West Coast Observer: California’s Water Problem

By William Silveira

A friend on the East Coast recently sent me a link to the New York Times article “The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking” [by Lois Henry, May 25]. Its opening sounds a siren:

CORCORAN, Calif. — In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.
    Corcoran is sinking.

[You can read the whole article here, after I provide a context for you.]

Groundwater overdrafting  and land subsidence are a problem all over the central valley, but they are dramatically most obvious in Corcoran.
    It has been reported that the Friant-Kern Canal, which supplies irrigation water from the San Joaquin River east of Fresno down to the eastside of Tulare and Kern Counties, is subsiding as well. Engineering changes are being planned, but as matters stand it can carry only about half the water for which it was designed. (That’s a little academic this year as there is not much water available from Millerton Lake on the San Joaquin River.)
    Some of the companies mentioned in the Times article haven’t stopped at pumping out water from Corcoran. The Lower Tulare Irrigation District, which covers a huge area of land south of Tulare (including my father’s farm) has for years followed a policy of buying up extra water to recharge underground aquifers. It was quite successful and stabilized the underground water table.

Thousands of acres
of pistachios

But now some of the companies mentioned have purchased land on the western boundaries of the Lower Tule Irrigation District, drilled wells on that land, and are pumping water from there, via the state water project canal to the west, and drawing it out again in western Kern County to irrigate what was essentially desert in the area of Lost Hills. There they have planted thousands of acres of pistachios (Lost Hills, lost water!)

    The company that has done this is owned by Lynda and Stewart Resnick. They are philanthropists and live in a Beverly Hills mansion. (One of Lynda’s philanthropic gestures was her donation to the Los Angeles Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard of her collection of 19th-Century gowns worn by 19th-Century European queens. She even donated the money for a special building to house the collection. I wonder whether it includes a gown worn by Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake!”)?
    Lynda is also the brains behind the pomegranate juice brand, Pom Wonderful. A government agency finally made her rein in some of her more extravagant claims for the allegedly marvelous health benefits of the stuff. (It all calls to mind the old saying, “When you get lemons, make lemonade.”) In this case they made pomegranate juice from pomegranates grown on what had been intermittently farmed ground in the Terra Bella area. They’re also growing them in Lost Hills.

When the Boswell Company and other large landowners around Corcoran grew field crops like cotton, corn, and alfalfa, some of the irrigation water percolated back into the underground water stratas. But now much of the land south of Corcoran has been planted to pistachios, which use more water than those field crops. Moreover, thousands of acres south of Corcoran that had been considered too marginal to plant to field crops, and were therefore not farmed, have been planted to pistachios. These trees are watered by drip systems, so very little water makes it into the underground aquifers.
    As you might imagine, water in California is a very political issue, and it’s hard to get big financial interests together to do anything in the public interest. The legislation mentioned in the Times article is an attempt by the legislature to address some of the problems. I think that it’s probably too late for Corcoran, southern Kings County, and western Tulare County.
    In our last big drought I heard a story about a farmer in northwestern Kings County who had drilled a very deep well that yielded water that was so salty his cattle wouldn’t drink it.
    My nephew, Craig, owned a section of land in Tulare County very near to Corcoran. It was good, rich ground, but he saw the handwriting on the wall and sold it. He then bought other farm land south of Farmersville.

Our U.S. congressman, Devin Nunes, a Trump stalwart, is closely allied with the Westlands Water District in western Fresno County. Most of the Westlands water comes from the state water project. But this year is a drought year and there is no water from the state water project. Nunes has been advocating for the construction of another dam on the San Joaquin River, in addition to the Friant Dam. But there is no support for that. It’s doubtful that even if it were built it would contribute much to solving the water shortage.
    The real problem is that there is simply not enough water to irrigate all the potentially irrigable land in the central valley. Back in the 1960s the voters were asked to approve a very large bond issue for the construction of the state water project. It was hyped as a solution to the overdrafting of underground water in western Fresno and Kings Counties. The trouble was that after large landowners acquired access to that water they began farming land that had never been farmed before for lack of water.

Copyright © 2021 by William Silveira