Fresno

More than four dozen of the 900 Hmong farmers in Fresno County say the five-year California drought is affecting their operations, mostly by drying up the wells they need to water their crops, says the Sacramento Bee. The refugees from Southeast Asia account for the bulk of the 1,500 small farms in the county and most of them earn a modest income from their rented land, so there is no easy solution.

Nearly half of the farm workers in Yolo County, California, face food insecurity, three times the rate of farm workers in the rest of California and in the United States, says a new report out by the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS).

Farmers and landowners in California are spending millions of dollars to drill increasingly deeper wells in California, says National Geographic.