By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
One, of course, is the third year of drought. I refer here to
nature’s lack of rain and snow. But also factor in the state’s additional
man-made drought, through diversions of precious stored reservoir water from
agriculture and community use to environmental causes that demand more river
water must flow out to the sea.
The state’s environmental fanatics over thirty years ago cancelled
the critical tertiary phases of the California Water Project and the federal
Central Valley Project. I guess those in the Bay Area whose lives rest on Hetch Hetchy
delivered reservoir water deemed reservoirs for all others passé and
so 19th century.
The result is that a brilliantly engineered water transfer system
— 80% of Californians live where 20% of the state’s rain and snow fall —
designed to incrementally expand as population grew, became frozen in amber. We
had a wonderful water storage system for 23 million people in 1980. But it
proved completely inadequate for the 40 million plus of 2014, who assumed
household and drinking water, irrigation supplies, and clean hydroelectric
power came out
of thin air.
The other facet of this disaster is a surreal, counterintuitive
mad land rush in the Central Valley. The focus is on any farmland in a strip
from the Sierra foothills to five miles west of the 99 Highway. Open land that
just five years ago went for $5,000 to $6,000 per acre is now selling at
$20,000 and more. Nut orchards and prime vineyard land that were priced at
$15,000 in 2009 now are haggled over at $30,000 to $40,000. The price seems to
escalate monthly in direct proportion to the fall of the water table.
Why exactly is farmland so insanely priced, when canal water is
nonexistent and the water table is dropping several feet each month — as tens
of thousands of farmers tap their savings to deepen their wells to grab what
they can of the shrinking aquifer?
The answer is complex. One, the growth of India, China, Southeast
Asia and the Pacific as consumers of California specialty crops coincides with
steady inflation here at home in the price of food. In such a perfect storm,
farming has never been more lucrative. It is almost as if the more regulations,
taxes, and rules that are put on farming, the more food becomes precious.
Prices to almond growers have reached $3 and more a pound. Some
mature nut varieties bring $8,000 to $10,000 in profits per acre. As
farmers swarm to plant crops like almonds or pistachios, they abandon old
marginally profitable produce like grapes and stone fruit — and such reductions
in those acreages have likewise revitalized the fresh and dried fruit markets.
In a word, price-wise everything in California is now good, and water-wise
everything is lousy — with one weird caveat. Let me elaborate a bit more on the
underground contours that frame the reaction to the drought.
The old hydrologists and geologists warned us that annual
snowmelts run off the Sierra granite, on past the clay foothill soil, and seep
into a huge sandy loam aquifer from about ten miles to forty miles distant. But
quite precipitously that aquifer plunges as one heads each mile westward to the
Coast Range, so much so that out by Highway 33 to I-5, it is not uncommon to
hunt for brackish water at 1500 feet and more.
In other words, without the water projects’ deliveries of surface
irrigation water from Northern California, the multibillion-dollar vast West
Side — excellent soils, brilliantly engineered canal systems, a font of
agribusiness genius — is threatened with abject extinction. I grew up hunting
with my father out on the pre-water project “West Side.” shooting jack rabbits
and ground squirrels among the parched salt flats, tumbleweeds, and brambles
that offered marginal cattle raising lands at best.
If we cut the surface water to the West Side or simply don’t have
it, the verdant bread basket of the nation returns to desert — and with it are
lost billions of dollars in export earnings, thousands of jobs, tens of
billions in spin-off economic commerce, and assurances of affordable food, from
cotton and lettuce to pistachios and tomatoes.
As millions of these acres remain threatened, a desperate
agribusiness looks eastward, to the well-watered loams far closer to the
Sierra. Here, in towns like Reedley, Selma, Fowler, Fresno and Madera, the
aquifer is, for a while longer, close to the surface. It has been replenished
by snow runoff for centuries, and canal water recharge ponds for over 100
years.
If there is a fourth year of drought, the West Side, as we have
known it, is doomed, but not necessarily the East Side. To continue to garner
record-high commodity prices — which only soar further on fears of water
shortages — everyone seems to want part of the old agrarian mosaic here to the
east, where the old homesteaded 40- and 80-acre plots sit atop good, relatively
shallow water, even in these trying times of drought. (There were reasons why
our ancestors settled where they did).
Even as a tiny farmer who now rents out his vineyard and works
weekly on the coast, I have watched for three years this chaos with
bewilderment. Everyone I know (myself included) is water-obsessed. We keep
paying taxes to irrigation districts, but have not had a drop for three years.
New wells are drilled constantly (the waiting list for drillers is long and the
price has skyrocketed).
The hunt for water proves a vicious cycle: the pump sucks air from
a dry well in a sinking water table, so the farmer pays thousands of dollars to
deepen his well or drill a new one so that he can pay more for electricity for
a bigger pump to draw less water from a lower level which only forces the
collective water table even lower.
Magnify each farmer’s ordeal hundreds of thousands of times over,
and just when you sense abject madness, stop!
For a year or more, all this money, time, and effort may well yet
save an orchard or vineyard at a time of record prices. Men get mean over
water, more so than over almost anything else I’ve seen. I witness and hear of
lies and thieving, of the piratical and selfish, as farmers scramble to crowd
to the head of the well-drilling list, or to cancel once iron-clad pump
easements, or beg to share a neighbor’s well until they can drill a new one. It
reminds me of my grandfather’s 19th-century stories of shoot-outs at
local ditch gates.
Speculators, real estate agents, and fly-by-nighters circulate.
They come with all sorts of buy-out offers, strange lease schemes, long-term
preposterous visions of vast orchard developments — all in a panic mode to find
farmland with water.
Of course, give us a wet year with an extraordinary snowfall, and
all this madness vanishes as life returns to normal. But that is no given. Now
paranoia rules, and fears grow that there will be a fourth or fifth year of
drought, or that the greens will end all surface delivery in their selfish
desire to promote baitfish over people.
A final reflection: The last thirty years saw the final
destruction of the long-ailing California family farmer and his parochial world
of agrarianism. The family farm was not a business, but a proverbial way of
life that revolved around seasonal rhythms, local rural get-togethers, and a
shame culture where farmers sought to raise kids that would not embarrass a
100-year family reputation. All that is over here, as their small tesserae are
now recombined into larger mosaics of corporate farms. Economy of scale,
mechanization, and efficiency leave no room for quaint ideas of raising kids to
learn the value of hard, monotonous work, or to neither romanticize nor harm
nature, or to remember to treat the rich and poor man the same, or to remember
to match your lofty words with mundane deeds of living what you profess.
As I see the well rigs fly by, the for-sale signs spring up, and
the investors scour the countryside, I think of all these small farms whose
owners are now dead, whose children long ago moved away with the bad prices,
and the now rougher rural communities (illegal immigration, meth labs, and the
destruction of manufacturing jobs were not kind to rural California).
In this season of drought, when I see these old vineyards
bulldozed out, their clapboard homes obliterated, the once uneven land reformed
— as the land produces as never before — I think of their
ghosts still. They were the Hazelhoffers, Garabedians, and the Yamamotos
and thousands like them, the moral universe of rough but good men and their
axioms of “Treat me fair, and I’ll do the same,” “He kept his word,” “The
Smith kid was spoiled and no damn good,” and “Remember who you are and where
you came from.”
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