[Water_news] 5. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: AGENCIES, PROGRAMS, PEOPLE - 4/08/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

April 8, 2009

 

5. Agencies, Programs, People –

 

James G. Boswell II dies at 86; cotton magnate built family farm into agribusiness giant

The Los Angeles Times

 

No hosing off driveway, no restaurant water without asking

The Orange County Register

 

Editorial: If it takes a crisis...

The Chico Enterprise-Record

 

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James G. Boswell II dies at 86; cotton magnate built family farm into agribusiness giant

The Los Angeles Times – 4/7/09

By Jerry Hirsch

 

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Boswell built the state’s first giant agribusiness, and played an influential role in shaping the state's water and land policies.

 

Heralded as 'The King of California,' Boswell at one point oversaw an empire spanning 200,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, transforming the industry and influencing pivotal state water policies.

 

James G. Boswell II, the intensely private businessman who transformed his family's cotton holdings into California's first giant agribusiness and one of the nation's great farming empires, has died. He was 86.

Boswell died of natural causes Friday at his home in Indian Wells, Calif., according to a statement from the family.

As head of the family-owned J.G. Boswell Co., Boswell ran a company that has dominated California cotton growing for generations and has used its clout to influence land- and water-resource policy throughout much of the state.

He was just 29 when he inherited the company following the death of his uncle J.G. Boswell, the family patriarch. Over the next half-century, he transformed the business and more than tripled the size of the family farm, which peaked about 200,000 acres and now spans 150,000 in the San Joaquin Valley town of Corcoran. Boswell's labs created new, more productive seeds. Technological improvements to his gins boosted their capacity to 400 bales of cotton a day -- enough to produce 840,000 pairs of boxer shorts, according to a 2003 Times article.

Historians and agriculture economists credit Boswell with creating the template for large agribusiness concerns.

The Boswell business remains one of the world's top sellers of "the extra-long staple cotton that goes into fabric blends and both soft and high-end apparel," said Don Villarejo, director emeritus of the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis.

"His legacy is quite impressive," said Villarejo. "He was a brilliant business leader beloved by many of his employees. At the same time, his company was able to be ahead of and often acquire his chief farming competitors."

Boswell also was legendary for using a combination of political clout and legal strategy "to outwit many of the environmental groups that have tried to restrict water deliveries to California agriculture," Villarejo said.

He was an innovative water user, one of the first to employ lasers to level fields so that water flowed evenly and efficiently, said Richard Howitt, an agriculture economist at UC Davis.

Careful water management, including employing agronomists to determine when and how to water, allowed Boswell's farms to produce more cotton with less water than competitors, Howitt said. Many of his techniques were later adopted by other farms.

But even during this period of growth and success for the enterprise, which included diversification into tomatoes and other crops, real estate development and farming in distant Australia, Boswell remained an intensely private man at the head of an intensely private family business.

A rare 1999 interview with two now-former Los Angeles Times writers gave outsiders a sense of Boswell's character.

For years staff writer Mark Arax and business editor Rick Wartzman had attempted to meet the cotton patriarch. But each letter and call was rejected. The two were writing "The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire," a book about the family's cotton business, and they needed to talk to him. Finally he agreed.

J.G., as Boswell liked to be called, wanted to meet them on his land rather than in some sterile office. His intent was to show them that the business was only as good as its earth.

Boswell, the pair wrote, "wore a Cal Poly Ag hat tucked low, frayed khaki pants, a flannel shirt and Rockport shoes."

"It was all part of an image that Boswell loved to play up. He had earned an economics degree at Stanford and sat on the board of General Electric and other big corporations, but he fancied himself a cowboy," they wrote in a 2003 Times article.

Boswell attended the Thacher School, an exclusive private boarding school in Ojai, graduating in 1941.

He served in the Army during World War II in the South Pacific before graduating from Stanford in 1946. That's where he met his first wife, Rosalind Murray. They raised their three children in Pasadena, far from the farm. She died in 2000.

The company remains headquartered in Pasadena.

Fancying himself a cowboy and living like a city boy, J.G. proved to be a complex figure. When he reached out to shake the writers' hands, they noticed the missing fingers on his right hand, the result of a cattle-roping accident.

 

They jumped into an aged Chevy truck for a tour of his holdings. The writers said they traveled half a day and 150 miles but never left the farm. When they asked Boswell how much land he really owned, he responded, "What are you, a tax collector?"

"I'm the bad guy in agriculture because I'm big," he said later. "I'm not going to try to fight it. I can't change an image and say, 'Well, I'm righteous and good and all that.' But I'm telling you . . . I'm not going to apologize for our size."

Wartzman, now director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, said he was sad to learn of Boswell's death.

"He was an immensely complicated guy, someone who knew every inch of his land but whose company did some pretty awful things to the land," Wartzman said. "It is just hard to farm in an environmentally sound manner at that scale."

The company used its political clout to encourage the building of the Pine Flat Dam to shut the flow of water to Tulare Lake, which at one point was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River. The drained lake bed is now farmland, located at the heart of Boswell's sprawling enterprise.

Boswell was born March 10, 1923, in Greensboro, Ga., the son of William Whittier Boswell Sr. and Kate Hall Boswell, and moved west with his parents and his uncles.

He was named after his uncle J.G. Boswell, who married Ruth Chandler, the daughter of Los Angeles Times Publisher and real estate baron Harry Chandler.

With no children of his own, J.G. Boswell picked his nephew to take control of the company he had founded in 1921 with the help of his brothers.

In the early 1980s, Boswell and the company would spend $1 million to defeat the Peripheral Canal, a system proposed to move water to Southern California. He thought it would hurt farming interests.

During the same period, Boswell helped farmers outflank state and game regulators and pump water from excessive snowmelt into the north fork of the Kings River. The move prevented farmland from flooding but also introduced the nonnative predatory white bass into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

At times profane, Boswell liked to be in control. For many years his company extended its influence throughout the San Joaquin Valley by lending money to other growers.

He served as chairman, president and chief executive of the company from 1952 until his retirement in 1984. He remained on the company's board of directors until his death. His son James W. Boswell now runs the business.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Barbara Wallace Boswell; daughters Jody Hall and Lorraine Wilcox; and five grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for April 22 at 1 p.m. at the Corcoran High School Memorial Stadium.#

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-james-boswell7-2009apr07,0,2341062.story

 

No hosing off driveway, no restaurant water without asking

Santa Ana approves measures to conserve water, and power to impose further restrictions if necessary.

The Orange County Register – 4/8/09

By Doug Irving

 

SANTA ANA – The City Council on Monday enacted a series of water-conservation measures intended to change how restaurants serve drinks, how hotels launder towels – and how you water your lawn.

 

The city's new water law also offers a taste of what's to come if the statewide drought – already in its third year – continues to worsen. It allows the city in the future to order across-the-board cutbacks from every customer – and to limit water flow to those who don't comply.

 

For now, water scofflaws who break the new rules can expect to receive a notice of the violation from the city. Continued water offenses could be met with an administrative citation, along the lines of a parking ticket.

 

Santa Ana operates the biggest water agency in Orange County, with more than 350,000 customers. The City Council oversees the water agency and voted 7-0 on Monday evening to put the new water rules into effect.

 

"We do have a water crisis," Mayor Miguel Pulido said. "I think we're going to have to take more and more aggressive steps in the city to do our part."

 

Under the new rules, residents are not allowed to hose down their sidewalks and driveways, or to water their yards during the day without a shut-off nozzle.

 

Restaurants are prohibited from serving drinking water without customers ordering it. Hotels have to give customers staying more than one night the option of re-using their towels and linens, rather than have them washed daily.

 

If conditions worsen, however, the new law allows the council to enact three additional tiers of conservation measures, each one more restrictive than the last. Under those tiers, the city would order its water customers to cut their usage by a percentage set by the council – and fine those who don't comply.

 

The worst water wasters could even find flow-restricting devices crimping their water lines, courtesy of the city. Those devices would prevent them from using more than one gallon per minute.

 

Nobody spoke against the new water law during Monday's meeting. The council discussion focused on the need for such conservation measures – and on the benefits of low-flow toilets and no-flush urinals.

 

"It's not pretty," Councilwoman Claudia Alvarez said of Southern California's water situation. "And it's only going to get worse."#

 

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/water-city-new-2356428-council-customers

 

Editorial: If it takes a crisis...

The Chico Enterprise-Record – 4/8/09

North state Rep. Wally Herger has taken lately to calling California's current drought, a "regulatory drought." 

 

The Chico Republican made the comment a couple of times last week in regard to the Red Bluff Diversion Dam's operations. It pretty much looks like the dam will be taken out of service, replaced by pumps to lift water into the Tehama-Colusa Canal, which irrigates around 150,000 acres of west Sacramento Valley farmland.

 

It's not that Herger doesn't know the drought is real. There's just not enough water, and regulations are not responsible for that. The point he's trying to make is that environmental restrictions are limiting the way water is moved in the state.

 

It's not really a huge issue north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, because there's enough water in the north state's reservoirs to serve the north state's needs. And since it can't be exported south through the delta because of those environmental rules, we're not likely to get shorted.

 

Sure, locales like Paradise with limited water supplies are likely to have some problems. But the drought is only going to bite hard south of the delta.

 

Some San Joaquin Valley representatives have been pushing for an exception from the Endangered Species Act to change that. The argument is the only reason the San Joaquin can't get enough water is that some dang minnow in the delta gets chewed up by the pumps that move the water south. It's a manufactured drought, manufactured by environmental legislation.

 

Let us wipe out the delta smelt and we'll all be fine.

 

Well, no, we won't.

 

Don't get us wrong, we believe environmental laws are sometimes out of whack. For example, the idea that all 16 gazillion elderberry bushes in the state have to be protected because there's the possibility a rare beetle is nesting in them is stupid.

 

But California's water supply system is a mess. The delta is on the verge of ecological collapse. That contributes to the declining salmon populations in north state rivers. Water storage capacity is inadequate for a growing state. It's been obvious for years, and its been ignored for years. We need a couple of new reservoirs. Hate to say it, but we probably need a peripheral canal around the delta to allow that area to sort itself out. We need some action.

 

But it's easier to delude ourselves that we'll be able to conserve enough water to meet growing needs. If that doesn't work there's enough water under the ground in the north state that we don't need to build new reservoirs. We'll just tap the Tuscan aquifer, even though we don't know if that cure will be a catastrophe. We've been studying it for years and we just don't know.

 

It's easier to avoid the political battle than to actually solve a problem. That's why we say, regulated or not, bring the drought on. Let the folks who need the north state's water suffer until they're ready fix what's wrong.

 

Because this state — like our nation — doesn't solve problems. We only act when there are crises.

 

And with the state's water supply, we're getting there.#

 

http://www.chicoer.com/opinion/ci_12095181

 

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