“America’s Salad Bowl”, California’s Salinas Valley, is facing a slightly different problem from the rest of the drought-strike state – the problem of having water when nobody else does.
This water comes from a single source — Salinas Valley groundwater. What is going to happen by way of regulation and how much longer this water is going to last is the thought that many successful farmers in the valley have at the forefront of their minds.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
“The problems of other areas is they have no water,” said Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. “Our problem here is we still have water. And to some degree, that presents a different set of challenges.”
Foremost among them is how to preserve the massive, but overdrafted, aquifer — one of the most stressed groundwater basins in the state, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
No one knows exactly how deep it goes or how much water is left. A county report estimates there are about 5.3 trillion gallons of water stored underground. About 3% to 4% of that amount is pumped out each year.
“It’s a good aquifer, it’s really deep, but we’re essentially slowly mining it over time,” said Michael Cahn, a University of California water resources advisor who helps local farmers improve irrigation. “The reality is, you can’t take too much out.”
Farmers have lost wells before due to water becoming salty and rightly, they have a degree of concern about the current one.
There is an idea floating around of increasing storage by building a tunnel between the two existing reservoirs, and the thought of using more recycled wastewater, but neither of these plans is completely reliable.
County officials are working on a more detailed groundwater estimate, but in the meantime, most farmers are hoping for rain.
Inframanage.com observes that the mining of aquifers past the point of recharge is becoming a problem across the western United States. Ultimately this practice is not sustainable.
The analysis of the long-term availability of water sources for utilities is part of the Future Demand section of your infrastructure asset management plan. In this section future demand for water, demand management programs, alternative water sources and other programs can be analyzed and the financial and management impacts assessed.
The future demand analysis then feeds into your asset lifecycle management planning, and financial projections.
PHOTO CREDIT: By BrendelSignature at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9737007
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