Water Watch: Good News Evaporates : It’s officially the driest year of the drought; we have to think about which crops to grow

As news of the California drought hardened, so did feelings among the state’s farmers about future diversions of water from agriculture to cities and industry.

Despite the record rains of March and glistening snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada, estimates of runoff and storage of water to meet future needs were gloomier last week than they had been just a month ago. The “rainy” season is over. The fifth year of drought has turned out to be the driest of the five. Even the Farmer’s Almanac offers no clue as to whether autumn will bring normal rainfall or a sixth year of drought.

But one plaintive sentence from Harold Carter, who runs an agricultural think-tank at UC Davis, sums up better than anything else we have heard what the future almost certainly holds for the industry he analyzes.

“The greatest threat to agriculture,” he told a recent meeting in Monterey of water experts, “is people.” What he meant, of course, was not that people habitually stab carrots with knives or forks, but that the incredible growth in California’s population inevitably means more water for people and less for crops.

Even Henry Voss, Director of the state Department of Food and Agriculture, told the Monterey conference that water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, rice and cotton may well have to yield to higher-cost produce that uses less water.

“I think that if something (like that) is not done, we have seen he golden era of agriculture pass,” Voss told the spring meeting of the Assn. of California Water Agencies.

As if to provide a model for the growing tensions between farming-as-usual and urban areas over water supplies, an environmental group recently attacked dairy subsidies, not so much for the higher milk prices they cause, but for the water being wasted to irrigate alfalfa for cattle fodder.

The Environmental Defense Fund said that about 10% of California dairy products are sold as surplus to the federal Commodity Credit Corp. Because alfalfa is so water-intensive, that translates into dairy products that consumers don’t need--all being produced with water equal to half of what the state sells to Southern California in a normal year.

As Times writer Dan Morain reported recently, analysts think water bills in Southern California could be running $100 a month by the end of the 1990s, five to 10 times as much as customers now pay. This will result from tighter standards of purity for drinking water as well as big investments in reclaiming waste water for industrial use and for watering parks and other green areas.

In that context, the EDF’s challenge on alfalfa will be hard to ignore.