A new report on California’s drought has revealed that farmland has shrunk by 10% this year over 2019, resulting in 752,000 acres of fallowed land.
California’s farming industry lost $1.7 billion in revenue this year, up from $1.3 billion last year. This led to a loss of 12,000 agricultural jobs, said a report from the University of California, Merced and the Public Policy Institute.
The state produced its smallest rice crop since the drought in the 1970s.
“It’s a disaster,” rice farmer Don Bransford told the Los Angeles Times. “This has never happened. Never. And I’ve been farming since 1980.”
This year, Bransford didn’t plant a single acre of rice even though he normally farms about 1,800 acres.
Parched lands have been a disaster particularly for rice growers, who are grappling with the state’s driest three-year spell on record. They reside in the Central Valley, which has traditionally been one of America’s biggest agricultural providers and exporters.
The area primarily relies on canals to deliver water from a series of lakes, but state cutbacks have dwindled their supply down to nothing, state Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D) told the Washington Examiner.
“The Sacramento Valley and its communities have been ground zero during this drought,” said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “It might be wise to assess investments in recharge and pumping infrastructure to increase drought resilience.”
Farmers have been relying on wells and groundwater to keep in business, pumping 27% more groundwater this year than in 2019, the report said.
CALIFORNIA FARMS TURN TO DUST AS NEWSOM AND WHITE HOUSE POLICIES WORSEN DROUGHT EFFECTS
This has created a secondary disaster as wells run dry and depleted groundwater causes the earth to collapse in many places. As a countermeasure, a state law has been passed requiring farmers to curtail underground water use in droughts by 2040.
The end result will be large swaths of land permanently fallowed, according to a 2019 report titled “Water and the Future of the San Joaquin Valley.”
“We typically plant about 100,000 acres of rice in our district. And this year, we planted 1,000 acres,” Thad Bettner, general manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s just a massive, massive impact.”
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The rice produced is a short- and medium-grain variety called japonica that is used in sushi and exported around the world.
