California’s historic drought

Government estimates tell California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) it will take 11 trillion gallons of water to end the historic drought in his state.  The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration inform us the drought is due to natural causes not global warming. Californians are using too much water.

“Multi-year droughts appear regularly in the state’s climate record, and it’s a safe bet that a similar event will happen again,” a NOAA researcher advised.  The American Geophysical Union tells Sacramento the drought is the worst in 1,200 years.

{mosads}Whichever statistics you see, the California drought is massive, historic and, unbelievably, irrelevant to California’s non-caring politicians. Brown plans to allocate $1 billion for drought relief in the state’s agriculturally rich, (assuming constant water supply) Central Valley and other drought-stricken areas.

Brown’s $1 billion includes money for a variety of things including dry wells, water for fishing, aid for unemployed farm workers, and $660 million for flood protection.

If rain comes, Brown believes, it can cause sudden storms to flood unprepared communities. If floods fail to appear, perhaps some of the money can be diverted to real problems like economic hardship to small businesses.

Over the past four years, urban Democrats and rural Republicans, with help from President Obama and the House of Representatives, tried to negotiate a fair water deal to keep small businesses running and farm laborers working.

The most senior political minds in California and Washington could not reach anything resembling an agreement and walked away from the bargaining table on the economic devastation and human misery they were elected to work cooperatively to lessen despite their political differences. Meantime, urban consumers are paying as much as 4-5 percent more for California’s agricultural products.

Governor Brown is talking sacrifice to the people of California. He thinks houses should have fewer bathrooms, pools and green luscious yards. He also feels production of California’s water intensive and domestically and globally popular fruits and vegetables, walnuts and alfalfa, need to be re-thought.

More than 200 crops with an estimated value of $17 billion are grown in the Central Valley. It is water policy, by producers with technical assistance from the state that should be re-considered. The central problem is fundamental economics. Can producers lower production and management costs while increasing or maintaining yield and income without doing harm to the environment? It is a difficult question that drove negotiators from the table.   

An amazing number of California’s agricultural producers continue to use costly and inefficient sprinkler irrigation systems, or flood systems, when more efficient drip irrigation systems would lessen the amount of water usage and vastly improve water delivery to plants. This change in irrigation technology, long used in Israel and parts of Mexico, will require investment producers are not likely to have due to the drought damage to crops and income for the past four years. The initial investment in drip irrigation is also expensive.

Drip irrigation technology is expensive as is the training and management needed by producers to make it pay off. California politicians, businesses and the U.S. Department of Agriculture need to improve water usage by farmers and ranchers. They can all begin by agreeing a new production model, drip irrigation, is needed for the state to remain competitive with the crops domestic and global buyers demand from California.

Adoption of drip irrigation will lower the volume of debate between environmentalists, politicians, and freelance activists who threaten to “occupy the crops.” In short, drip irrigation will signal more responsible production management.

Expensive desalinization plants to convert ocean water to plant use, enforced conservation, and enforced water recycling are other new opportunities to improve water usage. Another approach, also costly, involves soil conditioning to retain and use water more efficiently.  Conservation and recycling have failed to significantly address the problem.  

A $1 billion desalinization plant in Carlsbad, CA, is estimated to be operational by the end of 2015. Other desalinization units are planned and needed before water scarcity becomes a thing of the past.  Still, desalinized water will not be cheap and its use may slightly alter the production economics of crops.

As Californians continue to struggle with the effects of historic drought, new responsible water policies, management, and technologies point the way to a successful future for the state’s varied business and environmental interests.

Patterson is a diplomat, writer, speaker and educator.