With California headed for a fourth year of drought, the outlook for the growing season is grim. “But our situation is not hopeless,” says Helene Dillard, dean of agriculture at UC-Davis. In an editorial in AgAlert, a farm-group publication, Dillard listed four areas of research at UC-Davis that could result in “practical solutions.” They include work on groundwater banking, which uses excess surface water to replenish aquifers; fine-tuning irrigation as a way to stretch water supplies; breeding drought-tolerant crops, including rice and wheat; and finding ways to reduce water use by wineries, which now use four to six gallons of water to produce a gallon of wine, much of it for washing equipment.
“Crisis is apparent as you drive through the valley. Many fields are fallow – some idled last year, others more recently. The earth is baked hard,” says the Guardian in a story from Fresno. It quotes Shawn Coburn, who farms near Dos Palos, as saying, “You’ll see a lot more fallowed land this year.” Coburn abandoned alfalfa and pomegranates, and cut his tomato acreage by two-thirds last year. “Like many farmers, he assailed pumping restrictions aimed at protecting the delta smelt, a threatened fish, and other environmental regulations, branding them ruinous and futile. Environmentalists call them vital to the entire ecosystem,” reports the Guardian.