The irrigation crisis

Talk to an ag producer and the complaint is restricted irrigation. Today's water allocation is only ten percent of what it used to be and "they" are talking about shutting us off completely. Crops are suffering from drought. Whole fields are allowed to dry up and wither away. The government, the one we pay taxes to, is requiring us to shut off the irrigation ditches and restrict pumping so that the water, our water, can go to our neighbors. Sure we are short on water; that is what happens in a drought. Signs along the highway read "Crop Water Produces Food" and "If you like foreign gas, you will love foreign food!"

All the above we heard and read on our recent travels along I-5 and CA-99 through the San Joaquin Valley in California. Somehow though it sounded just like the ongoing complaints that we hear daily in Southwestern Nebraska. About the only difference is that the "neighbor" demanding the delivery of water is not Kansas, it is instead the EPA demanding fresh water minimum flows into the Sacramento Delta ostensibly for a minnow sized fish. Evidently the two inch Delta Smelt, Hypomesus transpacificus, has been declared endangered and a California Federal Court judge, by edict, ordered the easy solution of taking the "needed" water out of the farmer's hides.

The restrictions on water have similar roots to the Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska problems of which we are familiar. Years ago the Federal government did construction projects to build dams and develop irrigation along the San Joaquin River. The idea was to encourage small family farms so each farmer was allocated adequate water to irrigate crops on 160 acres of land. The federal government funded the construction but each irrigator had to pay fees to cover the delivery of the water and to cover "repayment" of capitol costs. It must have been the same government that built similar dams and irrigation systems in this area because the 160 acre allocation and repayment systems work the same way both places.

The San Joaquin Valley in California is an agriculture wonder. Farmers there can grow about any crop including corn, wheat, soybeans, dairy, beef, rice, dry edible beans, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, carrots, peaches, almonds, English walnuts, pistachios, edible grapes, wine grapes, figs, peaches, apricots, pomegranates, onions, melons garlic, artichokes and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. We lived in Merced in the midst of it all during the early 1970s. My next door neighbor had 800 acres of rice and the fellow across the street raised corn for Frito Lay. My best friend had a 60 acre almond orchard. Merced County is much larger than normal Nebraska counties but I was told that its gross agriculture income (not counting cannabis production and sales) was equal to the whole ag income for the state of Nebraska.

California agriculture underwent the same revolution we experienced in Nebraska. Today 160 acres can produce income to sustain a family only if specialized labor intensive crops such as "organic" garden vegetables are grown. Today's commercial farms have become huge and mechanized. Preferred crops are those that can be produced with the minimum amount of labor. Irrigation through drip and center pivot is much more efficient so less water is required per acre. It seems like I have heard the same thing here too.

Remember the systems were built and irrigation water was allocated on the basis of 160 acres per farmer. As the farms were consolidated and grew the law was changed and fudged so that today's mega farms can still have adequate water to produce their high value crops. So that is one source of resentment as explained by my liberal leaning buddy. He named a huge dairy nearby, 25,000 cows producing price subsidized milk. (Honestly I have no idea whether milk prices are subsidized or not.) Cows eat corn silage, a crop that replaces direct human food crops. Therefore the justification for the irrigation project, the raising of human food is being unfairly circumvented. Jim said that he can live without milk but he can't live without water.

Enter the EPA which discovers that a native minnow, the delta smelt is endangered and a chance to shut down the bad old mega-farms. Actually the farmers in California are facing a bigger threat and that is the other use and justification for building the California Central Canal in the first place. The California Aqueduct, fed by the Central Canal, is one of several projects built to move water from the Sierra's and northern California to the Los Angeles Basin. Irrigation was merely additional justification for originally building the project. Ever increasing populations of Los Angeles and other Southern California cities demand adequate water to support their way of life. They have more votes than the farmers in the food producing valleys on farther north, a fact not ignored by politicians and judges. No judge is going to shut off water headed south to SoCal and its millions of voters when he has the excuse of saving an endangered fish, no matter how small and useless. There aren't very many farmer votes and we can always import food from Mexico. Right?

So maybe our future here in Southwest Nebraska will mirror the decline in ag production from the San Joaquin Valley. We too can import food from Kansas while our politicos sacrifice our irrigation water to buy votes.

That is the way I saw it.