Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [221]
A Carter administration investigation conducted a couple of years earlier before the reform—the first serious effort to gauge the degree of compliance with the law—had established that more than 90 percent of the acreage violations were occurring in California and Arizona, whose hot climate permits high-value crops and two-crop seasons—exactly the kind of climate where the original 160-acre limit is eminently fair. In Colorado, or Montana, or Wyoming, where most farms are at altitudes of at least 4,000 feet, where the freeze-danger period runs to eight months, and where farmers are lucky to raise one good crop of low-value corn or wheat, a revision of the acreage limit was probably in order. But California’s farmers, having received the gift of subsidized water not long before, were now awarded with a so-called reform whose chief result was to legalize wholesale noncompliance with federal law.
Even if the farmers sensed that, ultimately, the government would cave in, the Reclamation law was at the very least a nuisance to the big growers in the CVP service area. And to many of the really big growers who owned huge acreages toward the southern end of the valley, between Fresno and Bakersfield, the Central Valley Project meant nothing at all. Nearly all of its water deliveries stopped at Fresno, and most of it went to the valley’s east side. The biggest owners were south of Fresno, and a number were on the west side, where they had amassed fiefdoms of dirt-cheap scrubland, which they were either irrigating or hoping to irrigate someday. Not a single substantial stream drains the lee side of the Coast Range south of San Francisco—precipitation is barely six inches a year—so most of the west-side growers were utterly dependent on groundwater. It was fossil water, water that had accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years but which, at the rate it was being pumped, evaporated, and transpired by plants, would barely last another fifty, if that.
The Central Valley Project was, in fact, to have an interesting—a startling—effect on the groundwater table of the San Joaquin Valley. In Tulare County, at one test well, the aquifer dropped sixty feet between 1920 and 1960, the year the first CVP water arrived. Thanks to the flood of new surface water, the water table then rose twenty feet in nine years. Just three years later, however, it had dropped another thirty-three feet. In Kern County, where the depth to groundwater is much greater, farmers who had pumped from 275 feet during World War II were pumping from 460 feet by 1965. The reason was obvious: the CVP and the Corps of Engineers projects on the Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern had delivered a lot of surface water throughout the valley, but they had encouraged so much agricultural expansion that they hadn’t really relieved the pressure on the aquifer at all. For a while things were better; then the projects actually made things worse. Half the agricultural water used in the state was still coming out of the ground—even farmers who got cheap federal water continued to pump from their own wells in order to irrigate as much land as possible—and with three times as much irrigated land in production as there had been thirty years before, the big projects, besides depriving San Francisco Bay of half of its historical outflow, were just