‘This is how dry things are.’ California warns farmers about water cutoffs due to drought

The seriousness of California’s drought is being driven home to thousands of farmers in the Central Valley.

State regulators warned 6,600 farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed on Tuesday that they’re about to lose the right to pull water from the estuary’s rivers at some point this summer. The watershed covers a major swath of the Central Valley.

The written warnings from the State Water Resources Control Board don’t require the growers to stop taking water right away — but they serve as a likely precursor to the severing of water rights in the coming weeks.

“This is how dry things are,” water board Chairman Joaquin Esquivel said in an interview. “The hydrology that we’re seeing is not there .... There will not be enough natural flow.”

Most farmers who rely on the two big government water-conveyance systems, the State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project, have already been told they’ll get little to no water this year. Now the state water board is warning those growers with direct, legal water rights that they are likely to get cut off.

It’s not clear when their water rights would be curtailed, and some farmers will get cut off earlier than others, depending on where they rank in California’s convoluted water rights system. Most of the farmers receiving the “notices of water unavailability” hold so-called junior rights and would be first in line to get curtailed, possibly in a matter of weeks. But farmers with more senior rights also were warned of the likelihood that they might lose water this summer.

Esquivel said the state board is in a bind, struggling to balance agriculture’s needs with minimum river flows needed to maintain populations of fish protected by the Endangered Species Act. As it is, water shortages along the Sacramento River this year are expected to kill up to 88% of the juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon, officials with the National Marine Fisheries Service warned last month.

Meanwhile, Esquivel said the state board has to keep “cities and communities from running out of water.”

Sacramento area municipal water systems are planning to rely more heavily this year on groundwater supplies as Folsom Lake — normally the major source for the region’s human needs — sees its water level plunge.

The warnings to growers were issued the same day the state board moved to restrict water usage for farmers along the Russian River, which is suffering some of the worst drought conditions in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties, including all of the Central Valley.

This story was originally published June 15, 2021 at 2:15 PM.