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Not a yr after my grandfather arrived, the raisin went bust. The Armenian and Japanese farmers had planted so many grapes to dry into raisins that Solar-Maid couldn’t promote half of them. Who would purchase the opposite half turned a query of such great theater, tragic and comedian, that even Fresno’s sage, William Saroyan, would weigh in. If we might solely persuade each mom in China to place a single raisin in her pot of rice, we’d have the glut solved, he mused.
Simply because the bust hit, the nice drought of the Twenties hit too, revealing the folly and greed of California agriculture. It wasn’t sufficient that the farmers had taken the 5 rivers. They have been now utilizing turbine pumps to grab the aquifer, the traditional lake beneath the valley. In a land of glut, they have been planting a whole bunch of hundreds extra acres of crops. This larger footprint wasn’t prime farmland however poor, salty dust past rivers’ attain. Because the drought worsened, the brand new farms have been extracting a lot water out of the bottom that their pumps couldn’t attain any decrease. Their crops have been withering.
A cry went out from the agrarians to the politicians: “Steal us a river.” They have been eyeing the flood flows of the Sacramento River up north. If the plan sounded audacious, effectively, simply such a theft had already been achieved by the Metropolis of Los Angeles, reaching up and over the mountain to steal the Owens River.
That is how the federal authorities, within the Nineteen Forties, got here to construct the Central Valley Venture, damming the rivers and putting in mammoth pumps within the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta to maneuver water to the dying farms within the center. That is how the state of California, within the Nineteen Sixties, constructed the State Water Venture, putting in extra pumps within the delta and a 444-mile-long aqueduct to maneuver extra water to develop extra farms within the center and extra homes and swimming swimming pools in Southern California.
That is how we’ve come to the purpose immediately, in the course of the driest decade in state historical past, that valley farmers haven’t diminished their footprint to satisfy water’s shortage however have added a half-million extra acres of everlasting crops—extra almonds, pistachios, mandarins. They’ve lowered their pumps by a whole bunch of ft to chase the dwindling aquifer even because it dwindles additional, sucking so many thousands and thousands of acre-feet of water out of the earth that the land is sinking. This subsidence is collapsing the canals and ditches, lowering the movement of the very aqueduct that we constructed to create the movement itself.
How may a local account for such insanity?
No civilization had ever constructed a grander system to move water. It sprawled farmland. It sprawled suburbia. It made rise three world-class cities, and an financial system that might rank because the fifth largest on the planet. However it didn’t change the important nature of California. Drought is California. Flood is California. One yr our rivers and streams produce 30 million acre-feet of water. The subsequent yr, they produce 200 million acre-feet. The common yr, 72.5 million acre-feet, is a lie we inform ourselves.
I’m sitting on the porch of a century-old farmhouse, consuming kebabs and pilaf with David “Mas” Masumoto. We’re looking in close to silence at his 80 acres of orchards and vineyards not removed from the Kings River. His small work crew has gone residence. His spouse, Marcy, is doing volunteer work abroad, and their three canines, all stinking, know no bounds. The entire place seems to be exhausted, like a farm the place the farmer has died. However Mas, nearing 68, is as alive as ever.
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