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By Root 1747 0

to let the San Joaquin growers have its customers’ unused water cannot be proved. They did it, this argument goes, because when they realized what a bonanza it would be to the growers they all invested in valley agriculture themselves. After all, if they had their customers’ interests truly at heart they should have held out for a higher price, forcing the growers to share at least some of the capital and interest costs. The people who make this argument usually take their listeners on a guided tour through California’s verdant history of public graft to reinforce their point. Bill Warne, for his part, doesn’t share such paranoid suspicions. In his mind, they did it because they knew they would need the valley’s help when the time came to get more water from the north. “With the environmental opposition to new development, the Met realized it had to stop fighting with the valley and close ranks,” he says. “Maybe this was their way of making peace.”

Whatever the answer, the first of the surplus water was delivered to the San Joaquin Valley in 1973. Precipitation stayed near or above normal for the next ten years, except for the two freak years of the drought, and consumption in southern California remained well below predictions. As a result, there was a literal flood of surplus water in the valley, sold at an average price of $3.50 per acre-foot—the same incredibly low price the Bureau charged. Even in 1976, the beginning of the drought, the state inexplicably let go of 580,110 acre-feet of “surplus” water that it might well have husbanded for the near-catastrophe waiting around the corner. The Kern County Water Agency, whose clients include many of the biggest and wealthiest growers in the state, took 442,250 acre-feet of that amount, setting a pattern: since 1973, it has gotten between one-half and three-quarters of the share. By the end of 1981, it had received a total of 1.8 million acre-feet of surplus water. It got it for around $6 million—the alleged cost of delivery. Meanwhile, according to Richard Walker and Michael Storper, two analysts at the University of California, the Met’s customers had been assessed about $170 million for the same water—water they never received. The growers had gotten a $164 million gift.

After peaking at 524,247 acre-feet in 1979, Kern County’s surplus deliveries began to diminish as the Met called on more of its entitlement, but it was virtually guaranteed hundreds of thousands of acre-feet for years. Meanwhile, as the Peripheral Canal debate was raging on, and the Met was saying that without the canal southern California would perish, an internal study, not intended for release, predicted that “as much as 750,000 acre-feet [of unused water] in the MWD service area” would be available if the canal was built. In other words, the Peripheral Canal would not so much save Los Angeles as allow the growers to keep using hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of surplus water while metropolitan Los Angeles paid for it. The farmers, for their part, seemed to be counting on it, for they were using surplus water to expand their acreage well beyond a level sustainable with contract water alone. According to at least one agricultural economist at UC-Davis, they were also using it to irrigate permanent crops—exactly what Bill Warne had said they must not do. It would have been very foolish of them to do so unless they expected to have a lot of surplus water for a long time.

It was the same old story again. The big farmers had managed to get something (a lot of water) for next to nothing. People in Los Angeles, meanwhile, were being taught a different lesson: that you can get nothing for something.

All of this raises a further question: who, exactly, are the farmers getting most of the water?

In 1981, Les Melville had been growing olives for nearly fifteen years on his fifty-acre farm near Oroville, the town that grew up alongside the Water Project’s monumental dam. He bought the farm in the 1960s, and through innovation, and a lot of lavish care, he raised the previous owner’s average yields from