The Interior Department says there will be no irrigation water for most farmers in California’s Central Valley for the second year in a row, calling it “an unprecedented situation.” The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the Central Valley Project, said, “California is experiencing its fourth consecutive year of below-average precipitation …. Without unusually heavy precipitation over the next few months, extreme drought conditions are forecasted to persist throughout the Central Valley.”
California is the top U.S. producer of fruits and vegetables and ranks No. 1 in crop value.
The “zero allotment” was based on low water levels in reservoirs and paltry snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas. Water levels in six key reservoirs were 47 percent of average while snowpack was one-fifth of average for late February. “January 2015 was the driest January in recorded history for northern California,” said the Bureau of Reclamation. It said water supplies to cities would be constrained. The Bureau will re-examine the water outlook each month.
“At the University of California-Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory site near Donner Summit, there was only about a foot of snow on the ground, which is lower for late February than all of the dry winters in the last 70 years,” according to the weekly Drought Monitor. “Snow depth at this site never got above 3 feet this winter, when their usual maximum depth would be around 12 feet.”
“The announcement from the Bureau of Reclamation means that farmers in California’s main agricultural region will fallow hundreds of thousands of acres, and heavily pump already depleted wells, perhaps faster than last year,” reports the San Jose Mercury News. “Last year, 428,000 acres, or 5 percent of the state’s cropland, was left unplanted because of the drought, and 17,100 jobs — about 4 percent of all state farm employment — were lost.” Farm groups said the government should relax its protection of endangered fish so more water can be diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta, according to the newspaper.