As California’s Drought Worsens, the Biden Administration Cuts Water Supplies and Farmers Struggle to Compensate
The driest year in four decades for the state’s water supply hub is hitting its richest agricultural valley hard.
Liza Gross
By Liza Gross
May 28, 2021
California ships water to cities and farms through a combination of state and federal programs that oversee a complex network of hundreds of miles of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts throughout the state.
Farmers in the state’s richest agricultural valley have long relied on water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s massive Central Valley Project (CVP) for irrigation, especially in the drier southern reaches of the valley. The CVP stretches some 400 miles from the Trinity Dam, about 125 miles south of the Oregon border, to Bakersfield in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The bureau manages 9 million acre-feet of water—imagine roughly 9 million football fields covered with a foot of water—most of which is used to irrigate about a third of the state’s farmland.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28052021/california-central-valley-drought-water/
