Rural water district squeezing to make every drop count

By Seth Nidever
snidever@hanfordsentinel.com
Looking southeast from the parking lot of In-N-Out Burger in the tiny farm worker town of Kettleman City, a vast swath of orchards in the Dudley Ridge Water District stretches from the beginning of the Coastal Range into the flatland of the San Joaquin Valley.

Imported water from Northern California has transformed what would be dry brush, barren hillsides and prime coyote habitat into some of the most productive almond, pistachio and pomegranate trees in the state.

Now, drought and environmental restrictions have nearly turned off the huge pumps in the Sacramento River Delta, threatening to revert this agricultural mecca back to the primeval desert it once was.

The numbers for Dudley Ridge tell the dry story.

The district is expected to get the equivalent of 55 percent of its normal allocation from the State Water Project, the sprawling system of canals and reservoirs that delivers water to hundreds of thousands of farm acres and 25 million residents south of the Delta.

Actually, the delivered amount from the State Water Project is only 15 percent this year, but Dudley Ridge managers have cobbled together water transfers and water bank carryovers to eke their way up to the 55 percent equivalent.

That still leaves growers with a hard choice of either cutting irrigation back on all their trees or focusing water on the best trees and letting the others "go to firewood," said Dale Melville, district manager.

Larry Easterling, a pistachio grower in the district, is scrambling to find any source of water he can to keep his 200,000 pistachio trees in production.

The state Department of Water Resources has arranged to transfer 200,000 acre-feet from farmers in the wetter Sacramento Valley to parched San Joaquin Valley farmers, but Dudley Ridge is slated to get only 2,000 acre-feet of that, Easterling said.

An acre-foot is enough water to cover one acre of land a foot deep.

"It's not going to solve the problem for us," Easterling said.

He'd like to get some water from a water bank in Kern County, but the Kern County Water Agency has strict rules about how much can leave Kern County.

And what KCWA has allowed out has already been mostly snapped up, Easterling said.

Some growers have tried digging wells at deep depths and deep expense to suck out brackish saltwater that can keep the trees alive temporarily but will kill them with salt if applied continuously, Easterling said.

Some other water districts have the luxury of substantial, high-quality underground water.

Not Dudley Ridge.

This remote area in one of the driest parts of the San Joaquin Valley is essentially 100 percent dependent on the State Water Project.

Before 2007, when a federal judge ruled that the giant SWP pumps were threatening the endangered Delta Smelt fish, Dudley Ridge was getting between 75 to 80 percent of its full allocation in normal years.

That was good for growers because they have to pay substantial fees to the SWP whether the water is delivered or not.

This year, with the expected 15 percent allocation, those high fixed costs are weighing on growers.

In past years, the district has had a reserve fund to draw from to help offset the higher per-acre fees growers pay in low water years.

But that fund has been largely exhausted, said Rick Besecker, district treasurer.

Meanwhile, something else has been exhausted: The water banking programs the district has relied on to get it through dry years.

Two years of drought and pumping restrictions have left the district with little more to draw on.

"Looking toward the future, we're in a precarious position, to say the least," Besecker said. "I don't think trees can take much more of it."

Easterling isn't throwing in the towel yet. He figures to cut water use 10 percent by applying less to the male trees. He's thinking about radical pruning, which would drastically reduce their water consumption but would leave them unproductive for several years.

"I've been in the pistachio industry for 40 years. I've never seen anything like this before," he said.

The reporter can be reached at 583-2432.