During California’s last extreme drought, lawmakers scrambled to protect the state’s dwindling groundwater. But the resulting law was limited. It set up a framework to manage groundwater, but so far has done little to safeguard the precious resource.
,” saying farms growing almonds and alfalfa use an estimated 3 trillion gallons of water per year and the crops are exported in large quantities.
The law is “not only not stopping groundwater overdraft yet. It’s permitting accelerated efforts to grab as much groundwater as farmers can, before limits are put into place,” Gleick said.bluntly on Twitter, comparing the situation to “telling bank robbers they really had to stop robbing the bank and they had ten years to get out before the police would move in.”
The finished well would irrigate two orchards separated by a narrow road near the Tulare County town of Terra Bella. On one side of the lane, orange trees thick with deep green foliage surrounded the clamorous, 60-ton drilling rig. On the other side, acres of spindly, young pistachio trees, years away from bearing fruit, marched into the distance.The orchards are owned by Setton Farms, one of the biggest pistachio growers in the country.
In the end, Davis said, “we didn’t find anything that was worth taking the risk” of drilling so deep. The completed well is 880 feet, a little deeper than the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco is tall. And, he said, Setton decided to take the unused casing and have a second well drilled. Clattering slowly down a row of grapevines, the massive harvester was the same bright blue as its driver’s turban. Harjinder Singh, a Sikh who once farmed in India’s Punjab region, has tilled these fertile acres with his extended family for more than two decades.
At 1,000 feet, the well is about as deep as the Eiffel Tower is tall, deeper than 90% of ag wells in the county. But the water level had dropped — 110 feet in just the last nine years. And it took three weeks for workers to arrive and move the pump lower in the well. The lack of water left some vines dry and brown at harvest time, their grapes shriveled.
A shallower well that supplies the family’s two houses and a rental home also began to fail. They noticed when the water flowing from faucets suddenly shrank to a trickle. That well is 355 feet deep, and they were pumping water from 340 feet when the pressure began to falter.
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