UC Cooperative Extension director for Tulare County Jim Sullins says a "Perfect Storm" brewing in the San Joaquin Valley is turning the coming spring and summer into a time of uncertainty and challenge about water, according to an article in the Porterville Recorder.
The convergence of three years of below average rain and snowfall with recent court decisions about the fate of water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is just one of farmers' concerns.
“It’s almost a perfect storm situation. We have low commodity prices, the economic situation and now the uncertainty that the drought has brought,” Sullins was quoted in the story. “Any one of those things would have made life difficult and now we have all three.”
Reporter Jim Stone provided a breakdown of water availability in Tulare County with information from the Friant Water Authority. A FWA public information consultant told the reporter that a significant amount of Tulare County’s water depends on supplies pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and delivered through the Friant-Kern Canal as a result of a complex set of water exchanges that date back to the 1870s.
The first 800,000 acre-feet of water is allocated to irrigation and water districts that carry Class 1 contracts. Any water over that amount goes to districts with Class 2 contracts. As it now stands, only 25 percent of Class 1 supply is scheduled to be delivered, leaving farmers to rely on more costly alternatives such as pumping groundwater, fallowing acreage or suspending irrigation on crops already planted.
“Some crops that are particularly vulnerable [to drought] are citrus,” Sullins was quoted in the story. “There’s not groundwater available in many of those locations.”