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The Real Water Crisis
Soil and groundwater salinizationin Western San Joaquin Valley
Drainage-impaired land in San Joaquin Valley, Victor Miguel Ponce
Fresno --
The small towns of Mendota and Firebaugh lie along the San Joaquin River.Dependent on construction and agricultural jobs, the towns have been suffering greatlyfrom the recession and drought.The towns are surrounded by once-fertile farmland, that was reclaimed for agriculture inthe 1950's and 1960's. Much of the farmland is now fallowed, and landowners areclamoring for irrigation water to be restored. But the land has much more seriousissues than the drought The towns lie on the edge of 400,000 acres of increasinglysalt-impaired soils in Western Fresno County, that are also experiencing increasinglysevere groundwater contamination.The arid soils in the Western Fresno are derived from marine sediments and have highsalt and sodium content, as well as heavy metals such as selenium and chromium.Irrigation water from the Delta naturally contains salts. The crops take up the water andleave salts in the soil. Additional water is added to flush out the salts in order to maintaincrop productivity, but it also leaches selenium, boron, arsenic, molybdenum and other harmful minerals and salts from an ancient ocean bed in the Western San JoaquinValley. The contaminated drainage water collects on top of the Corcoran Clay Barrier and eventually reaches the root zone of plants.As the area has continued to be flooded with irrigation water, the water table has risen,and is now within six feet of the surface in most of the low-lying areas in the valley.The salty groundwater is wicking up into the root zone of crops, sometimes creating alayer of salt on the soil surface.These lands are becoming increasingly limited in the crops they can grow, and will haveto be completely retired unless some solution can be found to drain them. A recent USGeological survey found that 48% of the irrigated cropland in Western Fresno is saline-sodic, up from 33% in 1985.The Federal Bureau of Reclamation has looked into solving the drainage problems bycreating gravel evaporation ponds, but the cost is enormous, since one acre of evaporation pond is needed for every nine acres of land. In 2007, a proposedcombination of retirement of 200,000 acres of land and construction of 2000 acres of evaporation ponds was estimated to cost 2.7 billion dollars.Westlands has instead proposed to take responsibility for the drainage issues, inexchange for a permanent contract for approximately 1 million acre-feet of water. Thewater district is looking at using gravel evaporation beds instead of evaporation ponds,but the technology has never been proven to work and disposal of the salts is stillproblematic.These options do not solve the regional issues. Meanwhile, the specter has beenraised of water rights being resold for development. In a recent deal, a Westside farmer in Kings County sold the rights to 14,000 acre feet to the Mojave Water Agency in SanBernardino county for $77 million, or $5,500 an acre foot.
The out of district water sale could be the first of many. A water transfer bill is currentlypending in Congress that could remove many restrictions on in-district or agricultural useof CVP water. If the hundreds of thousands of acres of low-lying land are abandoneddue to salinity, and the water rights are resold to out of area development, the economicconsequences for rural towns in the Valley will be severe. There is currently noproposal to provide compensation for the economic impacts of allowing the soils tocontinue to deteriorate.An even more serious consequence to these communities is the salinization of the deepgroundwater in the area. Some computer models show that salts could be percolatingnot just into the shallow groundwater, but into the deep aquifers. In several decades,this could slowly make all of the groundwater in the area unsuitable for drinking or agricultural use. It would severely impact rural towns that rely on well water not only for irrigation, but for drinking and residential use.It is well to consider the example of Babylon, an ancient civilization which struggled withthe same salinity issues millennia ago Tablets tell of fields turning white, and croprecords show increasing shifts to barley because less salt-tolerant wheat could not begrown. Thousands of years later, 20% of the land in Iraq still cannot be farmed.
References:
2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy Discussion Draft
Central Valley Water Resource Control Board, Salinity in the Central Valley, May 2006http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/rwqcb5/water_issues/salinity/initial_development/swrcb-02may06-ovrvw-rpt.pdf US Department of Agriculture, Soil Survey of Fresno County, Western Parthttp://soildatamart.nrcs.usda.gov/Manuscripts/CA653/0/fresno.pdf Sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, California. Proceedingsof the National Academy of Sciences, September 5, 2005. Gerrit Schoups, Jan W.Hopmans et. al.http://www.pnas.org/content/102/43/15352.full
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