As U.S. farmlands remain dry, California counts the cost of its drought: $1.7 billion, thousands of acres unplanted

U.S. Department of Agriculture Drought Monitor map, adapted by The Rural Blog; click on it or the legend to enlarge.

Lack of rain has forced many Western farmers to leave their lands fallow, and the Department of Agriculture's Drought Monitor shows many other farming areas are also parched. But perhaps the most significant drought is in the No. 1 agricultural state, California.

The state's drought is scalding its way into its third year and cutting its agricultural output. "In the fall, rice fields in the Sacramento Valley usually shine golden brown as they await harvesting. This year, however, many fields were left covered with bare dirt," reports Ian James of the Los Angeles Times. About 752,000 acres have gone unplanted. "Gross crop revenues fell $1.7 billion, or 4.6%, this year. Revenues of the state’s food processing and manufacturing industries declined nearly $3.5 billion, or 7.8%."

Don Bransford is a rice farmer and board president of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District along the northern Sacramento River. "Bransford typically farms about 1,800 acres of rice. But the drought was so severe this year that water deliveries to area farms were drastically cut," James writes. "Bransford didn’t plant a single acre. Many other farms went idle as well. . . . This year the drought has pushed the fallowing of farmland to a new high." Bransford told James, “It’s a disaster. This has never happened. Never. And I’ve been farming since 1980.”

The severity and length of the drought have compounded the suffering. Loss of farmland is a piece of that, along with farmworker job loss. "The researchers said California lacks sufficient programs to assist laborers who lose farm jobs," James reports. "They said it’s crucial 'to identify and assist communities that rely on seasonal and permanent agricultural jobs that are vulnerable to drought'."

California farmers have turned to pumping groundwater, but "Such heavy reliance on wells will face new limitations in the coming years," James writes. "In areas where rice farms have long depended solely on flows from the Sacramento River, many growers have no wells. Without water flowing in canals, farmers were left without options."

The continued drought leaves an uncertain future for wildlife such as salmon and migratory birds, James reports: "While the dry fields show the drought’s immediate toll, farmers expect it could take a year to determine how severe the ecological ripple effects turn out to be." Tim Johnson, president and CEO of the California Rice Commission, told him that millions of wetland-dependent birds are threatened, and could alter their migratory paths along the Pacific Flyway.