Family farms struggling as California drought worsens: ‘We haven’t faced anything like this’
This story is part of the Central Valley News Collaborative — a bilingual, community journalism project funded by the Central Valley Community Foundation and with technology and training support from Microsoft Corp. The collaboration includes The Fresno Bee, Valley Public Radio, Vida en el Valle, Radio Bilingüe and the Institute for Media & Public Trust at Fresno State.
Amid this year’s severe drought, Hmong farmer June Moua had to leave a portion of her 10-acre plot of land in eastern Fresno County dry and fallow. Large sections of the rows of crops she did plant, including bunches of water-intensive greens, have wilted and shriveled into crunchy bits of brown foliage.
Her kale and bok choy are casualties of the central San Joaquin Valley’s dwindling water supply. Declining groundwater levels have made it harder for her to pump water from her well into her fields.
“These greens take a lot of water,” Moua, 43, said, as she examined the end of a dry row where bits of kale were scattered across the soil. “Every other day you have to water to keep going, otherwise it won’t work. They’re just going to die.”
Water in the Central Valley has become scarcer as the state grows not only drier, but hotter. That’s forcing small farmers like Moua to compete with larger ones for the limited water supply in one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions. In Fresno County, where Asian specialty crops make up just a fraction of the county’s $7.7 billion agricultural industry, small farmers like Moua now are struggling to maintain their livelihoods.
Their situation is even more precarious due to limited funds, language barriers and renting — rather than owning — the land. Water scarcity, combined with these other challenges, could lead to thousands of families losing their businesses and no longer supplying specialty fruits and vegetables to markets and businesses across the state, resulting in the “increase towards more consolidation into larger farms that are going to be less diverse,” according to Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, a small farms advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension.
“There’s a lot at stake,” said Dahlquist-Willard, who helps connect diverse and socially-disadvantaged farmers to resources. “The viability of smaller farms might be affected and our landscape will continue to change to maybe a few more high value crops versus a bigger diversity of a lot of different kinds of crops.”
Farmer struggles as Central Valley groundwater levels drop
Green rows of leafy mustard greens, peppers, bitter melon and Japanese eggplant line the dusty terrain on Moua’s farm, where she’s been harvesting crops for a decade. They are just a few of the hundreds of specialty crops from her native Laos that she grows in the Valley.
Moua loves cultivating Southeast Asian crops and selling them at farmers markets across Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. But the lack of available groundwater has made it even more difficult for her to sustain her operations.
“It’s getting worse and worse,” she said. “We haven’t faced anything like this so far. This is the first year that [it] is so bad.”
Moua gets her water from a well; it flows through a pipe and into small ditches that flood the field. Known as flood irrigation, small farmers have long used this method as a low-cost way to water their crops.
But since August, Moua has struggled to get enough water to irrigate all of her crops. She’ll turn on her water pump and wait, sometimes up to half an hour for the water to get to the field. All of that pumping has caused her electricity costs to skyrocket from $300 a month to nearly $1,000 a month.
As groundwater levels have dropped — due to periodic droughts and deeper groundwater pumping — this irrigation method has become less effective for small farmers, Dahlquist-Willard said.
Small farmers have few good options to increase their water supply, she said. They would need to drill a new well or deepen an existing well. Alternatively, she said, they could invest in a new irrigation system so they use less of their currently available water, but doing so would not boost their supply.
Still, those options are often too expensive for many small farmers, especially those who don’t own their land.
Farmers who rent the land like Moua face additional challenges because they may rely on the landowner to fix the well. Often, a landowner may find it easier to sell the land to a larger agricultural corporation or to real estate developers rather than investing thousands of dollars to repair a well.
“Every situation is different,” Dahlquist-Willard said. “If there are other plans for the land in the near future, like selling it or developing it, the landlord would be less likely to want to invest $25,000 to $50,000 in improving the property.”
Moua now fears that may happen to her, as her landowner is considering selling the land. Her lease ends at the end of November and she is hopeful she can secure the funds to buy it. But she has also accepted that without a loan, she may have to give up on her family’s long tradition of farming.
“We put our heart into farming and we do the best we can to serve the community we sell to,” Moua said as her brow furrowed above her blue face mask. “But at the moment that we’re facing the drought this year, it is just so bad that we don’t know how to get to the next step. We just don’t know how to go from here and might just totally stop farming.”
Latino farmer drills deeper well amid California drought
For immigrant farmers, language and cultural barriers are also a challenge. They may not know how to access certain financial and informational resources, such as state and federal grants, loans or land leasing agreements — critical resources that could prevent them from going out of business.
And even with the support of these resources, some small farmers — like 47-year-old Antonio Cabrera — still grapple with debt and encounter problems with accessing groundwater.
Cabrera, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager, worked in the fields for years while learning English at night school, before deciding to pursue a master’s degree in civil engineering at Fresno State. He now grows lemons on a 20-acre farm in Reedley, located just 22 miles southeast of Fresno.
On a warm Tuesday afternoon, Cabrera walked among his lemon groves, accompanied by his German shepherd Bakhu. Dressed in a gray athletic jacket and sturdy, mud-caked boots, he described the challenges he’s faced keeping his trees alive.
Groundwater levels on his farm last year dropped below 90 feet, at least 40 feet deeper than what his pump could reach. Earlier this year, Cabrera secured a grant through the United States Department of Agriculture to drill his well deeper, to 120 feet. Despite already investing about $40,000, his well ran dry after the additional drilling had been completed. At that point, his groundwater level had dropped to 142 feet in just a few months, he said.
“I spent all my money and then there was no water,” he said. “I was getting so much sand and I was burning my pump, so I said ‘nope, this is not going to work.’”
Cabrera’s farm is wedged between the fields of a large corporation, which has a well that reaches past 1,000 feet. He’s now relying on the company to provide him with water to irrigate his lemons, while he drills a new well on a different part of the farm. Relying on his neighbors has come at a cost, however, because he’s paying for both his electricity costs and theirs.
“They helped me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to water the trees,” he said. “But they are a big company and they have the money and they just go and drill.”
Cabrera’s new well will cost him about $60,000, he said. He’ll drill it with the help of an additional loan. But he’s still not done paying off the costs from the original well that he tried to salvage. He hopes the new well, which will be 500 feet deep, will sustain his farm for the next few years.
He says keeping up with the costs has been “extremely difficult.”
Still, Cabrera has not lost hope. He had always dreamed of owning a farm and will continue to grow his business despite his hardships. He’s proud of the hard work he’s put into the farm, including watching his trees grow from small seed saplings.
“As a Latino small farmer, I have to try to do as much as possible because I don’t have the means to pay for every single thing that I want to do in life,” he said. “If something is not going to work one way, it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work — you have to find a way around. I’ll never give up and I won’t give up on anything easily.”
This story was originally published November 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Family farms struggling as California drought worsens: ‘We haven’t faced anything like this’."