HOW THE OTHER CALIFORNIA LIVES
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
HOW THE OTHER CALIFORNIA LIVES
Tulare, Calif.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: When Americans think of California, they tend to think of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the golden coast—”a place where the grass is really greener, warm, wet and wild” as Santa Barbara native Katy Perry swoons in “California Gurls.” Or they think of the liberals and environmentalists who dominate state government.
Yet there’s another California, set back from the left coast, in the abundantly fertile Central Valley, which produces half of America’s fruits and vegetables; more than 98% of its almonds, pistachios and walnuts; a third of U.S. dairy exports—and Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck wine. This California has come under siege from the California of politicians and regulators, a siege that has been especially harmful during the current prolonged period of drought and water shortages. The storms that hit the state a couple of weeks ago didn’t make a dent in the water shortfall or in the farmers’ larger problems.
When Americans think of California, they tend to think of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the golden coast—”a place where the grass is really greener, warm, wet and wild” as Santa Barbara native Katy Perry swoons in “California Gurls.” Or they think of the liberals and environmentalists who dominate state government.
Yet there’s another California, set back from the left coast, in the abundantly fertile Central Valley, which produces half of America’s fruits and vegetables; more than 98% of its almonds, pistachios and walnuts; a third of U.S. dairy exports—and Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck wine. This California has come under siege from the California of politicians and regulators, a siege that has been especially harmful during the current prolonged period of drought and water shortages. The storms that hit the state a couple of weeks ago didn’t make a dent in the water shortfall or in the farmers’ larger problems.
Just ask Mark Watte, a second-generation dairyman and nut grower from rural Tulare, who doesn’t mince words. “Everywhere you turn, they are coming at us with this nonsensical b.s.!” he says. Who are “they”? Environmentalists, though the beleaguered California farmer cautions against using that word: “Most of them don’t really care about the environment. They are obstructionists.”
The 61-year-old farmer tends to speak with exclamation marks when he’s revved up—and that’s often these days. Mr. Watte sat down to chat recently at the Tulare Golf Course restaurant, where the dress code is jeans-and-flannel and the music strictly country. He was joined by Rep. Devin Nunes, who grew up working on a family-owned dairy farm that is still managed by his 95-year-old grandmother.
The congressman rolls out a large map of California’s sprawling irrigation system showing its rivers, canals, dams and lakes. The ultimate aim of the environmentalists, Mr. Watte says, is to wipe out 1.3 million acres of farmland and return the valley basin to its once-swampy state.
West-side growers have already taken tens of thousands of acres out of production. This year they plan to leave fallow half a million more acres, a drastic move spurred by a depletion of aquifers and suspension of state water deliveries. Harris Farms alone is taking 9,000 acres that would have grown melons, tomatoes, bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage and lettuce out of production. One result of farmers scaling back is that 72 million heads of lettuce won’t be produced in California and likely will be imported instead from Mexico.
Mr. Watte explains that west-side farmers in the Central Valley are idling all their crops except for high-value nut trees, which the farmers are paying a premium to keep on the drip. An acre-foot of water (enough to submerge an acre of land in one foot of water) can cost up to $1,300 compared with about $40 a few years ago. Meanwhile, some farmers are drilling deeper wells at a cost of $1 million per hole. These wells may last only five years, and the groundwater is often too salty to irrigate crops.
East-side farmers like Mr. Watte who were blessed with rich aquifers are also having to pump deeper. Later, on a tour of his farm, he drops a rock down a well. The “plunk” that reverberates is music to his ears since it means he still has groundwater. But he expects many pumps to break by this fall due to heavy use, which could force him to leave some land fallow. He also worries that farmers are causing “long-term permanent environmental damage” by depleting aquifers. “Once an aquifer is gone, you can’t restore it.”
“I’m more worried about 2024 than 2014,” says Mr. Watte who has worked on the farm since his father transplanted their family here from Long Beach in 1958. Mr. Watte and one of his two brothers, Brian, took over the business when their dad retired in 1984 and have since tripled its footprint to 4,500 acres. While Mr. Watte’s three daughters aren’t involved in day-to-day operations, a son-in-law and nephew help run the business.
Liberals blame the water shortage on record dry weather and climate change. (Climate models predict that California will get wetter if the world is warming, but never mind.) Those explanations ignore that San Joaquin farmers haven’t received 100% of their contractual water allocations from the federal Central Valley Project since 2006, even in years of heavy rain or snow. Farmers got only 45% of the water they were due in 2010, when precipitation was 110% of the norm. Regulations ostensibly intended to protect fish like the three-inch delta smelt, steelhead and chinook salmon, Mr. Watte says, are to blame.
He explains that California Democratic Rep. George Miller in 1992 led the first major water siege with the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which allocated 1.2 million acre-feet of water to wildlife—enough to sustain 1.2 million families and 300,000 acres. The law aggravated the existing acrimony between farmers and environmentalists, and resulted in a turf war between federal and state regulators.
Eventually, green groups, farmers, the feds and state reached an armistice with the 1994 Bay Delta Accord, which jettisoned a demand by environmental groups to restore fish to a dry stretch of the San Joaquin River. Sen. Dianne Feinstein in October 1994 expressed her unequivocal opposition to “any effort to take water from Friant Dam for the purpose of restoring a long gone fishery on the San Joaquin River.” Such a water diversion, she said, would have proved devastating to “10,000 small, family farms.”
But environmental groups soon broke the peace by suing for more water diversions to protect salmon and smelt. By 2009, Ms. Feinstein’s views had reversed: She backed the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act, whose goal was to restore fish to what had been a dry river bed. But not just any fish—specifically, cold-water salmon that hadn’t been documented at the site since the 1940s. Cold-water salmon require “huge volumes of water” to thrive, Mr. Watte notes, and he thinks that was exactly the point. The environmentalists “don’t care about fish,” he says. “The fish are just a prop, a vehicle to get our water.”
That may sound paranoid, but consider that about 400,000 acre-feet of water over the past two years have been diverted from farm use merely to conduct salmon test-runs on the dry river. Such prodigious use of water for seemingly everything but farming is starting to seem familiar to growers. For the past seven years, federal regulators have been flushing hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta into the San Francisco Bay on the pretext of protecting three-inch smelt from pumps that send water to farmers in the Central Valley.
It’s ironic, Mr. Watte says, that the biggest threat to the smelt is “Sacramento and other communities that are pumping their sewage into the delta—or not treating it the way they should be.” Another irony: Government biologists kill more smelt each year conducting population surveys than do the delta’s water pumps. Meanwhile, Mr. Watte notes, San Francisco is piping in “pristine water from Yosemite”—thereby circumventing the delta—while liberals demand that more water be diverted from farmers to restore the smelt’s polluted ecosystem.
Regulations also make it nearly impossible to build or expand reservoirs to store water from wet years. Consider the saga of adding to the Lake Kaweah reservoir more than two decades ago. “I’m on a water board that added 21 feet of height to the lake,” says Mr. Watte. “It took us 20 years and $55 million to accomplish that, and of that $55 million, about $20 million was for environmental mitigation.”
Such mitigation included coddling the elderberry beetles of the Sierra foothills. Elderberry bushes “are not endangered, but the elderberry beetle that lives in the bushes are,” Mr. Watte says. “So we gave the contractor a significant bonus to be done by a certain date because it was the beginning of elderberry beetle breeding season,” and heaven forbid that construction disturb beetles feeling “amorous.”
The reservoir improved flood protection, which “you would think would be a good thing,” says Mr. Watte—but then the water board was told by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service that it had to “mitigate for the lack of flooding,” he says, incredulous 15 years later. So the water board paid a farmer to flood a separate field occasionally for the benefit of the local flora and fauna.
But when the state Department of Fish and Wildlife examined the flooding site, the inspectors discovered burrowing owls—which the state has designated a “species of special concern.” The state required owl safeguards. An elaborate ritual was devised to trap and release the owls far from the flooding, even though, as Mr. Watte notes, the owls tended to fly away when the area got wet and return when it dried out.
The environmental burdens are bad enough for farmers, but then there are the government-exacerbated costs of doing business, including truck rules recently imposed by the California Air Resources Board adding $7 per ton to the cost of transporting hay and a mysterious $16 per acre “environmental charge” on Mr. Watte’s irrigation-district assessment. That money is rebated to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation—for purposes that Rep. Nunes says he has been so far unable to divine.
These added costs hamper innovation, which Central Valley farmers happen to be good at. Though inhabitants of coastal California may be unaware, these farmers have pioneered technology to conserve water and improve land productivity. Tens of thousands of farmers from around the world flock to Tulare each winter for the World Ag Expo.
While giving a tour of his farm, Mr. Watte flags a couple of GPS-equipped, self-driving tractors. He shows off a machine that shakes pistachios off trees and catches the nuts before they hit the ground. Even flood irrigation, which environmentalists decry as wasteful, he says, is highly efficient due to the use of laser land leveling.
Rep. Nunes and Mr. Watte later take a drive though Tulare, a tight-knit immigrant city of about 60,000. “This is old America,” Mr. Watte says. Though tiny, Tulare is home to some of the nation’s largest dairy plants, making Saputo, Land O’Lakes and Häagen-Dazs products. “What happens to workers in the absence of wheat to feed the cows that make the milk that feed these big plants?” he muses.
Unemployment in the valley ticked up in December even as the statewide rate fell to 8.3% from 8.5% thanks to robust job growth in the Bay Area. Kings, Tulare and Merced counties, where the unemployment rate ranges from 12.8% to 14.2%, lost more than 4,000 jobs in November 2013. Signs like “Food Grows Where Water Flows” and “No Water = No Jobs” dot Highway 99, which runs up the valley’s east side.
Democrats’ solution to the water crisis is to give farmers handouts. President Obama dropped by Democratic Rep. Jim Costa’s Fresno district Feb. 14 to announce $135 million to restock food banks and indemnify ranchers for dead cattle. Mr. Obama “came out, did his face time, and threw some money at” the problem, says Mr. Watte. “It’s a slap in our face. It’s like leaving a waitress a quarter tip.”
As if helping to prove Mr. Watte’s point, President Obama, Gov. Jerry Brown and Sens. Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have denounced a congressional bill backed by California’s GOP delegation that would temporarily waive species protections so farmers would be first in the water line when it rains. Mr. Brown called the bill an “unwelcome and divisive intrusion into California’s efforts to manage this severe crisis.”
A few days after the president issued a veto threat, northern California was hit by a deluge. Government responded quickly: To protect the three-inch smelt from the delta pumps that would have directed the rainfall to Central Valley farmers desperate to irrigate their land, regulators flushed 95,000 acre-feet of water into the ocean.
Ms. Finley is an editorial writer for the Journal.