. “I think we’ll get by, but it’s going to be tough. I’m having problems with my new well right now.”

For those without any access to well water, 1990 is already being dismissed as a year for just getting by.

Despite warnings last winter that his canal water could be cut in half, Clay Groefsma planted garlic and tomatoes on his acreage near Five Points. He also put money and water into preparing his cotton fields for planting, before learning that his water supply would be halved.

Now he doesn’t have enough water for all his garlic and tomatoes, so he will only harvest part of the crop. And some of the ground prepared for cotton will be left fallow.

“I don’t think many farmers plan for a drought--we’re optimists by nature,” Groefsma said. “If I can just pay back the bank this year I’ll be more than happy.”

Because of the way farmers irrigate, the worst effects of the drought may not be felt in the markets until next year. Once the summer growing season ends, fields for cotton and some other crops are watered in the winter to be ready for spring planting. Some vegetables are also planted late in the year for spring harvest.

But many growers without wells say they will be out of water once this summer ends.

Meanwhile, the state’s reservoirs will begin next spring nearly empty unless the Sierra Nevada is buried in snow next winter. Droughts have seldom lasted five years in California, and even this fourth year defied history.

“The real crunch will come if there is another dry year,” said Stephen Hall of the California Farm Water Coalition, a Fresno advocacy group for agriculture.

The May rains, which made only marginal contributions to reservoirs, gave hope to livestock ranchers, but not enough to slow the migration of cattle herds north in search of pasture.

For some ranchers, trucking the cattle to Oregon is a desperate measure to keep herds intact. But many other ranchers have been forced to cull long-established herds and give up their leases on pasture in Central and Southern California.

“We’ve had whole herds sell out,” said Fred Hayes, a rancher in Lompoc Valley near Santa Barbara. “We don’t expect to see half of the cattle left in this county by the end of the year.”

Hayes gave up one of his ranches this year and has cut his herd from 150 head of cattle to 60. Even if the rain returns to normal this winter, the pastures and the herds won’t rebound immediately, he said.

“It might take three or four years to build up a nice herd of heifers,” Hayes said.

Others are trying to buy hay to make up for the loss of pasture, a tactic that worked in the early years of the drought. But hay has become difficult to obtain, despite a federal program of relief for California cattle ranchers.

“There really isn’t a lot of feed available, at any price,” said Myron Openshaw, an Oroville rancher and president of the California Cattlemen’s Assn.