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The Real Water Crisis

Soil and groundwater salinization


in Western San Joaquin Valley

Drainage-impaired land in San Joaquin Valley, Victor Miguel Ponce


Fresno -- The small towns of Mendota and Firebaugh lie along the San Joaquin River.
Dependent on construction and agricultural jobs, the towns have been suffering greatly
from the recession and drought.

The towns are surrounded by once-fertile farmland, that was reclaimed for agriculture in
the 1950's and 1960's. Much of the farmland is now fallowed, and landowners are
clamoring for irrigation water to be restored. But the land has much more serious
issues than the drought The towns lie on the edge of 400,000 acres of increasingly
salt-impaired soils in Western Fresno County, that are also experiencing increasingly
severe groundwater contamination.

The arid soils in the Western Fresno are derived from marine sediments and have high
salt and sodium content, as well as heavy metals such as selenium and chromium.

Irrigation water from the Delta naturally contains salts. The crops take up the water and
leave salts in the soil. Additional water is added to flush out the salts in order to maintain
crop productivity, but it also leaches selenium, boron, arsenic, molybdenum and other
harmful minerals and salts from an ancient ocean bed in the Western San Joaquin
Valley. The contaminated drainage water collects on top of the Corcoran Clay Barrier
and eventually reaches the root zone of plants.

As the area has continued to be flooded with irrigation water, the water table has risen,
and is now within six feet of the surface in most of the low-lying areas in the valley.
The salty groundwater is wicking up into the root zone of crops, sometimes creating a
layer of salt on the soil surface.

These lands are becoming increasingly limited in the crops they can grow, and will have
to be completely retired unless some solution can be found to drain them. A recent US
Geological survey found that 48% of the irrigated cropland in Western Fresno is saline-
sodic, up from 33% in 1985.

The Federal Bureau of Reclamation has looked into solving the drainage problems by
creating gravel evaporation ponds, but the cost is enormous, since one acre of
evaporation pond is needed for every nine acres of land. In 2007, a proposed
combination of retirement of 200,000 acres of land and construction of 2000 acres of
evaporation ponds was estimated to cost 2.7 billion dollars.

Westlands has instead proposed to take responsibility for the drainage issues, in
exchange for a permanent contract for approximately 1 million acre-feet of water. The
water district is looking at using gravel evaporation beds instead of evaporation ponds,
but the technology has never been proven to work and disposal of the salts is still
problematic.

These options do not solve the regional issues. Meanwhile, the specter has been
raised of water rights being resold for development. In a recent deal, a Westside farmer
in Kings County sold the rights to 14,000 acre feet to the Mojave Water Agency in San
Bernardino county for $77 million, or $5,500 an acre foot.
The out of district water sale could be the first of many. A water transfer bill is currently
pending in Congress that could remove many restrictions on in-district or agricultural use
of CVP water. If the hundreds of thousands of acres of low-lying land are abandoned
due to salinity, and the water rights are resold to out of area development, the economic
consequences for rural towns in the Valley will be severe. There is currently no
proposal to provide compensation for the economic impacts of allowing the soils to
continue to deteriorate.

An even more serious consequence to these communities is the salinization of the deep
groundwater in the area. Some computer models show that salts could be percolating
not just into the shallow groundwater, but into the deep aquifers. In several decades,
this could slowly make all of the groundwater in the area unsuitable for drinking or
agricultural use. It would severely impact rural towns that rely on well water not only for
irrigation, but for drinking and residential use.

It is well to consider the example of Babylon, an ancient civilization which struggled with
the same salinity issues millennia ago Tablets tell of fields turning white, and crop
records show increasing shifts to barley because less salt-tolerant wheat could not be
grown. Thousands of years later, 20% of the land in Iraq still cannot be farmed.

References:

Groundwater Availability of the Central Valley Aquifer, California


See http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1766/

2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy Discussion Draft


http://www.energy.ca.gov/2009publications/CNRA-1000-2009-027/CNRA-1000-2009-
027-D.PDF

Central Valley Water Resource Control Board, Salinity in the Central Valley, May 2006
http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/rwqcb5/water_issues/salinity/initial_development/swrcb-
02may06-ovrvw-rpt.pdf

US Department of Agriculture, Soil Survey of Fresno County, Western Part


http://soildatamart.nrcs.usda.gov/Manuscripts/CA653/0/fresno.pdf

Sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, California. Proceedings


of the National Academy of Sciences, September 5, 2005. Gerrit Schoups, Jan W.
Hopmans et. al. http://www.pnas.org/content/102/43/15352.full
US Department of Agriculture, Soil Survey of Western Fresno County
Source: Rainbow Report
Source: Rainbow Report

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