There is a tremendous disconnect between urban- and suburbanites and farmers when it comes to water in California. Many, if not most, consumers — TFF CSA subscribers excepted, of course — think that farmers waste copious amounts of water, as if we have nothing better to do than dump it on the ground.
Like many misunderstandings, this one is primarily derived from ignorance. Urban/suburban water users inhabit an entirely different reality not just than farmers but than all rural water users. For folks in the cities and suburbs, water is a service similar to electricity or natural gas. It is distributed to your residence or workplace by a provider that may be public or private. They maintain the system of production and distribution. All you have to do is pay your water bill, if you even get one. Some consumers pay based on how much they use, but in plenty of cities it’s just a simple fee for service. If you turn on the water and nothing comes out of the tap, you call the provider and they have to fix the problem or explain what is happening. And if, for some reason, the water supply is interrupted, they generally have to provide you with water in the interim somehow.
Some folks in the cities and suburbs might know where exactly their water comes from, but in my experience, they are few and far between. It’s not a problem they have to worry about, and it’s not like they can choose to get it from somewhere else. In rural areas, everyone knows exactly where their water comes from — whether for irrigating their crops or for taking showers and washing dishes. It may come from a utility, most likely a water district. Or it may come from a well on the property where they live. Either way, though, the infrastructure that brings it to them once it enters their property is privately owned: Pumps, wells, the electrical equipment that drives them, and the pipes that deliver it. If there is a problem with any of those components, it’s not someone else’s problem — it’s theirs. And until the problem is fixed, they have no water.
Communal water systems make a huge amount of sense: Water infrastructure is expensive to install, expensive to maintain and expensive to fix. Unfortunately for farmers, it’s even more expensive if it breaks when it is needed to water crops and those crops die or fail as a result. It’s a truism among farmers that things only break when you use them, and irrigation is no exception. And in the case of a rural domestic water system, well, you tell me: how often do you not need water in your house for a whole day, much less a whole week? Even a small problem with a rural water system on a farm can turn into a crisis very quickly.
We have multiple water systems that we depend on at Terra Firma. Our biggest system carries the 1,000 gallons a minute of water we receive most days from the Lake Berryessa via the Solano Irrigation District. We use that to irrigate 100 acres combined of vegetables, fruit trees, grapevines, pistachio and walnuts on our biggest parcel of land. That ranch also has two agricultural wells with pumps that can produce a combined 1500 gallons a minute of water. During our busiest irrigation season, aka “now”, we use all of that water most days, twenty-four hours per day. But most of the year, we have at least one “backup” water source if one of those two wells is out of commission or the irrigation district is offline for whatever reason. That is, of course, unless there is a power outage: all of our irrigation systems depend on electricity to run the pumps.
(A brief aside about that electricity: farmers and rural residents pay for it. So while the water in ground may be “free” — a fact that may seem unfair to people who pay their provider for water — it’s not free to lift it up out of the ground and pressurize it. That is one of several reasons why farmers don’t use any more water than they have to: Conserving water on a farm also means conserving electricity.)
All of the other ranches we farm have a single water source for irrigation. Any problem with one of those systems means we have no water at that location for the crops until it is fixed. And in addition to ag wells, we also rely on 3 smaller “domestic” wells to provide drinking water, wash water for our crops, and other miscellaneous uses. If you are wondering “why a different water source?” Well, you wouldn’t want to try to drink water from a firehose. All of our agricultural water systems produce at least 200 gallons per minute of water; the average garden hose, faucet or shower uses less than 10 gallons per minute.
At each parcel we farm, a system of buried pipes carries the water underground from the well through the fields to various “risers” or hydrants that supply all the crops. If any of those happens to break — for example, if a vehicle backs into it — we have to shut the entire system down in order to fix it. Those repairs can be relatively simple to fix, or very complicated if the pipe breaks underground and has to be excavated. A few years back, a semitruck delivering 40 tons of compost took a “shortcut” through the farm, crushing a large pipe that was buried four feet under the soil. That repair took us almost two weeks to complete; thankfully it happened in January and not in July.
If the pumping system at any of our fields fails the well itself, we generally call in the experts. That can sometimes mean waiting several days, in the middle of irrigation season, for a pump service company to schedule a visit, diagnose the problem, and then repair it. The problem can be as simple as a blown fuse or burned up wire in the electrical components — at least once every summer, a spider or wasp makes its nest inside one of the electrical boxes, causing it to short out. A small problem, like a leak in the system that causes the pump to go haywire, can be easily remedied in an hour or less. But it we don’t catch it, it can cause the pump itself to burn out, requiring the pump service company to bring out a crane to remove the pump from the well and replace it. That job, which takes at least a day, costs thousands of dollars even for a small pump. A bigger pump, which will usually be deeper in the ground, can cost $10,000 or more to repair.
But nothing compares to the failure of a well itself. That can be a result of the water table sinking below the level where the pipe reaches: a well is just a hole in the ground with a pipe in it that is perforated in a certain zone to allow water to enter it. But the pipe itself, called a casing, can collapse with age and corrosion: old wells were made with metal pipe; new ones use PVC. The cost of drilling a well can range from $40,000 to over a million dollars depending on how deep it is and how wide in diameter. And the entire process, from determining a location for the well to permitting to drilling and finally installing a pumping system, takes at least 3 months and as long as a year. Two of our old wells failed during the 2015 drought, and we are still paying off the loans for them now.
In the past week, we’ve had two different water systems fail. One was an agricultural pump that was shorted out by a power outage on Friday night, during the hottest three-day period we’ve had all summer. Luckily, the pump company was able to get it fixed in less than two hours. Had it been a more serious problem resulting in a longer shutdown of our irrigation, we would have lost several crops in the heat. The other was the domestic pump that provides water for my house, as well as for some of our table grapes, which was not producing enough pressure for irrigation and turned out to be on its last legs. It had to be pulled out of the well and replaced, a project which took two people a full day.
Farmers are the last people in the world who take water for granted. It’s true we use a lot of it: growing crops in California during the dry season simply requires many thousands of gallons per acre. But we’re using for a good reason: to feed you and everyone else the fruits, vegetables and nuts that grow so well here.
Thanks,