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By Root 1609 0

one year. A lot of these guys are actually absentee owners farming by telephone from their dentists’ offices in Scottsdale. They hire some manager who may be competent or incompetent and they don’t care. They’re not in this business to farm crops, or even to make a profit. They’re farming the government. They’re growing tax shelters. But even if you do have a highly competent farmer who wouldn’t mind reducing his wastewater flows, he has no incentive to conserve. Federal water is so cheap it might as well be free. What’s the point of hiring a couple of additional irrigation managers to save free water? It’s wrong to say the farmer is the culprit. He is being forced to consume water.”

Van Schilfgaarde’s outspokenness on this subject may well have had something to do with his departure from the USDA laboratory in 1984. Meanwhile, as his salinity-management approach is almost universally ignored and the Bureau’s expensive solutions receive several hundred times more money than his laboratory does, salinity levels at Imperial Dam could reach 1,150 parts per million as early as the year 2000 and keep rising even if its desalination plant operates effectively—a prospect open to considerable doubt. New projects in the upper basin, oil shale development, the continued leaching of saline soil—all will contribute to salinity’s inexorable march. This is bad news for the Mexicans, but it is bad news for Los Angeles, too. Each additional part per million of salts in the city’s Colorado River supply is estimated to cause $300,000 worth of damage, basin-wide, to the things the water comes in contact with: pipes, fixtures, machinery, cars. A rise in salinity levels at Imperial Dam from 900 to 1,150 parts per million, then, will cost the citizens of southern California about $75 million a year.

The Bureau’s answer to all of this appears on a chart which it has available for distribution. The answer is simply described as “further salinity-control projects under study.” Adopting these unnamed solutions, at whatever cost, is supposed to hold salinity levels at about 1,030 parts per million at Imperial Dam, still too high to meet our Compact obligation to Mexico—which, since 1974, has become one of our three most important foreign suppliers of oil. The Bureau’s answer to that appears on the graph as “future additional measures”—whatever those are.

In the Colorado Basin, the effects of wastefully irrigating saline lands are not, for the most part, being felt by those doing the irrigating. Thanks mainly to the taxpayers, the farmers who are contributing the lion’s share of the salts to the river have had drainage facilities built which flush the problem down to someone else. In the San Joaquin Valley, it is a different story. The San Joaquin’s problem is unique—an ingenious revenge by nature, in the minds of some, on a valley whose transformation into the richest agricultural region in the world was wrought at awesome cost to rivers, fish, and wildlife. Several times in the relatively recent geologic past—within the last couple of million years—the valley was a great inland sea, thick with diatomaceous life and tiny suspended sediments which settled near the middle of the gently sloping valley floor. Compressed and compacted, the stuff formed an almost impervious layer of clay that now underlies close to two million acres of fabulously productive irrigated land. In the middle of the valley, the clay membrane is quite shallow, sometimes just a few feet beneath the surface soil. When irrigation water percolates down, it collects on the clay like bathwater in a tub. In hydrologists’ argot, it has become “perched” water. Since the perched water does not have a chance to mingle with the relatively pure aquifer beneath the clay, it may become highly saline, as in Iraq. The more the farmers irrigate, the higher it rises. In places, it has reached the surface, killing everything around. There are already thousands of acres near the southern end of the valley that look as if they had been dusted with snow; not even weeds can grow there. An identical