SACRAMENTO—The leader of California’s largest farmers’ organization assailed as “misinformation” the oft-repeated notion that growers use 80 percent of the state’s water and urged leaders to do a better job at planning for droughts.
California Farm Bureau Federation president Paul Wenger said only about 40 percent of the state’s overall water supply is used for food production in a given year while about half is kept in-stream or sent to refuges to benefit the environment.
He said the state’s reservoirs were full in 2012 but water was released to make room for storms that never came, and that too much water from subsequent storms has been left to flow into the ocean rather than being used to ease the drought’s impacts.
“This is real, and we’re all to blame for it,” Wenger said during a water forum at the Crest Theater in Sacramento, which was sponsored by the Association of California Water Agencies.
“We are fallowing fields,” said Wenger, a Modesto, Calif., almond and walnut grower. “We are taking out 10 percent of our orchards to have enough water for our other orchards. But I have the privilege of paying taxes on my whole property as if it was producing … How would you like to live in only one room in your house but have to pay on the whole house?”
Wenger was one of more than a dozen officials and water experts to speak at the forum, which was streamed online. State water agency leaders again defended Gov. Jerry Brown’s April 1 executive order, which required cities to reduce their water use by 25 percent but imposed no new restrictions on farms.
Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, said urban infrastructure and storage have become so effective that “people don’t know where their water comes from.
“They’re hundreds of miles away from the pain that’s felt” in the form of fallowed fields and people standing in line to shower at community centers in rural areas where wells have run dry, Marcus said.
“I’ve lived in countries where you only have water for two hours a day a few days a week,” she said. “That is inconvenience. Turning your sprinklers off is not.”
State climatologist Michael Anderson said California has been in a 15-year warming trend that has led to the worst April 1 snowpack on record. He said it will take big storms in the high-precipitation months of December, January and February for the state to emerge from the drought.
“It’s not going to be one storm that gets you out of this,” Anderson said. “It’s going to be a whole water year with consistently above average rainfall as well as snowpack.”
The amount of water used by agriculture has been a source of debate in recent months, as some media outlets have repeated environmental groups’ claim that farms use 80 percent of California’s water while generating only 2 percent of its economic activity.
According to the state water board, an annual average of 8.9 million acre-feet, or 20 percent, of water diverted from streams from 1998 to 2010 went to urban uses while an average of 34 million acre feet a year, or 77 percent, was used by agriculture. Another 1.5 million acre-feet, or 3.5 percent, went to managed wetlands, agency spokesman Tim Moran told the Capital Press last summer.
But farm groups such as California Citrus Mutual argue the totals don’t take into account that a majority of the 200 million acre-feet of water supply from rain and snow in an average year remains undeveloped. A 25 percent reduction in environmental water use could save as much as 9.85 million acre-feet in one year, Citrus Mutual officials stated recently.
Wenger told the 300 gathered at the water forum and an estimated 1,000 watching online that a Department of Water Resources study done during the drought in the late 1980s and early ‘90s found that agriculture used 31 percent of the state’s surface water.
“It’s interesting when misinformation gets out there … and after it’s repeated six or so times, it becomes fact,” he said.
Wenger recalled a statement by a British Parliament member during a transportation strike that civilization “is nine meals away from anarchy,” and said California farm exports that have become a target for environmental groups feed the world.
“It’s very interesting to have folks say we shouldn’t be exporting food to other parts of the world,” Wenger said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be importing manufactured goods from other parts of the world … We import far more water (used in production of goods) from other parts of the world than we export.”
Source: www.capitalpress.com