Mar 5, 2009
The California Farm Bureau Federation's weekly publication AgAlert contains a clear and concise rundown of farmers's concerns about the 2009 California drought.
Here are some facts presented in the article, written by Steve Adler:
- Farmers who will get no water allocations are abandoning plans for planting annual crops like cotton and processing tomatoes in order to divert whatever water they have to permanent crops like almonds, pistachios and grapes
- These decisions will lead to 847,000 acres of fallow farmland this year, according to an estimate from economists at the UC Davis
- The water shortages could lead to the loss of as many as 80,000 jobs in the
- It takes about 3 1/2 acre-feet of water to produce an almond crop and about 1 foot of water to keep trees alive
- Last year when diesel fuel hit $4 per gallon, it cost about $250 an acre-foot to pump well water
- The drought has been compounded by recent regulatory decisions. Endangered Species Act protection for fish species in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta restricts movement of water from delta pumps operated by the federal Central Valley Project and the state project