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Image: Lake Oroville Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. California drought
As drought rages, California farmers look for ways to save water
California’s ongoing drought shows that we need to challenge decades of pursuit of maximizing agricultural water use.
California is recalibrating its water conservation efforts as it reels from a third straight year of agricultural drought.
“This drought has brought home the fact that California is a dry place and we can’t get all the water we want,” said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, and director of the Watershed Science Center.
Lund said limiting the use of groundwater (which lies in aquifers below the surface) during rainy years can replenish groundwater basins so municipalities and farms can tap into that water during dry times.
Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Agriculture’s Relentless Exploitation of Groundwater,” said agriculture’s relentless exploitation of groundwater has reduced its ability to be used in drought years and thus cannot play a role in alleviating drought. The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in CaliforniaHistorically, groundwater extraction has gone unregulated, largely due to the influence of powerful agribusiness interests.
Even though groundwater extraction rates have jumped 50 percent in the past few years — a typical response to drought — it is still not enough to meet the needs of the agricultural sector.
In fact, Walker explains, the current adverse impacts on agriculture are a symptom of years of imprudent, uncontrolled groundwater extraction, not just the current drought, which is not the worst by historical standards.
Read the full article: Food cans
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