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Retiring Farmland to Save Water?
Even with irrigation, the summer sun can bake the soil on cotton farms outside Firebaugh to a hardened crust. Another kind of heat has been generated by the Phase I Final Report released this fall by CALFED, which eliminates drying up such San Joaquin Valley farmland as a way to save water to "fix" the Bay-Delta system.
CALFED - a two-year-old, cooperative federal and state effort to develop a long-term solution to Bay-Delta water supply and environmental conflicts had initially considered removing 800,000 acres of marginal San Joaquin lands from production. The latest report (see Now in Print) crosses off land retirement as one of the ways to save water within CALFED's current three alternative solutions. Land retirement is to be used only when water quality issues demand it, the report says.
CALFED's Rick Soehren says economic and other impacts of fallowing land were considered by CALFED during the scoping process. But ultimately CALFED decided that changing the use of land was not an acceptable way to save water. "There are ways to conserve water and manage water and land better and keep the land in production," says Soehren. He says landowners in the San Joaquin can pursue a "whole suite" of conservation, conjunctive use and recycling measures instead of drying up farms.
Ronnie Weiner-Cohen of the Natural Resources Defense Council says CALFED was right to reduce the original 800,000 figure but not to "throw out the baby with the bath water."
Enviros believe that in backing away from land retirement, CALFED is undermining public faith in its solution-seeking process. "This is being held up as an example of CALFED caving in on a key issue, not on its merits but solely because of pressure from agriculture," Cohen says.
The Environmental Water Caucus, which represents over 20 groups, thinks at least 200,000 - 300,000 acres of permanent retirement is needed to achieve water quality objectives alone, and that another 200,00-300,000 should be considered for a mix of temporary fallowing and permanent retirement to help achieve water supply reliability objectives. "In many cases, land retirement offers the most cost effective water quality and water supply reliability benefits and has been widely recognized by various federal and state programs as necessary," according to a caucus position statement. Cohen says any such land retirement would be voluntary and compensated on a willing seller basis, and points to the high level of interest expressed by farmers in the land retirement program created by the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act.
Steve Hall, of the Association of California Water Agencies, says land retirement never had anything at all to do with fixing the Delta. "There are some in the environmental community who just want to see farmland taken out of production and don't care if it is directly related to what we are working on," Hall says.
Cohen thinks much of the debatable land will come out of production anyway eventually, as studies have shown that farming on much of the salty former desert in the San Joaquin is not sustainable. She says if CALFED takes a stand now to take the land outof production, it would prevent the property from being converted to development in the future.
Hall says there will be land that goes out of production in the San Joaquin because of drainage problems but taking land out should "not be a function of CALFED."
Contacts: Rick Soehren (916)657-2666; Ronnie Weiner-Cohen(415)777-0220; Steve Hall (916)441-4545
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