Farms, fish and the future: State water board must balance the needs of all Californians
On Wednesday, March 16 the State Water Resources Control Board will meet to discuss Sacramento River temperature management and its impact on salmon for 2022 and beyond.
Salmon, salmon fishermen, and all Californians, are struggling with drought impacts. And as we work toward long-term solutions, that doesn’t make this year easier for anyone.
However, it is important to maintain balance between all water users and observe the California Water Code, which requires “reasonable” decisions among competing water uses. And while some may want to define “reasonable” solely on the basis of an amount of water allocated to each user, it’s clearly not that simple.
Farms do require water, which they use to grow the healthy, local, food supply we all depend on. But despite increasing water efficiency, farmers are always the first to have supplies cut, and this year is no different. Many are receiving 30% or less of the normal allocation. Cutting it further could easily result in more lost farms as we saw in 2014, 2015, and again in 2021, adding more pressure to food prices.
And the “industry” is not made up of only farmers, their families and the descendants hoping to continue farming.
California farms employ more than 400,000 people each year, most of which are Latino, and many live in small, rural communities that are the first to feel the pain when farm jobs dry up. For many of these workers and their families, this has been their livelihood for decades.
Joe Del Bosque’s Mexican-born parents were migrant farm workers in the 1930s and 1940s, and Joe spent 10 years working for other farmers until he and his wife, Maria, were able to start their own farm on the westside of Fresno County. They are passionate about their workers. “The fact that many of our seasonal workers come back to our farm year after year shows their loyalty . . . Maria and I take pride in that,” said Joe.
This personal story is repeated throughout the state because even though many people associate California farming mostly with the Central Valley, there is agricultural production located in all 58 California counties.
However, the impact of water for farming doesn’t stop there. There are hundreds of thousands of other jobs that are dependent on farming. From large concerns such as food processors, all the way down to the local hardware stores, restaurants, mechanics, and other small businesses that depend on farmers and farm workers to say afloat.
Eliminating these jobs would also have a huge negative impact on both state and local tax revenue, which hurts schools, government services like law enforcement and fire protection, and in the end, all California taxpayers. If the tax revenue isn’t coming from the farm economy, it must be made up from other sources.
Clearly, when you move to shut down farming, the impacts spread exponentially.
On the flip side, farmers do recognize the importance of salmon to the state, and have been working with others to help improve habitat, reduce predators and increase food supply. The results have been more than encouraging.
Far from the “near-complete loss of young salmon,” predicted by many media outlets in 2021, there was a large adult salmon run that returned up the Sacramento River to spawn early in 2021 and by October of last year more than 200,000 young salmon were migrating downstream with many more still rearing. And as we all remember, 2021 was an extremely dry and hot year, which tells us the answer to helping salmon is not all about the amount of water it would take to deliver cooler temperatures.
We believe a better way to help salmon, rather than solely focusing on water temperature and further decimating our local food supply, would be to continue working on mitigating other factors known to hurt salmon while the entire state works toward a more secure water future by building more storage and fixing our infrastructure.