Drought Drained Billions Of Dollar From California Agriculture In 2021
Drought cost California’s agricultural sector $1.2 billion and 8,750 full- and part-time jobs last year, according to a new report prepared for the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture. It is the latest evidence that climate change is upending the country’s most productive agricultural region.
“This has been a fast-paced drought, and it shows how climate change increases the challenges we face in managing water in California,” said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) and a co-author of the report. “Sadly, we are going to see more and more droughts like this, so we need better tools to anticipate and minimize the socio-economic impacts.”
The report was produced by a team of researchers at UC Merced in collaboration with experts from UC Davis and the PPIC. They released their findings only days after many California farmers discovered they would not be getting a reprieve from drought conditions this year, either; on Feb. 23, the federal government announced that it will not release any water to Central Valley farmers in 2022. Two thirds of California is engulfed in “severe drought,” and the state just weathered its driest February on record.
Researchers
focused on several regions where drought conditions have been particularly
severe, including the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural
regions in the world, and the Russian River Basin, which is home to
California’s wine country. Their analysis found that farmers fallowed an
additional 395,000 acres of cropland because of last year’s water shortages. A
whopping 385,000 of those acres are located in the Central Valley. Rice,
cotton, grain, and field crops were among the commodities most affected.
Last year was one
of the driest in California’s recorded history, and many farmers’ water usage
was also constrained by new conservation policies. When the drought began, the
state had just started to implement the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA), which regulates groundwater pumping. The law has not stopped some
farmers from continuing to deplete groundwater, and
some water experts are unsure that it’s working.
But the UC Merced report suggests that SGMA has effectively regulated pumping
in some areas, particularly in parts of the Central Valley. According to water
experts at the PPIC, farmers will have to fallow at least 500,000 acres of
farmland by 2040 to achieve the state’s groundwater sustainability goals.
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