Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment
December 31, 2007
1. Top Items
Delta water exports halved; It was the first cut rising from a court ruling to protect threatened smelt - Sacramento Bee
A growing thirst; Water cutbacks changing Valley agriculture - Sacramento Bee
Delta water exports halved; It was the first cut rising from a court ruling to protect threatened smelt
Sacramento
By Matt Weiser, staff writer
Water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta were slashed in half Friday to protect a threatened fish, marking the first action sparked by a federal court order earlier this month.
The Dec. 14 ruling by U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger in
But those water exports have contributed to a steep decline in the population of the smelt, a fragile fingerling protected by the Endangered Species Act. The fish are not strong enough to resist the pull of the pumps, which reverse natural water flows in the Delta.
Wanger's ruling requires pumping reductions under certain conditions that affect the smelt. One of those triggers was tripped on Christmas Day when water clarity declined at a South Delta monitoring site.
"It's a belated Christmas present to the Delta smelt from Judge Wanger," said Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. "It is a historic occasion."
DWR and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had three days to respond after the trigger point was reached. They did so Friday morning by reducing combined pumping from 5,250 cubic feet per second to about 2,400, said Carl Torgersen, chief of operations and maintenance for the state Department of Water Resources.
The goal is to minimize reverse flows in the Delta to meet a threshold set by the court. The result, Torgersen said, will be about 5,600 acre-feet of water per day not delivered to users. That's enough water for about 10,000 average households for a year.
The cutback probably won't have an immediate effect. Torgersen said it will hinder the ability to refill San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos, a storage point for the southbound water.
But there could be long-term shortages, particularly if 2008 ends up being a drought year.
The pumping reductions must continue for 10 days unless rainfall substantially boosts natural runoff through the Delta.
"But we don't see that in the forecast," Torgersen said. "The effects of the Wanger decision can vary greatly and I wouldn't be able to say right now that it's actually putting us in a drought or not. That's a tough one."
The Zone 7 Water Agency, which serves about 200,000 customers around
"While this one cutback won't impact our customers' taps, it is going to reduce our supply of water for the year," said spokeswoman Boni Brewer. "Obviously the Delta habitat is in trouble and we're hoping there's some solution that can protect that habitat and long-term water supplies."
Zone 7 has already increased residential water rates by about $2.25 per month to pay for conservation measures and emergency supplies. Officials have also urged customers to reduce consumption by 10 percent.
The smelt's plight is viewed by many biologists as a warning of larger ecosystem troubles in the Delta. The smelt's decline is blamed on pumping effects as well as poor water quality, competition from invasive species, and loss of habitat and food.
Wildlife officials are preparing a new court-ordered management plan for the smelt, which may include water delivery rules that could make Friday's pumping reductions commonplace.
State officials are also studying long-term solutions, including major habitat restoration projects and new ways to move farm and domestic water around the Delta, such as a canal. #
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/597256.html
A growing thirst; Water cutbacks changing Valley agriculture
Sacramento
By Jim Downing, staff writer
RIVERDALE – "For a long time, water was almost taken for granted," said Mark Borba, his Lincoln Navigator whooshing past a field studded with railcar-sized cotton bales.
Borba, 57, has farmed the deep loam southwest of
Today, though, the Delta is in trouble. Fish populations are crashing, and scientists have been unable to explain why.
Water quality is poor. And the exported water that farmers like Borba had come to count as almost a birthright is in jeopardy as never before.
Last summer, state and federal officials throttled back the big Delta pumps, citing an imminent threat to the Delta smelt, a tiny fish protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.
Last year's dry winter left reservoirs depleted, with deliveries for 2008 expected at half of maximum. Earlier this month, a federal judge laid out a fish-protection plan likely to trim pumping by an additional 15 percent to 30 percent.
"This is by far the most serious condition that I can remember going into a water year," said Dan Nelson, executive director of the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, a coalition of water districts that depend on Delta water.
Even as proposals for billions of dollars in new reservoirs and a Delta bypass swirl at the Capitol, most forecasts predict permanent cuts in the water pumped south to Borba and his neighbors.
"A lot of guys are saying, 'Do I hunker down and try to wait this out somehow, or do I really change what I do?' " Borba said.
To be sure, Borba and other influential Valley players are pushing the state and federal governments for a Delta fix that would bring them more water in the future. But Borba wouldn't have succeeded in the farm business without knowing how to adapt.
So cotton and tomatoes, which need about 3 feet of water a year, are giving way to wheat and safflower, which get by on 18 inches. He's laid thousands of acres of drip irrigation. Three years ago, he replaced 750 acres of annual crops with almond trees, which yield enough revenue to justify even high-priced water.
"We're thinking about how to get the most return per acre-foot," he said. An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to cover an acre of land one foot deep.
Water has always been valuable to farmers. But at the prices charged for deliveries from government canals, it hasn't always been precious. So farmers could turn a profit even growing thirsty, relatively low-value crops like alfalfa hay and cotton, of which Borba grew 9,000 acres as recently as 1999.
Next year, he plans just 900 acres of cotton.
"We've known forever that farmers are willing to do things differently, given the right signals," said Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank.
"What we want is to figure out the right incentives so that we can have a healthy ag sector – and a healthy farm community – that uses less water. That's the key."
Chief among those incentives, Gleick said, is the price of water.
Borba pays at least $80 an acre-foot for Delta water. His full allocation amounts to a layer of water 30.6 inches deep over his land, but he seldom gets that much. The price per acre-foot rises as the amount delivered falls.
Borba's water price is subsidized. Unlike municipal and industrial users, irrigators don't have to pay the substantial borrowing costs on their part of the more than $3 billion it took to build the Central Valley Project. Completed in the early 1970s, the project consists of 20 dams and reservoirs and 500 miles of major canals stretching from Mount Shasta to
In water-short years – as 2008 is expected to be – Borba turns to more costly alternatives: groundwater and purchases of water from farmers who have alternate supplies or aren't subject to cutbacks.
Driving through his property, Borba stops the Navigator along one of the packed-earth roads that bound his fields. A line of sprinklers stretches across a tilled field, spreading groundwater on wheat seeds sown two weeks earlier. Cotton lint, left over from the season's harvest, lines the roadside.
Wheat acreage, by contrast, is up at least 20 percent this winter, according to seed brokers. Part of that trend has to do with commodity prices, but the cost and availability of water plays a major role as well, said Borba and others.
In the drought years of 1990 and 1991, farmers in the giant Westlands Water District, Borba's area, pumped 600,000 acre-feet of water, about three times the region's sustainable yield.
"This year, we'll probably do 700,000," Borba said.
Dozens of new wells are being sunk in the district, said Russ Freeman, supervisor of resources for Westlands. But he says Borba's estimate is a worst-case projection.
"It could happen, but I'm hoping it won't. I think he is, too," Freeman said.
Farmers don't have to buy groundwater from anybody, but it still isn't cheap. Pumping costs alone run $80 to $150 an acre-foot, depending on the price of electricity or diesel. Sinking a new well to the 1,800-foot depth often required here can easily cost $1 million.
Borba grew up driving tractors and fixing irrigation lines on his father's farm. Now he spends most of his time in his office, managing a staff of 45, juggling capital, weighing risk and return. This day, he dressed for work in a crisp red-checked shirt, matching red sweater and black jeans, his black hair combed neatly.
Still, on many mornings, Borba leaves his home in
He stops now at what is, in a seeming paradox, both one of his thirstiest fields and a hedge against water shortages: an orchard of almonds.
Almonds need about 4 feet of irrigation a year. What's more, in this part of the Valley, they have to be irrigated with Delta water because the trees don't tolerate the naturally occurring boron in the groundwater.
Borba strolls through the orchard, plucking some of the few remaining nuts from the trees and twisting the hulls open in his fingers.
After an initial investment of about $10,000 an acre to plant the trees and nurture them to bearing age, an almond orchard yields revenues of $3,000 to $5,000 an acre vs. $1,000 to $1,500 for cotton.
That extraordinary return – the result of high prices maintained by steady global demand – justifies almonds' water use. Borba has planted a fifth of the 2,300 acres he owns to almonds. The rest of his 10,000 acres is either leased or farmed for other landowners.
Even in a very dry year, he figures he can keep the orchard alive by concentrating the farm's full allotment of Delta water on the almond orchard. He'll use groundwater on the rest.
But heavy groundwater pumping can go on for only so long before the wells begin to fail. As shortages continue, more land is likely to go unplanted altogether.
"It will accelerate the trend, which is to fewer acres and higher-value crops," said Richard Howitt, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis.
Almonds and other so-called "permanent" plantings, including grapevines, fruit and nut trees, are generally the last crops to go unwatered. Trees and vines represent a huge capital investment, and farmers will pay extraordinary prices for water to keep them alive.
Borba farms about 2,000 acres for landowners who have planted all their land to almonds. The Delta allocation covers only a fraction of the trees' needs, so Borba has already lined up 1,000 acre-feet for the crucial 6-inch watering after next fall's harvest.
The price: $400,000.
This fall, water for almonds elsewhere in Westlands was even dearer: $700 an acre-foot.
"$700 is nuts," Borba said.
But it also makes business sense. Without the late-season water, the trees' yield in the following year could drop by twice the value of the water.
As water has grown scarcer, and as the acreage in almonds has grown, a bustling market in these deals has developed.
"More and more so, they're nonstop, year-round," said Nelson, the water coalition director.
This year, competition from the deep-pocketed Metropolitan Water District of Southern California may drive prices especially high. The giant urban water department announced last month that it hopes to buy as much as 300,000 acre-feet from
To complicate matters, pumping restrictions in the Delta may pinch off sales of water to the
"Whatever is south of the Delta is now finite," Borba said. #
http://www.sacbee.com/103/story/596932-p2.html
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