NEWS

Valley farmers finding ways to make water last

David Castellon
dcastell@visaliatimesdelta.com
Well water is pumper into basin for use on 6-month-old Arias pistachio trees in Terra Bella on Monday. Workers are replacing wood stakes that hold up the young trees.

With the Valley struggling through one of the worst droughts in California's history, Dennis McFarlin has been looking for new ways to get water for his 120-acres of farms between Orosi and Orange Cove.

And the situation is more desperate because he and other farmers who normally depend on water from Millerton Lake delivered through the Friant-Kern Canal are getting practically no surface-water deliveries this summer.

So operators of the Orange Cove Irrigation District have found at least an interim solution for farmers like McFarlin who are short on water. But it's not a new solution, as the idea harkens back to the 1920s, when farmers with wells often sold or shared their water with neighbors through pipes between farms, McFarlin said.

That became harder to do once the county started building rural roads, and then it became unnecessary after the Friant-Kern Canal was completed in the 1950s to deliver water to eastern Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties.

This time around, farmers with wells are making deals with farmers who don't have any — or badly need additional water to supplement their wells — to buy water.

Well and pump to support 6-month-old Arias pistachio trees in Terra Bella on Monday, August 18, 2014. The holding basin is behind the burm in the background.

As for how it's delivered, the system is similar to the one in the 1920, with well pumps pulling water from wells and injecting it into the 115 miles of pressurized irrigation pipes that run through 20-mile-long, two-mile-wide Orange Cove district.

Farmers who have purchased that water are can draw the equivalent amounts out of the system for their farming operations.

New pipes, flow meters and pressure regulators to control and measure the water going in out of the the system have been installed at farms buying or selling groundwater in the Orange Cove district, its the farmers who make the deals to buy and sell its explained Fergus Morrissey, the district's manager, adding that this is the first time district has transferred well water between farms.

"So it's basically a sharing of those with groundwater to those without," he explained. "Otherwise, the people who don't have any groundwater will lose their permanent crops. They're desperate."

This is just one example of farmers and irrigation districts going beyond business as usual to try to save their crops from dying out due to the drought.

"This is the first major drought we've had where we had no water in the reservoir" or at least none available to the majority of farmers who normally get surface water from Friant-Kern, which is driving efforts to find other ways to obtain and preserve water, McFarlin said.

He has a dozen wells on his farms, where he grows citrus, grapes, olives and pomegranates, but he needs additional water for his trees and vines to survive the summer, which prompted him to buy water from other farmers in the Orange Cove district.

But it wasn't cheap, said McFarlin, who at times paid up to $2,000 per acre foot of water compared to the $70 he paid for the same amount prior to losing his surface water allotment. And he said he has bought about 300 acre feet of groundwater so far.

An acre foot is equal to one acre of water one foot deep.

Vahid Salehi, owner of Pistacia Global, which manages about 1,200 acres of pistachio farms in the Terra Bella, Riverdale and Ducor areas, helped develop a similar solution when a 50-acre farm he manages with no wells was threatened by the lack of surface water.

In that case, some of his clients with well water agreed to sell some of it, so two 7,000-gallon water tanks were installed near near the pistachio grove without wells, and the water was trucked in to keep the trees alive.

Sprays water 6-month-old Arias pistachio trees in Terra Bella on Monday, August 18, 2014.

"This went on for almost a month's worth of irrigation," with about 50 acre feet of water purchased at a cost of about $1,200 an acre foot, Salehi said.

It's a considerable amount to pay for water, but McFarlin said the alternative could be worse, because if trees or vines die, farmers have to endure the costs of pulling them out and replacing them some time in the future with new, immature trees.

From that point, it could take about eight years for a citrus tree to mature enough to produce sufficient fruit to be profitable, he said.

Other methods to save water farmers are looking into include spraying tree leaves with chemicals to reduce transpiration — the evaporation of water through leaves — and spraying ground chemicals to promote the development of more root hairs so trees soak in more water when they're irrigated and when rain comes.

"I've seen a lot of desperation that leads to creativity," said Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Authority, which oversees distribution of water through the Friant-Kern Canal.

Embracing new, water-saving technology also is important, local water experts said.

Scott Bordelon, co-owner of Caleo Ag, a Fresno-based well-cleaning and irrigation-consulting business that includes clients in Tulare County, said one of the most promising pieces of new technology available to farmer is a series of underground sensors that detect when irrigation water flows into the ground below the trees' foot systems, so farmers can adjust and use no more water than their groves need.

The sensors also show if the water isn't going deep enough because not enough watering has occurred, he said.

"When the drought started, it was getting popular," Bordelon said of the ground-sensor technology, but because of the financial tolls because of the lack of water, many farmers here can't afford the sensors.

He said several farmers are ripping out parts of their acreage to build small reservoirs, so they can pump water from their wells at night — when electrical rates are cheaper to operate the pumps — and then use that water to irrigate during the day.

But digging reservoirs seems less for saving water than it is a reaction to higher electrical costs — which are going up in part because the drought is dropping well levels, so more power is needed to pull water to the surface — noted David Cardoza, owner of the Cardoza Company, a land-leveling business in Tulare that digs reservoirs.

Regardless of the water saving-efforts on the farms at least for the time being dealing for water remains among the most important strategies out there.

Such is the case for the Terra Bella Irrigation District, which this year has made three different deals to buy thousands of acre feet of water and one to conduct a series of swaps with the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, south of Bakersfield, in exchange for more than 5,000 acre feet of its water in Millerton Lake.

"And we're going to supply them a 5-to1 supply. So we are going to give them 25,000 acre feet over the next five years," at a rate of 5,000 acre feet a year.

That will not begin until after the drought ends and Terra Bella gets at least 80 percent of its initial allotment of water in a year, said Sean Geivet, general manager of the Terra Bella district.

"5,000 acre feet in one year is not a huge amount in a decent water year," he said, adding that the water deals, will cost farmers a lot, but they probably will save about 7,500 acres of trees, mostly citrus and pistachios.