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Farmland for Habitat, An Environmental Trade-off?
If there's any fist-shaking to be done over the loss of choice California farmland, it's usually aimed at urban creep. But while strip malls and subdivisions have clearly paved over thousands of acres of orchards, vineyards and croplands, the biggest consumer of farmland in recent years has been environmental restoration. Indeed a 1997 UC Davis study finds that between 1984 and 1994, the Central Valley lost more farmland to restoration than to urban development. As the CALFED effort to solve the Bay-Delta's long-term water conflicts gears up to restore 250,000 acres of Central Valley wetlands and shallows, and as specific on-the-ground environmental upgrades such as the Delta's Prospect Island project roll, state farming interests are nervous about losing too much ground.
"Just because you want to create a wetland doesn't mean you can look at the existing environment as a blank canvas," says the State Department of Food and Agriculture's Robin Reynolds. "Prime ag land is also an environmental resource. We shouldn't be improving one resource at the expense of another."
"If it turns out that we somehow have to compensate agriculture, it will have a substantial chilling effect on environmental restoration," says CALFED's Dick Daniel.
The issue is now being played out on three levels, on a project-specific level with Prospect Island, on a planning level with CALFED, and on a policy level with the state, where resource managers must decide how these two public goods will square off in the future.
Prospect island is a three-year-old project involving restoration of 1,300 acres of shallow-water fish and wetland habitat on an oft-flooded Delta isle with levees along a major shipping channel. Public interests bought Prospect from a willing seller in 1995 and the Army Corps and the state Department of Water Resources are restoring it with the help of Category III dollars - saying it will benefit waterfowl and the aquatic environment while solving expensive levee maintenance problems. Despite these benefits, Food and Ag is requesting CEQA compliance - to consider significant impacts on environmental resources related to agriculture - instead of the current initial study and "negative declaration," which asserts that farmland conversion is not a significant impact on the existing environment
Just because Prospect is "drainage-challenged" and has flooded every three years since the 1970s doesn't mean it's not prime ag land, says Reynolds. The island sports rich soils, as well as proximity to markets and its own riparian water rights. It's also within a core zone of the Delta identified by the 1992 Delta Protection Act as prime ag land worthy of protection. Indeed of CALFED's proposed 250,000 acres of habitat development, 90,000-115,000 are in the Delta, which amounts to 20-25% of the Delta's remaining farmland.
Environmentalists point out that large scale conversion of habitat and marshes to agriculture at the turn of the century caused much of the environmental damage agencies such as Water Resources and CALFED are now being asked to undo.
But Reynolds says some of the healthiest populations of now-endangered fish occurred in the 1960s long after agriculture took root. He says the habitat level hasn't changed since then, and that the real changes have been increased diversions and more introduced species. "As someone in ag, it looks like they've allowed weedy species to come in willy nilly while they've been chasing the pumps. Creating new habitat as an effective means of reversing species declines is speculation," he says.
Scientist Wim Kimmerer agrees that there isn't enough data yet to know whether creating habitat will help, and says new habitat might just as likely be colonized by introduced fish as endangered ones, or simply displace fish from one location to another. As the Prospect project includes extensive scientific monitoring plans, it offers one of the first large-scale controlled experiments where such questions may be answered.
Whatever the biological questions, habitat restoration seems to be the one thing warring water interests agree on. "If we don't restore habitat, we're back to no water and an unhealthy ecosystem, ESA problems and landowners unable to use land because of it. We're back in a box," says Daniel.
Overshadowing the biological questions are the political and legal ones. Food and Ag's concerns have lawyers throughout the state system busy debating the legal definitions of farmland, and how to interpret CEQA language in a certain "Appendix G" that lists loss of prime ag land as "normally" an impact on the environment. "With an intensive development, it's pretty clear you're going to lose something of the environment, but when you go from one open space to another, the question becomes does the fact that it's ag land deserve more protection under CEQA?" says Water Resources' lawyer Cathy Crothers.
"At this level, wildlife managers are becoming project developers, they're proposing massive construction projects that need public disclosure," adds Reynolds. "If they can't afford mitigation, they can't afford the project." Reynolds agency is requesting 3:1 mitigation (three acres of ag land elsewhere for every one acre lost to restoration) for the Prospect project.
Prospect planners are now looking to the state Resources Agency for guidance. Though discussions are underway, no statewide policy will emerge until at least late February according to the agency's Marc Luesebrink. He says the specifics of Prospect Island have "illuminated" many of the potential issues that may be encountered in other restoration projects coming down the pike, including CALFED's.
CALFED, meanwhile, is trying to temper everyone's visions of vast tracts of farmland suddenly awash in water and fish with strong reminders that its overall program will provide agriculture with a better and more reliable water supply. In terms of its ambitious habitat restoration program (not to mention its possible 500,000-acre ag land retirement program to reduce water demand), CALFED isn't planning a government land grab and has a strict policy of only working with willing sellers, according to Daniel. But if it comes to mitigation, even a one-to-one ratio could result in astronomical costs, he says.
"What are you going to do - go buy a parking lot or a strip mall and plow it?" says Water Resources' Leo Winternitz.
Probably not. But mitigation could take the form of buying agricultural easements or development rights from farmers (the difference between development and habitat value), trading water for land, exchanging drainage for land (to help farmers combat salinity problems), rotating crops with fallow flooded periods and/or providing financial support for more wildlife-friendly but often risky farming practices (such as not disking corn so that ducks can feed on the waste grain).
Underneath the talk of mitigation lies the thornier issue of statewide land use planning. To really protect ag land, restore the estuarine ecosystem and provide water for all, someone has to decide where the best places are for cities to grow, farmland to flourish, wetlands to sprout and shallows to spread. Someone also has to decide how to balance the current and future localized impacts of the restoration push with the more widespread and cumulative impacts of agricultural and urban development in the past.
Biologically-speaking, the Bay Institute's Gary Bobker thinks two zones are the most appropriate places to focus restoration: the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, which is plagued by selenium-rich soils and the accompanying drainage problems; and the once ecologically rich Delta, where farms and towns are now totally dependent on expensive and unnatural levees, and where the most habitat has been lost over time. "We need a sensible policy on ag land conversion that doesn't make it impossible to do restoration," says Daniel. "There's as much politics in this as there is biology."
Contact: Robin Reynolds (916) 323-7280; Dick Daniel (916)657-2666; Leo Winternitz (916)227-7548
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