Water War Divides San Joaquin Valley Farmers
FRESNO — No other landscape in America--not the cotton South nor the grain belt of the Midwest nor the sugar fields of Florida--has been more altered by the hand of agriculture than this sweeping valley in the middle of the state.
What hills and knolls existed back in Miwok and Tachi days have been flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Every river bursting out of the Sierra has been bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of dams, canals and levees. It is this corralled snowmelt, the highway banners proudly shout, that feeds and clothes a nation.
But America’s most productive farm region, with a never-ending harvest of 250 crops, is no monolith. There is an east side and a west side, and they grow different crops and draw water from different spigots and, until a few weeks ago, they took care not to tread on one another.
Now a nasty water war, which once pitted San Joaquin Valley farmers against Bay Area environmentalists, has broken out among the hydraulic brotherhood of the west and east sides, big farmers taking on smaller farmers over a river that cannot give any more.
The industrial-sized farms of the west side--large growers of cotton, wheat, garlic, tomatoes, almonds and lettuce--are making a bold grab for irrigation water from the tired San Joaquin River. For more than half a century, this water, by dint of contracts and a huge canal, has been shunted to mostly small farmers raising grapes, citrus and stone fruit along the east side.
Three east side communities at the foot of the Sierra--Orange Cove, Lindsay and Terra Bella--also draw their drinking water from the same Friant-Kern Canal.
No one, at least no one beyond the directors of the Westlands Water District, which represents the west side and is the largest farm water delivery system in the nation, saw the grab coming. For years, Westlands has been content to draw water from a supply 120 miles north.
The grab has rankled bureaucrats and miffed politicians, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “huge, huge mistake,†in part because the federal government has spent six decades and billions of dollars delicately balancing competing water interests and installing the intricate plumbing that transformed this desert and marsh.
And the fight could end up costing Los Angeles a future supply of pristine Sierra water. If Westlands prevails, a much-discussed partnership between east side farmers and the city’s Municipal Water District would almost surely die aborning. The prospective partners have been talking about a plan to add storage space to Friant Dam. In exchange for helping to capture more river water, Los Angeles could receive some of that water in wet years.
“This scheme by Westlands isn’t some small water war with hard-to-understand issues,†said Richard Moss, general manager of the Friant Water Users Assn., which represents 15,000 east-side farmers in 25 water districts from Madera to Kern counties, a 152-mile stretch. “It is nothing short of a direct, Pearl Harbor-type attack intended to cripple agriculture along the San Joaquin Valley’s east side.â€
In their defense, Westlands farmers point out that their draw of federal water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has been nothing but unreliable over the past decade. Some years, they have received only 25% to 30% of their contracted supply because of drought and legislative reforms that have increased flows for delta fish.
Backed into a corner, they say they had no choice but to take the unusual step of filing a permit with the state water resources agency to divert 500,000 acre-feet of water a year from the San Joaquin River. (An acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons, provides enough water for two typical families for one year.)
Westlands farmers are laying claim to one-third of the river’s flow on the basis that their land is in the river’s general vicinity. They have dusted off an old state law protecting local watersheds as their justification.
“I have no desire to take water out of the San Joaquin River and shortchange those guys on the east side,†said Ross Borba, a grower who farms 9,000 acres of diversified crops in Westlands. “But the federal government is failing to live up to its contract and deliver the water it promised us clear back in 1953. So we’ve got to do something.â€
Long before the dam building of the 1940s, valley farmers had dug enough canals to make the rivers theirs, grabbing a Sierra snowmelt that in the wettest years formed a great inland sea. The finest restaurants in San Francisco fished turtles for soup out of Tulare Lake, once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi.
Back then, no one was more audacious in claiming the rivers than Henry Miller, a San Francisco butcher and sausage maker who arrived in California with $6 in his pocket. In the 1860s, the government was offering title at $1 per acre to anyone willing to reclaim “worthless†swampland. All a homesteader had to do was prove that he had traversed his 160-acre chunk of the Golden State in a boat.
Miller had a boat all right but, legend has it, the boat happened to be attached to the top of a wagon, allowing him to claim tens of thousands of more or less dry acres and precious riparian rights. Before he was done, the cattle king owned 328,000 acres of California.
For the larger good of agriculture, the federal government bought up Miller’s water rights along the San Joaquin River in the late 1930s and parceled out the flow to several water districts. Westlands, which had yet to be formed, wasn’t one of them.
After Friant Dam was constructed in 1945 as part of the massive Central Valley Project, most of the flow of the San Joaquin River was redirected far from its natural course. Instead of the river’s flowing west, past Fresno, it was shunted north through a system of canals to Madera and then east and south to Porterville and Visalia.
The east side growers who draw on this flow farm an average of 100 acres, small by California standards.
It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when a new piece of plumbing was added to the Central Valley Project, that farmers on the west side had a reliable supply of surface water. Instead of pumping ground water from an aquifer that was deep and salt-laden, west side farmers contracted for more than one million acre-feet of delta water each year, drawn through a huge pumping station near Tracy.
Unlike the east side, where farmers patronize local communities boasting vibrant downtowns, west side farmers rarely live on their land. Many choose to reside and shop in the finest parts of Fresno. Indeed, the Fresno ZIP Code 93711--home to many west side growers--receives more federal crop subsidy checks than any other ZIP Code in the country.
That big versus little theme--the average farm in Westlands is 850 acres--can be heard in almost every conversation.
“This whole fight is about a way of life,†said Lucille Demetriff, who farms 65 acres of pomegranates, prunes and quince with her husband in the east side community of Porterville. “There are 600 growers in the Westlands Water District. Out here we have 15,000. If you care about the family farm, it’s plain and simple. We’re going to fight this thing to the end.â€
Borba, the big west-side grower, says Westlands is an easy and unfair target. He may own 17,000 acres served by two water districts, but he says he hasn’t turned a profit in several years and he doubts that any of his neighbors have, either.
“We’re family farmers, too. I farm with my mother, brothers, sisters and nephews. And Westlands is one of the most efficient water users in the country. But when federal water that used to cost me $10 an acre-foot now costs $60 and in some cases $138 an acre-foot, we’re losing our butts.
“An acre is an acre is an acre. And I don’t care if you have 1,000 of them or 10 of them, each one of those acres has to make a profit. I defy anyone to come out here and show me anyone who has made money farming this ground the last few years.â€
Tom Birmingham, general counsel for Westlands, said the effort to take water from the San Joaquin River was an unfortunate consequence of the federal government’s failure to abide by its contract. As recently as last week, he said, the Bureau of Reclamation reiterated that Westlands can expect only 50% of its contracted supply in average rain years.
“They say they hope to raise it to 65 or 70%, but they don’t explain how and there’s no legally enforceable assurance that they will accomplish that,†he said. “If we don’t take this action, half of Westlands is going to be fallowed.â€
In sending 500,000 acre feet of water their way, Westlands farmers argue, the federal government would be reviving a section of a river now dry because of diversions to the east side.
But east side farmers find any environmental argument made by Westlands just a little disingenuous. “They’re talking about taking a third of our water,†said Friant’s Moss. “What about the environment of the east side? It’s going to be devastated.â€
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