California’s third year of drought is strangling the farming industry

FIVE POINTS, Calif. - The school is disappearing.

Westside Elementary opened its doors nearly a century ago here in the San Joaquin Valley, among the most productive agricultural regions on earth. As recently as 1995, nearly 500 students filled its classrooms. Now 160 students attend and enrollment is falling fast.

This was where the children of farmworkers learned to read and write, often next to the children of the farm owners who employed their parents. But the farms are also vanishing, as hundreds of thousands of acres of rich soil are left unplanted each year.

The hard truth here, the one that fundamentally shapes the lives of those in the valley, is that water is disappearing. So is a way of life, a core of California economic culture, and a place that provides a nation struggling under the rising rate of inflation with a quarter of its food.

"This is getting progressively worse each year," said Baldomero Hernandez, the principal of Westside Elementary, who has lived in this hot, hazy valley for more than six decades. "And it is all because of a lack of water."

California's drought is intensifying as it enters a third year, and along with much else here in the San Joaquin, the hope that a wet end to 2021 would bring more water has disappeared, too. The same sentiment holds across much of the parched American west.

After a rainy and snow-filled December, the state endured its driest start to a year in at least a century. The end-of-year storms that raised the level of state reservoirs and brought a bounty of essential snow to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges are a distant memory.

A survey this month found that the year’s historically dry start has resulted in a snowpack more than 60% below average. Not a single major reservoir is filled to its average for this time of year. The one that serves the water district here, the nation’s largest by area, is less than half-full as the state’s wet season ends this month.

Wind and wildfire have been more common than rain this year. Less than half an inch of rain fell one day two weeks ago on Sacramento, the capital 180 miles north of here through the valley, to break a record 66-day streak without precipitation during winter months.

The whiplash has prompted the federal Central Valley Project, the vast Depression-era system of pumps, aqueducts and reservoirs that provides much of this region's surface water, to declare a second straight year of no water deliveries. The announcement means farmers across the valley must rely on depleted groundwater supplies and what they have been able to store.

Two weeks ago, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an additional $22.8 million in aid for what his office called “an immediate drought emergency.” The state, too, announced earlier this year that it would provide only 15% of its scheduled water deliveries, which primarily serve residential customers in Southern California. On Friday, given the withering recent weather, state water officials cut deliveries to 5%.

About one-third of the drought relief money will go toward encouraging conservation efforts, which have proven unsuccessful so far. In recent weeks, hundreds of farmers and residents have gathered for drought town halls meetings, mostly in the rural north, where the message has been to prepare for a planting season with the scant water on hand.

"There's a basic question that we need to address and that is do we want to sustain irrigated agriculture in California?" said Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands Water District, which oversees federal water deliveries to more than 700 farms here spread over 1,000 square miles.

"If the answer is yes, then we need to determine how we're going to invest in the infrastructure we need and what policies need to be changed to preserve it," he continued. "If the answer is no, then how are we going to deal with the socio-economic impacts of its elimination?"

Those consequences can already be seen in the heart of California's nearly $50 billion annual agriculture industry with implications for the nation's food supply and the state's long-term environmental health.

California’s Central Valley, which includes the San Joaquin, produces about 8% of the nation’s fruits, vegetables, dairy products and other food, as measured by value, according to the federal government.

That translates into roughly a quarter of the nation's food, according to federal government statistics, and 40% of its fruits and vegetables. Farmers in the Westlands district produce nearly $2 billion worth of food and fiber crops annually.

But the scarcity of water and the now-exorbitant price for it has prompted many farmers to leave large tracts of land fallow, an alarming trend that is accelerating with each dry year.

According to a UC Merced study conducted for the state, California farmers left nearly 400,000 acres of agricultural land unplanted last year due to a lack of water. The result, the study found, was a direct economic cost to farmers of $1.1 billion and the loss of nearly 9,000 agricultural jobs.

Nearly all of the fallowed land is here in the Central Valley. Farmers in the Westlands district left 200,000 acres idle last year — an area almost five times the size of Washington, D.C. — and some say they expect to leave even more unplanted this year.

The environmental implications of the drought are also grave. In 2014, the state legislature passed a law that requires water districts to eliminate any “overdraft” in pumping — removing groundwater faster than it can be replenished — within two decades of its passage.

Westlands water officials say groundwater within the district is being pumped today at almost twice the rate deemed sustainable. Hundreds of groundwater wells are running dry as the water table sinks with each dry year.

“We’re on a collision course with economics,” said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “We’re going to end up fallowing millions of acres, so, politically, what does that look like? I think the decision is being made, although no one is making it, about the future of agriculture. And I think the answer is not what people want.”