Living in Drought

The Drought is Now Killing off Century-old California Farms, Their Story is Well Told in This Report

by Alan Heathcock

Before we getto what this drought means — the anger and paranoia, the heartbreak and bitterness — it's important to remember the Central Valley isn't just any valley. It's one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Our country's breadbasket. Our primary source for tomatoes, almonds, grapes, cotton, and dozens of other products. I'm scheduled to see all of it, on what I'm told will be a "tour of destruction." My first stop is a beer with a man named "Mule."

Mule is the patriarch of Olson Family Farms. On hot summer evenings, locals congregate on a spit of riverside land deep in the Olsons' stone-fruit orchards. Guinea fowl wander the edges of the lot. The riverbanks shoulder a Lakota tepee, a cabin, a smokehouse, a bungalow on stilts they call the "inner sanctum," and a deck where a group of men drink beer and watch the river's brown water roll.

Mule has a long gray beard, wears a military jacket and a leather tricorne hat. He looks like a prospector straight from the gold-pan era, and chastises me when I call him "sir." As I find a spot on the deck, Mule says, "We're family down here. Down here we look after each other." He glances around at the farmers gathered. "This here's my family."

He says it like a warning — battle lines are clearly drawn around this drought, every outsider a potential spy—and I know he's telling me to watch my intentions.

"Yes, sir," I say, and Mule cracks the slightest grin and rears a hand as if he just might hit me.

Two of my main expectations are immediately dispelled. One, I expect the farmers I meet on this trip to be blighted and sorrowful, a bunch of Tom Joads just trying to make ends meet. But these guys are irreverent and cocksure. Tired, maybe. Clearly they listen to a lot of talk radio. I also expect ceaseless talk of the weather. Having grown up in farm country, I know every farmer looks helplessly to the sky hoping the weather gods will be kind. Even in the best of years, the weather is a weight. But in this current catastrophic cycle — three years of near-record rainfall deficits putting most of California at least one full year of normal rainfall behind recovery, some areas closer to two years, all while record breaking heat has currently left 58% of the state in "exceptional drought" conditions — I'm thinking I'll hear nothing short of the lament of the forsaken.

Instead, a man named Jeff Yarbro hammers on about who they see as enemy #1: environmentalists. As Yarbro has it, these particular environmentalists have fought to make sure whatever precious water is released from the state's reservoirs goes first to facilitating salmon runs. The problem is that most of this water heads out into the ocean with no attempt to reuse it. "They want this valley all jackrabbits and sage brush," he says, meaning the environmentalists. "They don't believe we should be here. They'd like to turn the valley like it was a hundred years ago. And for us to go elsewhere."

Andy Vidak, cherry farmer and senator for the 16th district, piggybacks Yarbro's passion, and for the next 20 minutes goes deeply and conspiratorially political. He educates me on a long series of decisions made by a "small percentage of politicians who also hold the most power" in collaboration with radical environmentalists who have worked to destroy the farmers of the Central Valley. "This is perfect politics," Vidak says. "The perfect war. This valley is conservative." He contends big-city liberals are aware they can save the salmon, don the hero's crown for environmentalists, all while eliminating conservative political opposition.

I respectfully suggest that one of the most productive agricultural valleys in the world couldn't possibly be sacrificed in the name of politics — there's a population base, functioning towns.

"No," Vidak counters. "People in New York or Boise, Idaho, don't care where their produce comes from." The valley of farmers could go away, and so long as the product came from elsewhere no one would care.

He tells me a story of a local food bank. It was mid-summer and the men in line would be working if so much land wasn't left unfarmed due to the water crisis. If that wasn't bad enough, he noticed the food bank was handing out cans of carrots grown in China.

"Carrots from China," Vidak says. "All while we have two of the largest carrot growers in the world down here. That's just wrong."

I ask if he thinks there's any hope for the Central Valley farmer. Vidak believes they're going to win eventually because the country needs good, nutritious food. He fights on hoping the balance of power can again be shifted back to the valley, back to the farmer.

Mule crosses over to crouch beside me, his tricorne hat almost piercing an eye. He holds up a smartphone and shows me a photo of a man, Burdizzo pincers in hand, castrating a bull.

No one talks for a time. The deck is still. Clearly these men are angry, desperate. I sympathize, but also wonder if maybe these conspiracy theories and salmon-supervillains aren't a sign they've been driven a little mad.

Mule gives me a horse blanket and we bed down for the night on the deck. The "family" snoring all around me, I try in vain to sleep, the river sparkling, the moon oddly bright in the sky.

The next morning I meet with the two men who, I'm told, will make sense of all of this for me. My guides on this tour of destruction. Jim Verboon is a big man, a walnut farmer and fisherman, with a friendly demeanor and a great jolly laugh. Russ Waymire is kind but serious. Hair oiled and shirt tucked, Russ is all business.

We meet in a little café and the two of them offer me a crash course in California Water 101. Even in non-drought years the logistics are complex. Snowpack runoff is captured in reservoirs. Rivers and lakes are dammed. Canals snake across the state. Some water is managed at the federal level, some at the state. There are 500 public water districts, each with local ordinances. There are senior water rights, junior rights, riparian rights. As difficult as it is to understand water collection and distribution, Russ and Jim simplify the crisis by reiterating what I heard the night before: Radical environmentalists have effectively lobbied to have water diverted away from the Central valley.

Beyond the salmon runs, Jim and Russ tell me about the delta smelt, a three-inch fish on the edge of extinction. Environmentalists claim the powerful pumps that send water to the Central Valley are killing the smelt. The plummeting fish population, and a lawsuit through the Endangered Species Act, has all but shut down the pumps. From the perspective of both environmentalists and the state, they're managing for the longterm. As in, if they divert water from salmon or smelt, they may never recover. Ever. While the farmers will eventually be okay. For a time, they'll have to make do with less.

Jim and Russ have no fight with the fish. They simply believe blame is misplaced. In their argument, Jim and Russ speak like professors, evenhanded and thorough. They show me maps and graphs, articles highlighted and annotated, findings from a scientist at U.C. Berkeley, attempting to validate their theory that it's not the pumps killing the fish, but raw sewage from Sacramento's regional treatment plant.

No matter the reason behind the pumps being shut off, one thing is irrefutable: The water isn't coming to the valley. Much of California relies on surface water collected by state and federal water projects. This year's snow pack was a dismal 29 percent. The winter and spring rains didn't come. After farmers struggled through receiving only 40 percent of their surface water allotment in 2012 and 20 percent in 2013, the Westlands water district that delivers water to the west valley received an unprecedented 0 percent of their 2014 allotment. Before this year, receiving zero surface water was inconceivable to the valley farmer. But now it's happened. Now anything's possible.

We drive through Jim's walnut orchard, his trees full and healthy. But the river behind his land is a deep canal of sand. I'm confused. This is the Kings River, the same river I slept beside the night before. Turns out this isn't the work of Mother Nature. A weir alters the water's flow a few miles to the northeast. Those who live above the weir have a river. Those to the south look upon a ghost-trench of silt and banks of dying woods.

Jim's keeping his operation going with well water. He doesn't want to deplete his land of groundwater, but has no choice. Wells are expensive, using groundwater dangerous. Natural aquifers are drying up, the land subsiding, as little as an inch in most areas, as much as a foot in others, the land collapsing as the water is siphoned out. How will he make it through this year? How does he sustain the land for the future? This is the balancing act Jim and every valley farmer must painfully confront.

For years, Russ owned a custom farming business and has helped harvest acreage in every corner of this valley. As we start to drive, he points out fallow land his crews once worked. We pass pistachio trees and Russ notes that the leaves are yellowing, the trees failing. The farther west we drive the larger the plots of unfarmed land. Signs mark the road's shoulder: NO WATER = HIGHER FOOD COSTS; NO HAY AGUA, NO HAY TRABAJO!; CONGRESS CREATED DUST BOWL.

I take out my camera, but it's impossible to convey the amount of fallow land with a photo. On one stretch, we drive for 35 minutes with unfarmed land on either side of the road for as far as the eye can see. This year, there's an estimated four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand acres left idle, or 1,250 square miles of land on the high side, a landmass larger than Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco combined.

We drive for miles through nothing but dirt and tumbleweeds and then, like an oasis, a dot of green emerges in all that brown. Trees surround a little house. David and Sharon Wakefield have lived outside of Mendota, California, for thirty-eight years. For most of those years, this land would be planted with row crops. With this year's 0 percent water allotment, his land is fallow, and the land surrounding the farm has been sold to a solar company. Where once was cotton and alfalfa will soon be fields of panels.

The ten acres that holds the Wakefields' house is the last scrap of a legacy of farming that started when Sharon's family moved out from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Jim introduces Sharon as "Dust Bowl Sharon," and she smiles but gives Jim a playful glance like maybe he's in trouble.

David and Sharon have been fighting for years to stay in business, have successfully made it through past droughts by abandoning land and shrinking their acreage. They describe what the land used to look like, the rows of cotton, green plants tufted white, the fields teeming with workers at harvest time.

Sharon shows me an old illustration from the Encyclopedia Britannica , a barnyard and farmhouse, crops in neat rows in the distance, a farmer harvesting wheat. A boy rides a brown horse. A woman in a white apron feeds the chickens.

"This was my dream since I was a girl," she says. "This is all I ever wanted."

They bought the land in 1976. They raised their kids here, made it a special place for the grandkids. At the edge of the yard sits a line of tractors. They've kept them all, dating back to a tractor Sharon's grandfather once used, a tractor they take pride in saying still runs. Sharon says they planted every tree. A eucalyptus towers above us, and I begin to realize this land won't just be sold, but all of this—the trees, the tractors, the house — might soon be gone.

We've circled the house and stand back in their little yard. I ask what they'll do now. David steals a glance at Sharon. "When we go I'll never look back up that drive again. It'll just be too hard."

Sharon says that when as kids they'd see a house and land being sold her father would say, "That's someone's broken dream." She peers out beyond the green of her trees as the sun sets hard over the dusty, barren land. "This is our broken dream."

Just downriver from Jim's orchard sits Bill Son's pistachio farm. Bill is Russ and Jim's friend, and is struggling with cancer. They've stopped to check on him because despite his illness he's still trying to farm, working as many hours as he can in his weakened state. Bill and his wife have mounting expenses and need to bring in a good harvest despite the drought.

Bill's already been working several hours. Shoulders stooped from exhaustion, he's still a tall man. His eyes are bright and alive though he keeps apologizing because he can hardly talk. Russ and Jim check on his well. His orchard is only hundreds of feet from the Kings River, which would naturally replenish his well if the river wasn't dry. It's bad news. Bill's well is shallow, the water dwindling.

His eyes full of worry, Bill excuses himself and retires to the house. We walk into his orchard. Russ plucks a bunch of nuts from a branch, uses shears to clip away the shells. Russ finds too many shells empty, a bad sign for this harvest. It means the trees are damaged and spells disaster for years to come.

They tell me that for 33 years Bill had a thriving custom farming business, but as the agriculture economy slowed he had to work longer hours and drive longer distances to work. He knew he was sick, but couldn't stop working to get proper care. The cancer was diagnosed late. Even when it was clear he needed a bone-marrow transplant, Bill couldn't spare the time for the required 30-day quarantine. Bill waited until after the harvest. The transplant didn't take, the cancer returned with a vengeance.

Source: Medium.co

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