California’s dry season is turning into a permanent state of being [Stockton Record]
Drought across the Western U.S. has forced California to ration water to farms. Hydroelectric dams barely work. The smallest spark — from a lawnmower or even a flat tire — can explode into a wildfire. And now the Climate Prediction Center just issued a forecast water managers in the Western U.S. didn’t want to hear. The latest report, released Thursday, puts the odds in favor of a second straight year of La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean. La Niña tends to steer the storm track north of California, leaving most of the state and the Southwest parched. Last year’s La Niña is one of the reasons for the current drought. If the forecast had instead called for El Niño, the odds would have favored a wetter than average winter for California and the Southwest — something the region badly needs. California has already suffered through two dry years, leaving the soil so parched that what little snow fell in the Sierra Nevada Mountains last winter either evaporated into the air this spring or sunk straight into the dirt, leaving little runoff for rivers and reservoirs. Even with average winter rain and snowfall, runoff would remain low just because the land is so dry.
Deep pockets vie for Kern pistachio orchards [Bakersfield Californian]
Pistachios have recently become perhaps the top choice for institutional investors in Kern County agriculture, apparently surpassing almonds. Farmland brokers say prices and demand for local pistachio orchards — the few properties listed for sale, anyway — have increased since about 2019 because of the trees’ longevity, crop price stability and higher tolerance for limited and lower-quality water supplies. “Pistachios are kind of a hot thing right now,” said Kevin Palla, land advisor with Bakersfield-based Pacific Commercial Realty Advisors, part of Cushman & Wakefield. David Magaña, vice president and senior analyst at RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness, said pistachios’ economic profile is generally better than that of other tree nuts — more so this year as the crop’s prices have held up stronger than those of almonds, whose outlook is also strong but not as much as pistachios.
Democrats demand Pentagon renew wildfire monitoring program [Los Angeles Times]
Seven weeks before an important wildfire monitoring program is slated to lose access to Pentagon satellite data, 31 Democrats from California on Monday demanded the Defense Department commit to continuing the access that firefighters have come to rely on. Since 2019, the Pentagon has been providing data from its classified infrared satellites to help firefighters in California and around the country spot and track wildfires. But that access is scheduled to end Sept. 30, and there is no assurance it will be extended. The program relies on satellite and drone data from a variety of sources, including the military, to provide on-the-ground fire officials with a holistic and almost real-time view of fires. It can be used to identify a fire spark in a remote region or track a fire in action, aiding with evacuations and firefighting.
Small towns grow desperate for water in California [New York Times]
Mendocino’s water shortage is an extreme example of what some far-flung towns in California are experiencing as the state slips deeper into its second year of drought. Scores of century-old, hand-dug wells in the town have run dry. This past week, residents of Mendocino watched as the Senate passed its $1 trillion infrastructure package, wondering whether some of those funds might reach them. The drought is revealing for California that perhaps even more than rainfall it is money and infrastructure that dictate who has sufficient water during the state’s increasingly frequent dry spells. The drought, and the effects of climate change more generally, have drawn a bold line under the weaknesses of smaller communities with fewer resources.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/us/drought-california-water-shortage.html?searchResultPosition=55
Rural population losses add to farm and ranch labor shortage [The Associated Press]
Rural America lost more population in the latest census, highlighting an already severe worker shortage in the nation’s farming and ranching regions and drawing calls from those industries for immigration reform to help ease the problem. The census data released last week showed that population gains in many rural areas were driven by increases in Hispanic and Latino residents, many of whom come as immigrants to work on farms or in meatpacking plants or to start their own businesses. “We’ve struggled on this issue for a long time to try to come up with a more reasonable, common-sense approach,” said John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, which is part of a group lobbying Congress for new immigration laws. Vilifying immigrants “just makes it harder to get there.”
https://apnews.com/article/census-2020-farm-ranch-labor-business-83107b136c2c92b6c4b7830b12f5bd96
California, Oregon braced for another extremist water rebellion. Why it’s calm, so far [Sacramento Bee
Anti-government activists seemed primed for a violent clash with federal authorities this summer in the Klamath Basin along the California-Oregon border. The federal Bureau of Reclamation had shut off water for most of the region’s 1,400 farms, denying access to the same irrigation canal in Klamath Falls, Ore., where during a drought two decades earlier, activists tried to pry open its headgates and clashed with U.S. marshals. Talk of rebellion over federal water policy, at least for now, seems to have waned in the Klamath Basin, even though farmers still haven’t received water from the federal canal and frustration hasn’t gone away over water being kept in the watershed to protect endangered suckers and salmon. But the Klamath Basin rebellion appears to have fizzled in large part because local agricultural and community leaders spoke out strongly against it. They moved to soften the rhetoric before the situation exploded. In May, as the federal government announced no water would flow down the “A Canal” for the first time since it was constructed in 1907, the Klamath Water Users Association put out a statement to its members condemning any hostilities. The association urged local activists to stop posting the home addresses of federal water employees on social media, and it condemned people “being recruited from other parts of the country to participate in demonstrations.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article253476059.html
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