When Americans think of California, they tend to think of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the golden coast—"a place where the grass is really greener, warm, wet and wild" as Santa Barbara native Katy Perry swoons in "California Gurls." Or they think of the liberals and environmentalists who dominate state government.
Yet there's another California, set back
from the left coast, in the abundantly fertile Central Valley, which
produces half of America's fruits and vegetables; more than 98% of its
almonds, pistachios and walnuts; a third of U.S. dairy exports—and
Trader
Joe's
Two Buck Chuck wine. This California has come under siege from
the California of politicians and regulators, a siege that has been
especially harmful during the current prolonged period of drought and
water shortages. The storms that hit the state a couple of weeks ago
didn't make a dent in the water shortfall or in the farmers' larger
problems.
Just ask Mark Watte, a
second-generation dairyman and nut grower from rural Tulare, who doesn't
mince words. "Everywhere you turn, they are coming at us with this
nonsensical b.s.!" he says. Who are "they"? Environmentalists, though
the beleaguered California farmer cautions against using that word:
"Most of them don't really care about the environment. They are
obstructionists."
The 61-year-old farmer
tends to speak with exclamation marks when he's revved up—and that's
often these days.
Mr. Watte
sat down to chat recently at the Tulare Golf Course restaurant,
where the dress code is jeans-and-flannel and the music strictly
country. He was joined by Rep.
Devin Nunes,
who grew up working on a family-owned dairy farm that is still
managed by his 95-year-old grandmother.
The
congressman rolls out a large map of California's sprawling irrigation
system showing its rivers, canals, dams and lakes. The ultimate aim of
the environmentalists, Mr. Watte says, is to wipe out 1.3 million acres
of farmland and return the valley basin to its once-swampy state.
West-side
growers have already taken tens of thousands of acres out of
production. This year they plan to leave fallow half a million more
acres, a drastic move spurred by a depletion of aquifers and suspension
of state water deliveries. Harris Farms alone is taking 9,000 acres that
would have grown melons, tomatoes, bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage and
lettuce out of production. One result of farmers scaling back is that 72
million heads of lettuce won't be produced in California and likely
will be imported instead from Mexico.
Mr.
Watte explains that west-side farmers in the Central Valley are idling
all their crops except for high-value nut trees, which the farmers are
paying a premium to keep on the drip. An acre-foot of water (enough to
submerge an acre of land in one foot of water) can cost up to $1,300
compared with about $40 a few years ago. Meanwhile, some farmers are
drilling deeper wells at a cost of $1 million per hole. These wells may
last only five years, and the groundwater is often too salty to irrigate
crops.
East-side farmers like Mr. Watte
who were blessed with rich aquifers are also having to pump deeper.
Later, on a tour of his farm, he drops a rock down a well. The "plunk"
that reverberates is music to his ears since it means he still has
groundwater. But he expects many pumps to break by this fall due to
heavy use, which could force him to leave some land fallow. He also
worries that farmers are causing "long-term permanent environmental
damage" by depleting aquifers. "Once an aquifer is gone, you can't
restore it."
"I'm more worried about
2024 than 2014," says Mr. Watte who has worked on the farm since his
father transplanted their family here from Long Beach in 1958. Mr. Watte
and one of his two brothers,
Brian,
took over the business when their dad retired in 1984 and have
since tripled its footprint to 4,500 acres. While Mr. Watte's three
daughters aren't involved in day-to-day operations, a son-in-law and
nephew help run the business.
Liberals
blame the water shortage on record dry weather and climate change.
(Climate models predict that California will get wetter if the world is
warming, but never mind.) Those explanations ignore that
San Joaquin
farmers haven't received 100% of their contractual water
allocations from the federal Central Valley Project since 2006, even in
years of heavy rain or snow. Farmers got only 45% of the water they were
due in 2010, when precipitation was 110% of the norm. Regulations
ostensibly intended to protect fish like the three-inch delta smelt,
steelhead and chinook salmon, Mr. Watte says, are to blame.
He
explains that California Democratic Rep.
George Miller
in 1992 led the first major water siege with the Central Valley
Project Improvement Act, which allocated 1.2 million acre-feet of water
to wildlife—enough to sustain 1.2 million families and 300,000 acres.
The law aggravated the existing acrimony between farmers and
environmentalists, and resulted in a turf war between federal and state
regulators.
Eventually,
green groups, farmers, the feds and state reached an armistice with the
1994 Bay Delta Accord, which jettisoned a demand by environmental
groups to restore fish to a dry stretch of the San Joaquin River. Sen.
Dianne Feinstein
in October 1994 expressed her unequivocal opposition to "any
effort to take water from
Friant Dam
for the purpose of restoring a long gone fishery on the San
Joaquin River." Such a water diversion, she said, would have proved
devastating to "10,000 small, family farms."
But
environmental groups soon broke the peace by suing for more water
diversions to protect salmon and smelt. By 2009, Ms. Feinstein's views
had reversed: She backed the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement
Act, whose goal was to restore fish to what had been a dry river bed.
But not just any fish—specifically, cold-water salmon that hadn't been
documented at the site since the 1940s. Cold-water salmon require "huge
volumes of water" to thrive, Mr. Watte notes, and he thinks that was
exactly the point. The environmentalists "don't care about fish," he
says. "The fish are just a prop, a vehicle to get our water."
That may sound paranoid, but consider that
about 400,000 acre-feet of water over the past two years have been
diverted from farm use merely to conduct salmon test-runs on
the dry river. Such prodigious use of water for seemingly everything but
farming is starting to seem familiar to growers. For the past seven
years, federal regulators have been flushing hundreds of thousands of
acre-feet of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta into the
San Francisco Bay on the pretext of protecting three-inch smelt from
pumps that send water to farmers in the Central Valley.
It's
ironic, Mr. Watte says, that the biggest threat to the smelt is
"Sacramento and other communities that are pumping their sewage into the
delta—or not treating it the way they should be." Another irony:
Government biologists kill more smelt each year conducting population
surveys than do the delta's water pumps. Meanwhile, Mr. Watte notes, San
Francisco is piping in "pristine water from Yosemite"—thereby
circumventing the delta—while liberals demand that more water be
diverted from farmers to restore the smelt's polluted ecosystem.
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