Even during four years of the worst drought in state history, California has seen total farm earnings increase 16 percent and farm employment rise 5 percent. “Both wages and employment in agriculture increased annually from 2012 to 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, reaching $12.7 billion and 421,213 jobs in 2015,” said News Deeply. “Average annual wages per employee reached $30,266 in 2015, an increase of 13.6 percent over the four-year drought period.”
Record numbers like these indicate “how we can still have a healthy [farm] sector — including a healthy number of jobs — with less water if we think about some of the shifting that we can be doing,” said Heather Cooley, director of the water program at the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank that released a report on the drought’s impact on agriculture. Specific examples of such “shifting” include growing high-price crops like almonds and pistachios, which, because they require more labor, boost employment numbers. Almonds, especially, are moneymakers, selling for $6,400 per ton on the global market in 2014 compared with $2,600 in 2000. Farmers are also countering the effects of the drought by using more water-efficient technologies like drip irrigation and planting crops better suited to specific microclimates.
Cooley warned that farmers have largely buffered their businesses from the worst effects of the drought by pumping groundwater at unsustainable rates. “It really shifts the burden to future generations, who have to dig more and deeper wells,” she said. Nuts, for instance, use much more water than the row crops they have replaced. Fortunately, farmers were able to ease up on groundwater use this year thanks to increased precipitation. Last winter, the California snowpack reached 85 percent of its average total, versus 5 percent the previous year — the worst total ever recorded. Workers who had to leave the state last year because they couldn’t find enough work are expected to return for this year’s fall fruit harvest.