A different kind of harvest is in store this year

Harvest season is an iconic time of year. Summer is over, the weather cools and we turn our attention to fall. We associate autumn harvest with plentiful, fresh food, delivered to our grocery stores, and finally making its way to the family dinner table. Living in California, which produces 60% of the nation’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables, we get the best of this bounty.

Unfortunately, this year will be different. According to the University of California, Merced, 695,000 acres of California farmland is unplanted and will not produce anything this year — a 76 percent increase from last year.

Much of the blame lies with the ongoing drought. While the wet years are getting wetter and the dry ones hotter, the same cycle has occurred often in California’s past. We got by before. What’s changed?

For one thing, we’re operating under a different set of rules than in the past. One glaring example is the Interim Operations Plan that governs how much water is stored and released from Lake Shasta.

Today, Shasta is being managed first and foremost for the protection of salmon in the Sacramento River. All other uses, including water for municipal users and agriculture, come second, third, or last in the order of priority for Lake Shasta.

This single-species management strategy has failed to restore salmon populations because it ignores other stressors, including predators, inadequate upstream habitat, and more.

This year, the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors (SRSC), senior water rights holders on the Sacramento River, received just 18% of their water supply. In the past, even in very dry years, they received 75% of the water, which is used to grow food.

That means 340,000 acres, or 75%, of the SRSC land is fallowed and not producing food. And the impact of fallowed farmland doesn’t stop at the farm gate. Farms go out of business. Employees lose their jobs and potentially their homes. Schools close and local tax revenue declines, affecting the very services many of these people will need.

According to a recent report by Daniel Sumner and William Matthews at the U.C. Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Sacramento Valley region alone is facing the loss of about 14,300 jobs and a $1.315 billion hit to the economy.

Fallowed farmland also affects consumers through food shortages and higher prices. Every acre of California farmland left uncultivated is the equivalent of 50,000 salads that will not be available to consumers.

And scenes like those in the Sacramento Valley are being repeated throughout California, putting our food supply at risk.

The situation is fixable, but we need government action to prevent this scenario from repeating itself. First, we must change our water management rules to focus on the health of the entire ecosystem rather than one species at a time.

Second, climate scientists have warned us we must do a better job storing water in wet years. Building new storage, as well as repairing decades-old conveyance infrastructure is not a question of money. Proposition 1, the water storage ballot measure passed eight years ago by an overwhelming majority, has yet to spend a dime on actual construction.

Governor Newsom recently called the bureaucratic slowwalk on project permitting “ridiculous.” The state also has a $97.5 billion budget surplus and both the federal infrastructure bill of 2021 and the recent Inflation Reduction Act provide water funding.

California’s water system must be flexible, adapting to weather whiplash, so we can capture more water when it’s available.

It all comes down to one question: Is it important to have a safe, affordable, domestic food supply? We say, “absolutely!”