Charge true cost of water
I recently drove up and down Interstate 5 through the Central Valley, where I saw miles of almond orchards. Almonds cultivated in irrigated Central Valley orchards once were lauded as one of the most popular and nutritious crops we grow in California. Today, almond cultivation is the poster child for profligate use of precious water supplies.
Critics decry almonds for the large amount of water they use (4 to 5 acrefeet per year, or about 1 gallon per nut). This criticism is true, if you compare it to the amount of water used by the grasslands they replaced (less than 1 acre-foot per year). But less nutritious crops like alfalfa use about as much water as almonds.
The calculus guiding water use is not likely to change much even if we let our lawns die or install low-flow toilets. Almond trees are a permanent crop, so farmers can’t stop watering the trees during the driest years. The state and federal water projects legally are obligated to send several million acre-feet of highly subsidized water to farms in the San Joaquin Valley. And, historic riparian rights support the withdrawal of water in the north part of the state where farmers flood fields to grow rice in a virtual desert. If we are to manage our state’s water resources most effectively, then we have to start with agriculture .
What makes California agriculture productive — our Mediterranean climate, with wet winters, rainless summers, and high evaporation rates — also makes the state dependent on a water system that moves vast amounts of water from the wet north to the dry south. Agriculture uses 80 percent of the state’s “developed” water — i.e., water that can be stored, moved by pumps and delivered via aqueduct or canal to field or faucet.
To endure this and future droughts, California needs a systemwide approach to manage a limited supply of water to agriculture. Rather than ranking crops by water use, we need to ask: Which crops do we want to support? How many acres of that crop do we need?
Are we willing to pay for the true cost of water to produce that crop?
For example, California produces more than 90 percent of the nation’s almonds, walnuts, apricots, pistachios and tomatoes. Should preferences be given to these crops because of their uniqueness, nutritional value, high quality and proximity to markets? Crops such as corn, rice, cotton and alfalfa can be grown where water is more plentiful and less valuable than in California. However, we have to recognize that alfalfa and corn support the dairy industry — California is the biggest dairy state — whose milk products are consumed locally, and also exported to Asia.
Because we live in a market-based economy, it is not politically welcomed to dictate who can grow what or where. Supplying agriculture with marketpriced water, rather than cheap, highly subsidized water, may provide a means to make better decisions. For perspective, last year farmers in the Central California Irrigation District near Los Banos (Merced County) paid $17 per acre-foot of water used, a price that is a fraction of the cost of storing water and pumping it across the state. If farmers paid more for water, then we would not see as many flooded pastures, or the current mix of crops and orchards.
In forging new water policy in our emerging state of drought, we should be aware of the unintended consequences of our past water-policy decisions. The Central Valley dairy and almond industries may have grown too large and too fast because water was too cheap. We don’t want to cause the collapse of agricultural sectors if water is suddenly too expensive. Time is needed for markets and prices to adjust. And there must be political will to price water at its true cost.
The bottom line: California feeds much of the nation. Any new water policy must factor that in. As droughts will return, we also need to develop a resilient agriculture-water system that can provide nutritious food and be sustained between droughts. To do so, we will need to be willing to pay more for the food we need and want to eat, and the water to produce it.