virtual water, dairy style

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Moving large quantities of water long distances is expensive. But there are alternatives:

The third-generation dairy farmer was forced to idle a quarter of his 1,200 acres in Tulare County, land that once also bristled with wheat and alfalfa. Now he is buying feed from out of state, paying record-high prices to contractors in Nevada, Texas and as far as Australia for alfalfa hay and corn silage.

Moving the water itself from Australia to California would be prohibitively expensive, you understand. But the alfalfa, apparently less so.

Understanding California’s drought: the “Porterville problem”

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I imagine that if I was a reporter in California, trying to cover the drought, I’d end up in Porterville too.

It’s the little community in Tulare County where the taps have gone dry. Jennifer Medina of the New York Times took us there this week, and for residents of a nation used to running water and flushing toilets in our homes, it’s a striking story.*  Type “Porterville” and “drought” into Google News and you’ll find the story being told again and again, so much so that the local paper did one of those “meta” stories describing the attention when two TV crews showed up on the same day :

The dire situation many East Porterville residents have found themselves in from three years of drought got the attention Tuesday of the CBS Evening News, as well as an Australian television crew.

But I think it is instructive that, when outsiders want to tell the story of Californian residents running out of water, they seem to have just one place to go. The same thing happened in 2012 in Texas, as national media descended on the little town of Spicewood Beach, because like Porterville, it seemed to be the only place actually running out of water.

The journalistic risk here is twofold. First, you risk leaving national readers with the impression that “Californians’ taps are running dry,” when mostly they’re not. This is a classic problem in newspegged journalism – we also gravitate toward the worst, and leave distant observers with the impression that that is all there is. Second, you miss important pieces of the drought story, because the difference between Portervilles and non-Portervilles is critical for making drought response policy.

To be clear, there have been lots of stories from lots of parts of California’s Central Valley about farmers running out of water for their crops. That’s a broad story. But the implication of the Porterville story is that most home water users aren’t running out. I think that’s an equally important story.

  • What went wrong in Porterville that isn’t happening elsewhere, and what have other communities done right?
  • What is the role of poverty in the Porterville case, and the other communities that find themselves on the verge of water supply troubles?
  • What has happened in urban and suburban California that has kept the big water supply systems from running out?

Hector Becera of the Los Angeles Times had a good story last month that got to some of this. He looked at communities that have made it onto the state’s “high risk” list but didn’t run out:

For some communities, earning a place on the list was the impetus to address problems that should have been fixed long ago. Some drilled new wells, built storage tanks or connected their water systems with larger ones and got off the critical list. Other communities were saved by late spring rains that filled reservoirs and other water supplies.

Fourteen communities, though, remain on the list, approaching a crisis point and trucking in water while they work to find a solution.

Tim Quinn, the executive director of the Assn. of California Water Agencies, said communities that have made the list are often small and isolated, and they relied on a single source of water, such as a stream, without backup sources. But he warned that if the drought continues, larger communities could face their own significant problems.

I took a crack at this last year when we were busy doing the same thing in New Mexico:

But like Sherlock Holmes’ curious case of the dog that did not bark in the night, a key part of the story of the drought of 2013 in rural New Mexico may be the communities that have not been in the news, because they have not run out of water.

While solid numbers are hard to come by, some in the state’s water management community say they believe there are fewer small community water problems in 2013 than in the last major drought, of 2002-03. With the severity of the current drought, water tables all across New Mexico are dropping. But many communities threatened by drought last time around have upgraded their systems, making them more resilient.

I think this is a part of the story that deserves more attention.

* An important coda: There are in fact, lots of Porterville-like communities in Indian Country, where aridity and poverty combine to leave homes that have never had running water. See, for example, Whitehorse Lake.

“drying up the streams” – Elwood Mead

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Elwood Mead

Elwood Mead

To water many western valleys will involve drying up the streams that flow through through them, and this physical fact ought to be faced frankly and honestly.

That’s Elwood Mead, sounding an awful lot like a proto-environmentalist, in his 1903 book Irrigation Institutions. Mead, who headed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1924 to 1936, oversaw plenty of drying up. He headed the agency when Hoover Dam was planned and built. But he wasn’t being a proto-environmentalist, just a pragmatist, in pointing out that people living downstream of the nation’s big irrigation works needed to recognize the fact that the water might no longer reach them, and that the nascent legal structures for water allocation at the time would need to recognize this reality.

Gordon Jacoby and the Colorado River: “predicting hydrologic bankruptcy”

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In my world, the 1976 tree ring analysis of the Colorado River’s long term flow done by Charles Stockton and Gordon Jacoby stands as one of the great works of policy-relevant science. But by the time I came on the scene, “Stockton and Jacoby”* (pdf) was just a marker, a signpost along our path to understanding the mistakes we made in allocating the Colorado River’s flow. I’d never looked at the details of how the work came about until we got news today of Jacoby’s death, and some reminiscing by some of Jacoby’s colleagues sent me down the rabbit hole of history to the wonderful story Jacoby told to oral historian Ronald Doel in 1996.

Stockton and Jacoby, 1976

Stockton and Jacoby, 1976

The National Science Foundation was funding a broad research effort into the impacts of the completion of Glen Canyon Dam and the filling of Lake Powell. Jacoby thought tree rings might be an interesting tool for understanding the long term history of flows on the river:

[I]n doing some of the water aspects, I heard somewhere — I can’t really cite a specific reference — this idea of using tree rings to find out about water supply. They realized first you have to know how much water is going to come into this reservoir. And I heard somewhere this concept of using growth rings of trees to estimate stream flow. And so I went and talked to Chuck [Charles] Stockton at the tree ring lab in Arizona and he’d been working on the Colorado River flow. So in the next contract that I put in, I put in a subcontract for us to work together on this.

Their findings were disconcerting.

The Colorado River’s allocation of 7.5 million feet annually for the Upper Basin, 7.5 million for the Lower Basin, with another 1.5 million acre feet tacked on for Mexico, had been negotiated during an unusually wet time. A very unusually wet time. Here’s their graph:

Lee's Ferry flow, Stockton and Jacoby, 1976

Lee’s Ferry flow, Stockton and Jacoby, 1976

Jacoby describes the response when he first presented the results, at a meeting of the AAAS in 1975:

At the end of my talk I think there were one or two agency people in the audience actually jumping to their feet and yelling; an interesting scene. I think I was predicting hydrologic bankruptcy with relation to these ideas and real stream flow. And so that got a lot of people excited.

There’s a history of great science in the years since clarifying the paleoclimate record and refining our understanding of the Colorado River’s flow, especially Woodhouse et. al in 2006. But Jacoby’s basic message still stands.

* If anyone has a link to a web-based copy of the original report, please share in the comments? Thanks.

update: Thanks to Kevin Anchukaitis, here’s a link to the original (big pdf).

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on public discussion in water politics, Gila edition.

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From the morning paper, a column about the importance of putting all the data on the table for a public discussion as we try to make collective decisions about our water future. (This is about the Gila River in New Mexico).

The argument here is technical, and I don’t expect you to be able to come to your own conclusion, based on a few paragraphs in a newspaper column, about whether Gaume and Coha are right to suggest there isn’t enough water to make the project worthwhile. But with what could be a hundred-plus million dollar decision facing the Interstate Stream Commission later this year about whether to proceed with this project, the public has a right to expect a full and robust public discussion. Such a discussion requires that the data be fully and completely available.

Does affluence make you more resilient to drought?

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My quick, poorly thought out answer to the question in the post title would have been “yes”, but OtPR once again has pointed out the error in my thinking. The wealthiest California farmers, OtPR argues, have locked themselves into high value but permanent crops (especially almonds) that leave them less flexibility to respond to climate variability:

[W]ealth is not acting to create the resilience I’d expect. Rather, if my association of wealth with greater farm equipment or permanent crops (very expensive to plant) holds true, it seems to be making total failure more likely. I generally think that wealth buffers against poor periods, but in Mr. Heathcock’s story, the resiliency appears to be highest in the least wealthy and lowest in the most wealthy. The garlic pickers who are contemplating moving to Washington and Oregon (yes! good choice on their part if farm labor is their goal) have a mobility the others don’t. The growers in row crops can rent their land for the drought year (Barlow, cotton) or only farm the sections they have water for (Allen, cotton). It is the growers in permanent crops that are in all-or-nothing situations. I’d have thought they were the wealthiest, but their wealth hasn’t been kept in a form that can buffer them against drought.  They should be holding it in accessible form so they can get through dry years without farming.   I’ll have to think about this more.

This is at the end of a three-post series that is worth reading in order and in its entirety: One. Two. Three.