Jeff Michael published some new data today suggesting California agricultural has been more resilient and less damaged by the current drought than I expected. “[T]here is virtually no difference in farm employment between 2014 and 2013 in the 3 counties that are thought to be most devastated by the drought,” Michael wrote. But perhaps I should not be so surprised.

For my book research, I’ve taken a dive into some research published in the 1960s and early ’70s by the late Bob Young, who started his career with a splash as a young ag economist at the University of Arizona by arguing that central Arizona did not need a huge infusion of Colorado River water. This violated an almost religious tenet in Arizona, his suggestions were ignored*, the Central Arizona Project was built, and we are now where we are. Young’s argument was that CAP would basically provide surplus supplies to an agricultural economy that did not need the water.

In a 1969 paper Young wrote with a colleague named William E. Martin (I hope this link works), he argued from pre-CAP data that, in the face of increasing water scarcity, Central Arizona ag was nevertheless growing. Why? Farmers, being self-interested actors, adapted. They made their irrigation systems more efficient, shifted their cropping patterns, and the like. “Irrigated farming,” they wrote at the time, “emerges as a rather robust corpse.”

That seems to be what is happening in California. Here’s Michael:

As I said, there is more data to sift through, but it is important to recognize that this drought is coming in the midst of a strong expansion period of Valley agriculture.  The total number of acres irrigated and harvested has been growing every year for most of the past decade, even in the face of scarce surface water.  Thus, in the absence of drought, I suspect 2014 employment would have been even higher.  The drought is causing significant fallowing of relatively low value, and non-labor intensive field crops, while new acreage is coming into production by tapping groundwater.  Thus, there are farmers laying people off, I don’t think the farmers in news reports are lying.  But clearly, there are others that were hiring.  In other words, the baseline for agriculture activity is rising, as I discussed last spring in this post.

A “robust corpse” in California as well? There are all kinds of questions about long term sustainability, but in the short term the collapse is not yet underway despite extraordinary drought.

* There’s a widely told story, repeated in Cadillac Desert, that Young was hounded out of Arizona as a result. Young ended up at Colorado State having an illustrious career as an ag and water economist, and died several years ago, so I can’t ask him, but I found a colleague whom Young told several years before his death that the hounding story was untrue – that far from being hounded out, U of A offered him a tenured position, but that CSU made him a better offer. More to come on that.

Reading Alex Breitler’s story yesterday about Stockton, for the first time in history, restricting the days of the week residents can water their lawns, I was reminded of this bit of business from Las Vegas:

In 1950, the municipality began restricting lawn watering. During the next two years the city employed the alternate day method, allowing homeowners with lots facing north and east to water their grass on even-numbered days of the month and the rest on odd.

That’s from Eugene P. Moehring’s Resort City in the Sunbelt, Las Vegas, 1930-2000. I’ve been unable to figure out how to confirm whether that’s the first example of odd-even watering. If anyone knows some bright grad student who’s done “The History of Municipal Water Conservation Policy” for their thesis, let me know.

Ensconced in my office in Albuquerque, I’ve been popping in and out of the webcast of today’s California State Water Resources Control Board workshop on the future of the Salton Sea, and I’ve noticed a very interesting subtext to the discussion that I think is important. It’s about the importance of Salton Sea environmental management to the broader goals of integrated water management in California and the western United States.

If we’re going to get this right elsewhere, we’ve got to get the Salton Sea question right now.

As a broad matter of policy, folks around the West are trying to figure out how to negotiate the process of ag-to-urban water transfers while managing what economists call “externalities” – the third party impacts that we’re going to have to manage as we adjust the system to changing hydrologic and societal realities.

Kevin Kelley of the Imperial Irrigation District told the board’s members this morning that more some 50,000 acres of Imperial farmland was fallowed last year as part of a program by which the metro area of coastal Southern California pays for water conserved. In the midst of a horrific California drought, that water has become critical, making up 60 percent of the municipal supplies shipped down the Colorado River Aqueduct last year, according to Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District. That’s huge. We talk about the importance of conservation. This is agricultural water conservation on an enormous scale.

courtesy Kevin Kelley, Imperial Irrigation District

But when agricultural activity in Imperial decreases, that means less ag runoff to feed the Salton Sea, and the sea shrinks. Kelly showed the slide to the right and told the board, “This area was covered in water ten years ago.”

The problem, as the Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen documented in a report last year, is that drying up the sea comes with enormous costs, as  a result of the hazardous dust clouds left behind. Health impacts are likely to be subsantial. Importantly, as several people testified today, that risk falls disproportionately on the poor. Imperial is a very poor place.

That’s bad as a general matter of equity and justice. It’s a moral issue. But it also could be a huge water management problem. The concern, as expressed repeatedly during today’s board meeting, is that as part of the Byzantine water transfer deal that kept Met’s aqueduct full last year with transferred ag water, the state of California promised to deal with “restoration” efforts to mitigate the worst of the sort of consequences Cohen described in his report. That largely has not happened. So LA got its water, Imperial ag got the money in exchange for the transferred water, and the externality remains unaddressed.

Failure here would be a serious setback to other innovated water management efforts, Cohen and his colleagues said in written testimony to the board (pdf):

The State’s failure to provide assurance that it will meet its mitigation obligations – either through a clear, transparent funding plan or through leadership on the development of a vision for Salton Sea restoration/mitigation – will have a chilling effect on future water transfer agreements that require state involvement. In effect, the State’s inaction not only jeopardizes the current QSA, but also diminishes the likelihood that other large-scale water transfers will occur to improve the State’s overall water reliability.

Emily Green has written a great primer for Southern Californians on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the distant geography from which a big chunk of their water emerges:

[W]hat makes the Delta the Delta is water. After winter rain and snow, roughly half of California’s fresh water arrives in this quirkily engineered, mis-named place. Twenty five million Californians depend to some degree or another on freshwater from the Delta. Roughly a third of Southern California’s supplies originate here.

Emily is sneaky good. This is great geography and hydrology, but as she notes in the introduction, this is at heart about sharing water.

David Zetland:

[W]e see a total lack of vision or action to address the REAL drivers of scarcity — retail prices too low to notice, permissive overuse of groundwater, failing water-as-charity policies, and the blinders of a historic pretension that water rights are properly allocated (nope) in the correct volumes (NOPE).

Taken together, the excess of demand over supply and failure to address that fact means that California is heading the way of Sao Paolo, with twice the population at risk.

Much more, worth clicking and reading in full.