“For many Californians, the state’s long drought has meant small inconveniences such as shorter showers and restrictions on watering lawns. But in two rural valleys, the Coachella southeast of Los Angeles and the San Joaquin to the north, farmworkers and other poor residents are feeling its impact in a far more serious and personal way,” says the Washington Post. In the San Joaquin Valley, Tulare County “is a land without water,” says the Post. About 2,400 homes do not have a water supply and rely on tank trucks from the county to bring water to them. In other communities, the draw-down of the water table has concentrated the amount of naturally occurring arsenic in the tap water. Arsenic is linked to cancer and birth defects.
The courtship between the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and the growers of Central Valley “can be slow,” says the Los Angeles Times datelined in Fresno. “The next generation of precision agriculture – a world of wireless sensors, cloud-based data crunching, aerial imaging and app-based decision-making – may germinate in Silicon Valley, but it will have to take root here, where growers soak up about 80% of the water diverted for human use.” The Water, Energy and Technology incubator at Fresno State U is “a patient matchmaker between two valleys separated by 80 miles and countless cultural differences.”
Precision equipment and technology is expensive, so only large operators can afford it, says the Times, but gradual adoption of first-generation precision ag “has helped keep water demand roughly flat for several decades even as yields steadily increase.” Further adoption of efficient irrigation practices could save up to 6 million acre feet of water a year, with 2 million acre feet available for uses outside of agriculture, says the newspaper. An acre foot is enough water for two households for a year. Besides having to prove the value of their offerings, entrepreneurs face competition from long-time irrigation companies, such as Valley and RainBird, that sell their own “smart” irrigation packages.
With California in the fourth year of drought and forecasts of less snowfall in the future due to climate change, the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates water projects throughout the West, “must completely rebuild a 20th-century infrastructure so that it can efficiently conserve and distribute water in a 21st-century warming world,” says the New York Times. It quotes Deputy Interior Secretary Michael Connor as saying, “We need to undertake what amounts to a giant re-plumbing project across the West.” The government faces demand for more water from a growing population and the possibility that a system designed to capture snowmelt from mountains will have to capture rainfall in the valleys.