From the BBC’s radio show, Business Daily:
Business Daily travels to California where the worst drought in four decades is hitting farmers hard. Justin Rowlatt visits Ron Cardella’s farm and winery where he is having to pump groundwater and make tough choices about which crops to save. Peter Vallis of the San Joaquin Valley Winegrowers Association tells us the long-term toll drought is taking on the Californian wine industry, plus why a small amount of drought may improve wine quality in the short term. We hear about the tension between farmers and environmentalists over California’s water priorities – and travel to California’s huge river delta where Campbell Ingram of the Delta Conservancy tells us why global warming is changing the way the state gets its water. Plus we talk to one of the men in charge of managing California’s water supply – Paul Helliker, Deputy Director of California’s Department of Water Resources.
Program transcript
[Host: Justin Rowlatt] In California, new rules mean if you use a hose to watch the sidewalk outside your house, it could end up costing you hundreds of dollars in fines. It’s the latest effort by the state to get Californians to cut their water use, and you don’t have to travel far to see why.We’re driving the west side freeway, this is one of the arteries that runs alongside the vast Central Valley, the hugely fertile plain in the middle of California. This place produces something like 60% of all the fruit and nuts consumed in America, but the evidence of drought here is everywhere. Every overhead road sign, and I’m going under one just now, warns of the serious drought and urges everyone to help save water. And the fields on either side of the road here are completely empty, they are just rows of dusty, barren furrows, and that is a really common site on this road. A farmer has put up a sign saying, ‘Congress-caused Dust Bowl,’ and those are pretty common, too. I’ve even see huge plantations of almond trees just withering and dying in the fields and it really is very dramatic.
Now this is my first visit to a California vineyard or winery as they call them, and it’s very different from what you might expect to encounter in Italy or France. There are no rolling hills, just big open vast fields with orderly rows of vines running down them, but the building looks as if it could be in Italy. It could be a Tuscan Villa; it’s absolutely beautiful.
“This is a beautiful; it’s a little bit of Italy here in the middle of California,” says Mr. Rowlatt, host.
“I’m glad you figured that out,” says Ron Cardella.
“How many crops do you grow?” asks the host.
“How many did I used to grow, or how many do I grow now?” asks Mr. Cardella.
“How many did you used to grow?”
“Five or six. Today we’re just growing tomatoes, almonds, and wine grapes. We had no allocation this year, so everything that’s on this ranch, the water is being supplied by these deep well pumps,” says Mr. Cardella.
“So you’re pumping it up from the groundwater,” says host.
“I’ve got these things running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What they are talking now is that we could probably run the wells a third of the time that we’re running them now. I’ve got 1600-1700 acres of permanent crops. We’re going to have to knock another 500-600 acres of those off. That’s why I say this is a crisis, and maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit but I don’t think so,” says Mr. Cardella.
“That’s quite a dramatic situation to be in, literally letting really quite old trees die away. To grow them back is going to take years, isn’t it?” asks host.
“I’ve been in this business now since 1970, and we’ve never had to make decisions like that. That’s how bad this water situation is,” says Mr. Cardella.
“So how tough is it for you as a farmer to have to look across your land and make decisions about the future of your business?,” asks host.
“I’ll tell you what’s tough is looking at my employees and telling them that I don’t have work for you. That’s probably harder than looking at my crops, and I’m spending all my time in the office, because I don’t want to see the crops. It kinda tears you up to see that you have to allocate what you have, and that it’s not nearly enough,” says Mr. Cardella.
“Of course, there have been other droughts. There were terrible years, 76-77 and 78 … “ says host.
“1977 was a lot worse. The difference between then and now, the environmentalists. That’s responsible for us not getting the water. The environmentalists are winning damn near every battle that we’re going into, and it’s like, wake up guys, because who is going to feed you?” says Mr. Cardella.
“Do you worry about the future?” asks the host.
“Yes. If our politicians don’t do something, which is building dams or scaling back these environmentalists – we can’t keep going this way. We have reached the end of the road as far as conserving. We produce 65,000 tons of tomatoes, three cents a pound. This year, it’s gone up to four cents,” says Mr. Cardella.
“You get four cents a pound … “ says host.
“We grow a lot of tomatoes,” says Mr. Cardella.
“I’m just thinking about what I pay for tomatoes even in a can, it’s a lot more than three cents a pound,” says host.
“The price on the farm has gone up 25% just due to water. I’m thinking about next year, having no tomatoes, selling my tomato machines, because if this thing is going to stay like this, I don’t even think I can take care of my vines and my trees,” says Mr. Cardella.
“What you’re describing is a kind of retreat. You’ve got this certain acreage, you’ve got this certain amount of water, and you’re now making calculations about what you can keep and what you can’t, and you’re saying you can leave tomatoes and not come back,” says host.
“If they don’t fix this situation, we won’t have the water to come back,” says Mr. Cardella.
The host then turns to Mr. Cardella’s son. “So you’re Ron’s son and you focus on the winery, don’t’ you. What we would call the vineyard. Are you going to take me through and show me what you do?”
“Yes, let’s check it out”, says farmer’s son. “So basically we produce various amounts of red wines, white wines here. The focus is on the Italian varieties … we make everything. I have over 12 different wines that I make from our vineyards which are right here on the ranch.”
“And what scale is it now? How much wine are you making here?”
“I’m producing about 5000 cases annually, and we really need to teach people is that what we’re doing with the water is a good thing. We’re feeding you. We’re producing food for people to consume,” says son.
The radio host and the farmer’s son are walking across the farm, and they pass a water pump. “This is one of our water wells, so it’s getting water out of the ground from about 800 feet,” says the son. “The well is 1200 feet. I’ve been out here for 20 years, and for the last two or three years, the wells have been basically running nonstop, and prior to that, I never saw the wells running.”
“So that is a tremendous change. So how much water do you pump out with this?” asks the host.
“This right now, we can go check the meter, but it should be pumping about 800 gallons per minute,” he says, looking at the meter. “It’s at about 700, it’s gone down a little bit, and that’s the result of the water table dropping. There’s simply less water down there.”
“If we walk over towards the vineyards here, we can see the irrigation system working now, and this is a drip irrigation system, so you’ve got a pipe running along the bottom of the vines,” says host.
“You can give the vineyards precisely how much water you want to give it and there’s very little waste,” says the son.
“Looking along the row, we can see just steady drip on to each vine, immediately presumably above the roots,” says the host.
“Yes, that’s right, and each one of those drippers will put out about anywhere from a quarter to a half-gallon per hour,” says son.
Host and the son go into the winery and discuss wine making operation. The conversation turns back to the drought.
“A bit of a pinch of water isn’t necessarily a problem for vineyards and for wineries because you get more flavor from your grapes, but there comes a point where presumably you are in trouble,” says the host.
“Well, it’s not a problem this year, but it could be a problem next year. If you continually stress the vine, eventually the vine is going to give up, it’s going to catch a disease, and die. Yes, we will have a little bit better quality for a year or two, but it can catch up with us also and start to hurt us,” says son.
“Are you anxious about the long-term? You’re relatively new to this business, you’ve been in it ten years. Are you anxious because you’re building this business, you’re building a new brand, you’ve made a huge investment as a family and as a person in this industry. Are you worried?” asks the host.
“Of course you are. It’s expensive to start up your own business. If things continue down the path that they are going, it could all be for nothing, so yeah, there’s a lot of stress, there’s a lot of worry – there’s a lot at stake,” says son.
“So we come out of the cellar and find that we’re standing directly on top of the fabulous wine cellar below. And Peter, you’re hear as well. Tell us who you are and where you’re from,” says host.
“I’m Peter Vallis, I’m the Executive Director of the San Joaquin Valley Winegrowers Association, and fourth generation California farmer,” says Mr. Vallis.
“Talking about the wine and the wine industry generally, how big an industry is California wine now?” asks host.
“I believe that it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a $200 billion industry,” says Mr. Vallis.
“This is a big industry by Californian standards, isn’t it,” asks host.
“Wine and grapes are easily the second largest agricultural commodity in California, right behind dairy. What we get the international press for is the wine,” says Mr. Vallis.
“So how much of an issue, at the moment, is the drought for the wine industry?” asks the host.
“It’s going to affect several things,” responds Mr. Vallis. “One, we are in a situation where we have to plant every year to keep up with our demand. With the uncertainty of water, we can’t really make those decisions to invest the $10,000 or so an acre to plant. Lack of water will reduce yields, so that’s going to create a gap in the supply side of wine in America.”
“So how worried are you about the future of California wine?” the host asks Mr. Vallis.
“In some ways, what seems to be happening here in the Central Valley seems to be very good for our grape production,” he says. “It seems to be improving our wine quality. However, on the flip side of that, there’s more and more and more import pressure from Europe as the consumers in wine drinking countries continue to drink less liters per person.”
Change of scene.
It really is windy out here and I’ve driven away from the ranch where I just had a couple of sips of that fine wine that Nathan Cardella gave me, and I’ve come up to the side of the San Luis Reservoir. Now this is one of the network of reservoirs that feeds water to the entire state of California and I’ll tell you what, up here, you really get a sense of the magnitude of the problem the state faces, because looking down you can see there’s a incredible kind of salty tide marker along the side of the reservoir which gives you a sense of just how low it is. It’s just over a quarter full, 29% full. Normally at this time of the year, it would be half full, so this issue of managing this finite, this limited water supply is a huge problem for the state. I’m going to drive up now to meet some of the guys responsible for trying to manage water supplies to California.
We’ve come down to a nature reserve in the Delta area of the Central Valley, and to be honest, here, you wouldn’t really know that there was a drought. There’s a lot of greenery and I’m meeting up with Campbell Ingram.
“I’m with the state Delta Conservancy, and we’re a partner with the Cosumnes River preserve that’s run by a patchwork of ownership with the Nature Conservancy and even the federal government,” says Campbell Ingram.
“So what is the idea of the river preserve?” asks the host.
“It is an amazing place. It’s one of the last free flowing rivers coming out of the west side of the Sierra Nevada, so the river is not controlled in any way,” says Mr. Ingram. “There is still a good bit of connectivity to the floodplain. In fact, all of the rivers that empty out of the Sierra Nevada for 500 miles up and down the state, down into the valley would have looked very much like this, along that riparian edge … “
“And now all of them, except this one, have dams or something interrupting the flow along the way?” asks the host.
“Correct,” says Mr. Ingram.
“How important is it that we conserve habitats like this?” asks the host.
“Well, for a variety of species, it’s critically important. If you think about the salmon life history, basically the salmon, in the springtime, when the water would come up and spread over these floodplains, that water would slow down, and it was incredibly full of food, and therefore they get much bigger, and when they enter the estuary, they are in a much healthier state, so that’s one species that has really evolved with and really benefits from that water spreading over the land in the spring,” says Mr. Ingram.
“And so how is this drought affecting the river preserve and the Delta, more generally?” asks the host.
“It’s very concerning and everybody is at this point hoping that next year we get some rain. If this proves to be a decadal drought, it will fundamentally change everything we do in California,” says Mr. Ingram.
“In what sense?” asks the host.
“In the sense that we won’t be watering our lawns likely, we won’t be filling our swimming pools,” says Mr. Ingram. “Our system that is fundamentally based on snowmelt runoff coming from the mountains could change quite a bit, into more of a rain generated system, less snow, more flashier rainstorms and that presents challenges to how we manage our reservoirs and whether or not our flood capacity is sufficient, so we really live in this challenging world of either you don’t have enough or you have way too much in California, and that’s all changing.”
“And why is that a challenge? Because you’re getting water at least, aren’t you?” asks the host.
“The interesting thing is when you’ve got a nice snowpack up there, it slowly melts out in a fairly controlled manner,” says Campbell Ingram. “If that’s no longer the case, and you’ve got big intense storms, you can fill those reservoirs up very quickly, and then you have to worry about overtopping, so it is a crisis and that’s why we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars in this planning and phase and it’s such a contentious issue. How are we going to manage the Delta into the future, make sure its sustainable, the ecosystem is sustainable and we have a functioning, secure water supply for all of California.”
So we’ve come up to the river to the nature reserve headquarters, a lovely building looking out over the Valley. There’s a feeder for hummingbirds and there’s been a couple of hummingbirds buzzing around it. I’m sitting with Paul Helliker, who is the Deputy Director of Water Management across half the state of California, more or less.
“Yes, the Department of Water Resources is the California agency that operates the system that the state owns and operates,” says Paul Helliker. “We also operate the California Aqueduct, the longest aqueduct in the world. It’s 700 miles of transportation system that takes water from the Delta to the Bay Area, as well as to the Central Valley for agricultural use and municipal use, and then Southern California as well.”
“So what can you do to address this water crisis that there is in California?” asks the host.
“What we are working on is a way to convey water from the northern part of the Delta to the pumps in the southern part of the Delta in a way that isolates that water from the waterways in the Delta,” says Mr. Helliker. “By isolating part of that supply, then we avoid any risks associated with failures of the levees and salt water intrusion. Coupled with that, though, is a major habitat restoration project which would restore 100,000 acres of habitat in the Delta, turn existing farmland and other land that’s become marginal back into tidal wetlands and freshwater wetlands and grasslands and so on.”
“That’s quite controversial, isn’t it,” says the host. “People don’t like the idea, particularly in the time of water crisis, of drought, that you’re going to be, as they see it, favoring animals and plants over human beings.”
“Some people say that, but I think it’s a project that many experts in the field, they view this as a critical project,” says Mr. Helliker. “Ultimately, we expect to start construction within a few years and have it operating by 2025.”
“Another aspect to the plans for water supply are building new reservoirs, aren’t there? There’s all these plans for five new reservoirs, enlarging reservoirs – tell me a bit about those plans,” asks the host.
“Those plans have been underway for a number of years,” says Mr. Helliker. “We’re going to need everything, we’re going to need water recycling systems, we’re going to need conservation, we’ll need new storage systems, as well as infrastructure improvements to provide reliability.”
“So how big are these tunnels that you’re planning to build underneath the Delta?” asks the host.
“The proposed tunnels are 40 feet in diameter; there would be two of them, and they’d be approximately 30 miles long from the northern place where the water would be pulled in from the three different screens, down to the pump stations in the south part of the Delta,” says Mr. Helliker.
“It’s a vast amount of water you’d be transporting,” says the host.
“It’s not more water from the Delta than we’ve currently been taking over the past 15 to 20 years, so the goal is a reliable water supply,” says Mr. Helliker.
That was Paul Helliker, Deputy Director of the California Department of Water Resources, and that is all for today’s program, but if you’re left thirsty for our unique take on the world of business, just search for Business Daily online. You’ll find a flood of programs to download …
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