Amid the rhetoric of doom, California agriculture has so far been growing its way through drought: Even as many farmers cut back their planting, California’s farm economy overall has been surprisingly resilient. Farm employment increased by more than 1 percent last year. Gross farm revenue from crop production actually increased by two-tenths of 1 percent …
Continue reading ‘California ag showing remarkable resilience’ »
Alfalfa, which recently handed over its”Demon Crop” title to almonds, is really a far better crop in drought than common wisdom suggests, according to U.C. Davis’s Dan Putnam: Contrary to popular belief, alfalfa has several unique positive biological properties and advantages when it comes to water. Due to these properties, alfalfa is remarkably resilient when …
Tom Philpott, who through his Mother Jones pieces has aimed aimed his considerable knowledge of our food system at California’s water problems, sets his sights this week on the Imperial Valley of southeastern California where, as he notes, “Imperial Valley’s farms gets 3.1 million acre-feet annually—more than half of California’s total allotment and more than …
One of my happy new discoveries among people writing about water in this time of drought is a guy named Dan Macon, who raises grass-fed lambs in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Mason’s one of those people who depend on water from the sky rather than irrigation water from a canal or groundwater pump, …
Tina Shields, the Colorado River Resources Manager for California’s big Imperial Irrigation District, joked Friday about the newfound celebrity of the California almond. Used to be, alfalfa was the alleged water waster that got all the attention. “The best thing for alfalfa growers is almonds,” Shields quipped at one point during a Las Vegas Colorado …
Continue reading ‘Almond growers – the alfalfa farmer’s new best friend’ »
Nathanael Johnson, in an excellent recent Grist piece, argues that the impact on California’s agricultural economy from the drought is likely to be less than some of the dire rhetoric might suggest because of the way farmers adapt: Philip Bowles, whose family farms near Los Banos, Calif., said they are changing and adapting every day. …
It was only when I was captioning and filing my pictures from my recent tours of the old bits of Arizona’s Lower Colorado River water infrastructure that I noticed what the graffiti here said: “I’m stuck in my ways.” It’s a surreal spot – springing from the side of a harsh desert canyon, a remarkable …
I know, I know, beware the romanticism of desert agriculture, but these trees are such a nostalgic throwback to my childhood. I grew up on the fringe of the Los Angeles suburbs. Trips to the desert were part of my childhood. And date palms along the highway were an iconic image of those jaunts. The …
Almonds get all the attention, but hay, that most pedestrian of crops, still covers more acres of California farmland. But less than it used to. In the drought of 2015, California farmers are planning to plant and maintain past plantings of 1.23 million acres of hay, according to new USDA data published last week. That’s …