California farmers depleted groundwater in this county. Now a state crackdown could rein them in

Cal Matters ^ | APRIL 15, 2024 | RACHEL BECKER

[Wuli]

All of this going on while California state agencies have mandatory restrictions on river waters going to the farms “in order to ‘save’ the marine life in the S.F. bay area”.

[ABN 505]

I read somewhere that nut trees require tremendous amounts of water in order to bear fruit, perhaps 10 times more than apple, pear or other types of orchard fruit.

[HamiltonJay]

I hate to break it to you, but modern farming methods rely on irrigation, there are very very few places where natural rainfall can support modern farming techniques... The insanely high yields per acre are only possible with irrigation. Water table depletion isn't limited to one county in California... most of the farmland in the US is depleting their aquifers, at varying rates, but few are not being depleted.

[redgolum]

I live and have lived in Iowa and Nebraska. That Red area is over the Ogalla Aquifer, and it is being pumped out so fast that there are earthquakes, and the table is dropping. The tan areas in Iowa are where you don’t see many pivots.

You made my point. That water is going away, and isn’t coming back.

[HamiltonJay]

Yes, I am not debating the water is being used faster than it can be replenished, I was simply pointing out modern crop yields (which are kind of necessary to keep the world population fed).

There is no doubt some places are depleting faster than others, but there are very very few places where we aren’t depleting our ground water.

It will be interesting long term, we certainly have the capacity to create as much fresh water as we want through desalination, however, its an incredibly costly process currently, and that doesn’t even get into how you move the water from the oceans to the farmland if we have to use technology to create the solution.

Eventually desalination and artificial pipelines are going to be neccessary unless we figure out a better way to get the high yields we need with less water.

If you look at the map, you see only 1 Aquifer (I believe) shows its actually adding water every year, up near the pacific northwest.. every other aquifer is depleting though at varying amounts.

A day of reconning is coming if nothing changes. Pretty damned clear that lots of land where people are farming and living are going to be without a local reliable water supply if things don’t change.

[GailA]

btt