Farms’ water crisis: ‘The plants are going to die’
Produce growers destroying trees, crops, leaving much of their land bare
Normally, Humberto Castañeda Produce grows heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, watermelons and other crops on its 180acre farm outside of Santa Rosa. But this year, Humberto Castañeda and his son, Gabriel, are planting only 17 acres after receiving a fraction of their normal allotment of water.
“I could plant the whole farm and have water that might last me for a month,” said Gabriel, 27, who is managing the farm his father founded in the 1980s for the first time this season. “After that, the plants are going to die.”
The Castañedas, Sonoma County’s largest vegetable growers, are among countless farmers across the state taking drastic measures to deal with the drought, either because they’re not getting their usual irrigation allotments or because the ponds they normally rely on are drying up in the second year of California’s drought. Almond growers are pulling stillproductive trees out of the earth in enormous numbers, and a Fresno County vegetable farmer made the local TV news after discing under rows of green asparagus he couldn’t irrigate. Dairy farmers are trucking in water for their cows, and beef operations are cutting back on production.
“It’s been the most stressful year of my career,” said Byron Palmer, grassland manager of Sonoma Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that manages
cattle using sustainable practices on several ranches in Sonoma County. With thousands of animals spread out at remote locations, Palmer and his crew rely on a number of “water points,” such as springs or ponds, where the animals drink at each ranch. “On any given day, they might stop producing water. You don’t get a text message.”
California’s agriculture sector is likely to experience the biggest impact of the recordbreaking drought. The economic toll on agriculture was estimated at $2.7 billion in 2015, the worst year of the last drought, according to UC Davis.
A few things are already different about this drought, said Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Northern California was much drier in the beginning of the year than it was in 2015, and its watersheds and snowpacks are the source of most of the water that supplies Central Valley farmers, she said. In addition, increased daily temperatures melted that snowpack quickly, and soil conditions are severely dry, she said.
While farmers warn that lost production will result in higher food prices, especially as dry conditions extend to other growing regions that supply the U.S. market, such as northern Mexico, Ross doesn’t see food scarcity or price increases as a given.
“Because many of the products can be sourced from other parts of California, we may not see immediate price implications,” she said.
The drought’s hit to California farms is uneven, depending on the source in the state’s complex and overtapped water distribution system. Senior water rights holders in the Sacramento Valley, called the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors, are receiving 75% of their normal allotment from the federal Central Valley Water Project, while other irrigation districts that draw from the same project are getting nothing. Even with its larger allotment, SRSC members are taking 30,000 of their 110,000 irrigated acres out of production, said Thaddeus Bettner of the GlennColusa Irrigation District.
The Castañedas also grow almonds on a 50acre parcel outside Modesto that is part of the Central California Irrigation District and will receive sufficient water, Gabriel Castañeda said. But in Santa Rosa, where he grows vegetables for local markets and Safeway, the city has cut back the amount of recycled water it provides to farmers by 60%, said Tawny Tesconi, executive director of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau.
Castañeda said he probably could have grown more in Santa Rosa but didn’t know until too late in the season how much water the farm would receive. Many of his standard crops, including butternut squash, and jalapeño, poblano, bell and other types of peppers need to be started in late February or March.
“We didn’t want to make the investment of growing a bunch of plants and not be able to plant them because of the water,” he said.
To retain moisture in the soil, Castañeda covers the ground with plastic sheeting, “like its own little greenhouse,” he said.
Dairy farms in western Sonoma County that rely on surface water are also quickly running low. Since each dairy cow drinks 30 to 40 gallons of water a day, larger dairies whose ponds have almost dried up are trucking in 35,000 to 40,000 gallons of water a day from local water haulers, Tesconi said. Water truckers haul recycled municipal water provided by Sonoma County.
“There’s places out there where even if you draw the well, you can’t get water,” she said.
Sonoma Mountain Institute, which cares for cattle owned by other ranchers and rotates them across different pastures it either owns or manages, returned the cattle to the owners early because there weren’t enough water or grasses on the pastures, said Palmer, who also coowns Grounded Grassfed, a small ranching company in Petaluma. That resulted in a loss of 30% of business and increased costs of 20% because they needed to hire more staff to make sure the animals weren’t going thirsty.
In Fresno County, the country’s topproducing agriculture region with $7.7 billion in revenue in 2019, farms on the western side of the county received none of their normal allotment from the federal Central Valley Project. That led Woolf Farming and Processing, which produces canning tomatoes, almonds, pistachios and other crops, to pull out 400 acres of almond trees that were only 15 years into their 25year lifespan. The company also decided not to grow an additional 100 acres of tomatoes it had planned.
Many farmers’ fallback in dry years is to buy water from farmers with a surplus or to pump groundwater. But there hasn’t been extra water to buy, and groundwater is especially limited in the San Joaquin Valley because of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, a state policy established during the last drought that limits how much water farmers can pump from the aquifer.
“It’s like our savings account,” said Daniel Hartwig, resource manager at Woolf Farming and a fourthgeneration local almond and grape farmer. “There’s only so much you can get out of the ground.”
Recently certified as a B corporation, which requires it to meet certain environmental standards, Woolf uses less water than the industry standard, Hartwig said, and is chipping up the pulledout almond trees to reincorporate back into the soil to aid carbon sequestration.
Doing so also can increase the soil’s water retention by 20%, said Christine Gemperle, who did the same thing in the last drought. She and her brother, Erich, farm two almond orchards in the Merced area, and worked with a University of Oregon researcher to try out other conservation measures, like limiting irrigation to a bare minimum.
“You’re keeping them in this zone when they are a little stressed but not too stressed,” she said, giving a tour of their orchard in Ceres (Stanislaus County) earlier this spring, when almonds hung on the trees in fuzzy green pods. “You see your trees look a little bit thirsty and you start to freak out — does my kid need to eat?”
The Ceres orchard is located right next to a Turlock Irrigation District canal, where Gemperle’s border collie roughhoused with her brother’s boxer. While the Gemperles use micro sprinklers to target each tree’s root zone and plant cover crops between rows to retain soil moisture — they will use less than their allotment — their neighbor is using an oldschool method of flooding the trees, which could result in their running out early this year, she said.
The Gemperles’ other orchard outside Gustine (Merced County) is getting none of its normal federal water allotment. But they conserved water last year, which they were able to carry over, to water twothirds of the orchard. They will let the other third die and pull out the rest of the 24yearold trees at the end of the season and chip them up as they did last time, to use for mulch when they replant the orchard a year later.
“Since 2014, drought always looms large in the back of my mind,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever farm without thinking there’s a drought around the corner.”