Bloomberg has an
interesting story on farmers in the Imperial Valley:
“You’ve been to the Grand Canyon, right?” Craig Elmore asks as he
pulls his Chevrolet Tahoe to the edge of a field plowed into tidy,
straight-as-an-arrow furrows, a section of the 6,000 acres that he
farms—land his father and grandfather farmed before him. “Basically,
right now, you’re driving over the Grand Canyon.”
Elmore speaks of the Imperial Valley with obvious pride,
right down to the origins of the dirt, carried here over millions of
years by the Colorado River as it carved the Grand Canyon ever deeper.
These fields turn lush green every fall with the lettuce, broccoli,
carrots, melons, and other fruits and vegetables that fill U.S.
supermarkets all winter. It’s a scorching 109 degrees Fahrenheit (43
degrees Celsius) outside his air-conditioned SUV on this August day, but
from November through March, temperatures moderate, and this small
section of the Sonoran Desert in California’s southeast corner becomes a
perfect spot to grow food.
Perfect, if you have water. And the farmers of the Imperial Valley have a
wealth of water. A handful of landowners—about 500 farms in all—control
the rights to 3.1 million acre-feet a year from the Colorado River.
That’s equal to about a third of the water used by California’s cities,
with 37 million people, where a four-year drought
means neighbors report you if your lawn is green. Or, to measure
another way, it’s half again as much water as Governor Jerry Brown aims
to save under his April executive order,
which set a February 2016 deadline for a 25 percent reduction in urban
use. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons (1.2 million liters) and can
supply the household needs of about 10 people for a year, though actual
water use rates vary widely....
The most basic principle governing water use in
the western U.S. is this: first in time, first in right. That’s why
Imperial Valley farmers have so much water. They arrived early, building
the first canal to withdraw Colorado River water and ship it to the
valley in 1901. When John Elmore came to the valley more than a century
ago, he worked for a time digging canals with something called a Fresno
Scraper, an innovative tool for its era, with a blade something like
that of a modern bulldozer but pulled by mules. In the 1930s, the
federal government built the All-American Canal, which flows along the
Mexican border from the Colorado River about 80 miles (130 kilometers)
to the Imperial Valley. It’s the highest-capacity irrigation canal in
the world (and still full).
Elsewhere in California, many conflicting water rights
have never been adjudicated, but the Imperial Valley’s allotment has
been defined and affirmed in court.
I found this comment pretty comical:
Another Imperial Valley farmer, Ronnie Leimgruber, whose grandfather
immigrated here from Switzerland in 1918, is skeptical that anyone else
deserves his water. “Do we really need 127 golf courses in Palm Springs
for Obama and the Hollywood elite?” He raises alfalfa, the most
water-intensive crop that’s grown in California, but has taken steps to
cut his irrigation use.
Yeah, because growing alfalfa in the desert and exporting it to Saudi Arabia makes a ton of sense. But if you want a real summary of the problem facing farmers throughout California, it is this:
“Agriculture accounts for 2 percent of the state’s gross domestic
product and 80 percent of the water consumed by humans,” says Stephen
Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California
Economy in Palo Alto. So there’s a tension between city dwellers and
farmers, Levy says. “Who do you think’s going to win that fight?” His
view is that urban areas should and will get the water they need if it’s
being wasted on the farms—a stance many politicians and regulators
echo.
It may take a while, but I'm pretty sure farmers are going to lose.
