Data, Statistics Archives - Page 38 of 44 - California Agriculture News Today

DPR Scientists Say Most Fresh California Produce Tested Has Little/No Detectable Pesticide Residues

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) announced that once again, the majority of produce it tested annually had little or no detectable pesticide residues and posed no health risk to the public. 95 percent of all California-grown produce, sampled by DPR in 2013, was in compliance with the allowable limits.

“This is a vivid example that California fresh produce is among the safest in the world, when it comes to pesticide exposure,” said DPR Director Brian R. Leahy. “DPR’s scientifically robust monitoring program is an indication that a strong pesticide regulatory program and dedicated growers can deliver produce that consumers can have confidence in.”

DPR tested 3,483 samples of different fruits and vegetables sold in farmers markets, wholesale and retail outlets, and distribution centers statewide. More than 155 different fruits and vegetables were sampled to reflect the dietary needs of California’s diverse population.

Of all 3,483 samples collected in 2013:

43.53 percent of the samples had no pesticide residues detected.
51.51 percent of the samples had residues that were within the legal tolerance levels.
3.99 percent of the samples had illegal residues of pesticides not approved for use on the commodities tested.
0.98 percent of the samples had illegal pesticide residues in excess of established tolerances. A produce item with an illegal residue level does not necessarily indicate a health hazard.

Each piece of fruit or vegetable may legally contain trace amounts of one or more pesticides. The amount and type of pesticide (known as a tolerance), is limited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. DPR’s Residue Monitoring Program staff carries out random inspections to verify that these limits are not exceeded.

The produce is tested in laboratories using state-of-the-art equipment operated by California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA). In 2013, these scientists frequently detected illegal pesticide residues on produce including:

Cactus Pads from Mexico,
Ginger from China,
Snow Peas from Guatemala and
Spinach from the US

Most of the 2013 illegal pesticide residues were found in produce imported from other countries and contained very low levels (a fraction of a part per million). The majority of the time they did not pose a health risk.

One exception occurred in 2013 when DPR discovered Cactus pads, imported from Mexico, that were tainted with an organophosphate-based pesticide. This had the potential to sicken people. DPR worked with the CA. Dept. of Public Health to issue an alert to consumers in February 2014. DPR also worked diligently to remove the entire product it from store shelves and distribution centers. In addition, DPR asked the US Food and Drug Administration to inspect produce at the borders and points of entry to stop shipments into California.

California has been analyzing produce for pesticide residues since 1926 and has developed the most extensive pesticide residue testing program of its kind in the nation. The 2013 pesticide residue monitoring data and previous years are posted at: http://www.cdpr.ca.gov/docs/enforce/residue/rsmonmnu.htm

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:27-07:00September 4th, 2014|

‘To-do list’ on food safety grows longer for feds

Source: Benjamin Goad; The Hill

The largest food safety overhaul in generations is being starved of funding needed to enforce a host of new regulations for factories, farms and importers, safety advocates warn.

The 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was billed as creating a fundamental shift in the way government protects the nation’s food supply against the threat of food-borne illness.

But despite bipartisan and industry support for the program, only a fraction of the funding needed to implement and enforce it has materialized. Now, with most fiscal 2015 funding issues likely in limbo until after the midterm elections, uncertainty remains.Without additional funding, priorities of the ambitious initiative could fall short, public interest groups fear.

“They’re just not going to make enough of a dent in their to-do list,” said Sandra Eskin, director of food safety at The Pew Charitable Trusts. “They’re going to be really strapped to effectively enforce it.”

The Food and Drug Administration in January of last year began rolling out the first of seven draft rules in support of the FSMA, the biggest food safety update in 70 years.

The rules add a slate of standards for the agriculture industry and food manufactures, and create third-party audits and a new supplier verification program to prevent contaminated foods from entering the country.

Together, the rules are meant to replace a decades-old system built to respond to illness outbreaks with one set up to prevent them through better practices at production plants, warehouses and farms.

The rule-making process has been fraught with delays, as the FDA grapples with a litany of questions about how to impose the regulations. The agency has been forced to revise and re-propose some of the rules in response to industry concerns.

The FDA’s failure to meet a July 2012 deadline under the law drew a lawsuit from food safety advocates and a subsequent federal court order requiring the agency to complete all final regulations under the FSMA by mid-2015.

But merely putting the rules in place is one matter; creating a system to enforce them is another.

During budget hearings this year, Michael Taylor, the FDA’s first ever deputy commissioner for foods, made clear that current funding levels would be insufficient.

“Simply put, we cannot achieve our objective of a safer food supply without a significant increase in resources,” he told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Upon approval of the FSMA in 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the FDA would need an additional $583 million over five years to carry out its new mission.

Following boosts totaling just under $100 million in fiscal 2011 and 2012, the administration estimated last May that an additional $400 million to $450 million would be required “to make FSMA a fully successful initiative.”

Since then, the funding allocated to the effort has been much less than requested, thanks to budget cuts and competing priorities. An omnibus funding bill for fiscal 2013 included $40 million for food safety, but that total was reduced to $37 million by sequester-related cuts.

A fiscal 2014 omnibus passed in January added $53 million more. As of Tuesday, the agency said an additional $362 million to $412 million was needed.

Spending bills now pending in both chambers of Congress contain increases of around $25 million, sowing angst among groups who say funding is required to fully implement the law.

Even business groups with reservations about the new restrictions support additional funding, which they view as bringing certainty to the industry.

“In order to keep consumer confidence in the safety of America’s food supply high and to reduce the number of foodborne illnesses, it is important that FDA also have the infrastructure in place to implement FSMA once the rules are finalized and after the appropriate compliance period ends,” a coalition of major businesses including Wal-Mart, General Mills and Coca-Cola wrote in a letter to congressional appropriators.

Specifically, the groups are calling for funding to retain and hire additional scientific experts, modernize the FDA’s information technology and increase food safety inspections to meet the targets set out in the law.

Sophia Kruszewski, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said the group is worried that a lack of funding would imperil programs authorized by the law to help farmers and other food producers come into compliance.

“Funding will be critical because so much of what proper implementation of FSMA is gong to require is training,” Kruszewski said. “It’s hard to know where all the money is going to come from.”

The Obama administration has proposed new user fees to help meet the funding goals. The president’s 2014 budget request calls for a new registration fee for domestic and foreign food facilities that are required to register with FDA. The fee would have yielded an estimated $59 million this year.

A second fee on imports would have brought in $166 million, according to estimates.

Congress, however, has not approved legislation establishing the fees, which industry groups have denounced as a “food tax.”

In prodding Congress to direct more money to the safety effort, public interest groups say the cost of inaction could be made clear in the event of a major illness outbreak.

There have been 26 multi-state outbreaks of food-borne illness since Obama signed the FSMA into law, according to a Pew analysis.

Food safety advocates say they are trying to raise the public profile of an issue that affects all Americans.

“Every time they sit down for a meal, they want to know that the government is doing to make sure their food is safe,” Eskin said.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:27-07:00September 4th, 2014|

Slant Well to Address Water Shortage Without Harming Environment

By Valerie King; National Driller*

History is unfolding along the coast of California, according to Dennis Williams, president of GEOSCIENCE Support Services Inc.

His groundwater consulting firm has designed something like 1,000 municipal water supply wells in almost 40 years. But those were typical wells, vertical wells. What he’s working on now he’s only done once before.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” he said, alluding to a well technology his firm is designing for California’s Monterey Peninsula. It’s called a slant well or subsurface intake, and while the technology has been used in Europe and tested in the United States, he says it’s still a very rare method.

“The evolution of the subsurface slant well technology,” as Williams calls it, is an outcome of California state regulators and environmental groups that prefer an environmentally friendly approach to desalination. Their goal is to avoid harming marine life like more traditional ocean pipelines tend to.

The slant well will be drilled close to the coastline at a diagonal and collect enough ocean water to produce about 100 million gallons of drinkable water daily.

That’s what California American Water hopes, according to Rich Svindland, vice president of engineering. California American Water is a subsidiary of American Water Works Company Inc., the largest publicly traded U.S. water and wastewater utility company. They proposed the idea after California ordered reductions to the Monterey Peninsula’s current water sources, a local river and aquifer that are expected to lose more than half of their current supply in the next decade.

“The idea is that we’re trying to launch a well field out under the ocean floor to basically ensure that we capture ocean water as opposed to inland ground freshwater,” Svindland said. The local groundwater basin he’s referring to is protected and cannot be exported to residents across the peninsula.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:27-07:00September 3rd, 2014|

Californian kiwifruit industry forecasts good fruit quality

Source: Fresh Fruit Portal

The upcoming season looks as though it should be a relatively positive one for Californian kiwifruit growers, with normal production, good fruit quality, and strong domestic market conditions.

California Kiwifruit Administrative Committee assistant director Nick Matteis said that as of the board’s latest meeting in July, the industry was anticipating a production of around 6.8 – 7 million seven-pound tray equivalents.

“That’s about average, based on producing acreage and what our growers are able to get produced per acre. It’s about a normal size crop, and the distribution of sizes will be pretty normal as well,” Matteis told www.freshfruitportal.com.

“It’s not lopsided towards larger sizes necessarily nor smaller sizes – there should be a good variation in size profile. The quality looks to be good as well, though at this juncture of course we still have a month and a half of growing season left.”

The board of directors will hold another meeting in September to take one last look at the estimates and see if anything dramatic has occurred.

Matteis said although it didn’t sound like growers have had serious problems with the state-wide drought, he could not be sure due to the vast area they covered.

“It’s hard to generalize how people are going to be affected because we have growing regions closer to the northern area and some further to the south with a couple of hundred miles in between,” he said.

“Most folks are pumping groundwater because there’s zero allocation from the state and federal water resources departments.

“So I think everybody’s going to make it just fine this year – I guess I could summate – but there is some pretty significant groundwater pumping that’s going on now to keep flows where they need to be to get to harvest.”

He added demand looked like it would be strong going into the season, with the first harvest expected to take place around six or seven days earlier than last year.

“Probably at the end of September we’ll start seeing some of the first fruit harvested, but the harvest being in full swing is usually around the first or second week of October,” Matteis said.

“The actual harvest will go till the end of November and then the marketing season will run from October all the way to April.”

Generally around 70-75% of the fruit is sold to the North America market, with Canada and Mexico being the two biggest importers.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:28-07:00September 1st, 2014|

Ag Alert update: Milk-pricing bill withdrawn

Source: Ag Alert

California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross announced Wednesday that milk-pricing legislation will not be pursued during this legislative session.

In a statement, she acknowledged that timing on Assembly Bill 2730 “was not ideal,” but that she was “compelled to see if we could get something done this year.”

“Since the August 13^th Task Force meeting, a tremendous amount of progress has been made, but not enough,” she said.

Ross did not say whether the department will pursue reform legislation again next year or discuss the future role of the Dairy Task Force.

Watch for further coverage in the Sept. 3 issue of Ag Alert.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:28-07:00September 1st, 2014|

US rice farmers see opportunity in China – from the Los Angeles Times

By David Pierson

Gregg Yielding was given a quixotic task: travel to China and determine if consumers there would be willing to eat American rice.

So he set up tables at some of the most popular supermarkets in southern China, hung American flags and began dishing out steamy samples of rice from Arkansas and California.

“At first they’d say, ‘There’s rice in the U.S.?” said Yielding, head of emerging markets for the U.S. Rice Producers Assn., a Houston-based trade group. “And we’d have to show them a map to explain that it’s grown in California and the South. Then they’d try it, and they would really like it.”

Chinese importers, distributors and grocery chains lined up. Selling U.S. rice to China seemed like a slam-dunk. But eight years after Yielding’s first venture on behalf of the U.S. industry, not a single shipment of American rice has officially made it into Chinese hands.

That won’t happen until the two countries agree on a so-called phytosanitary protocol, which determines the necessary steps U.S. rice exporters must take to mitigate pests such as insects. The disagreement highlights the growing pressure on U.S. agricultural producers to either accommodate China or risk being shut out of the world’s largest emerging consumer market.

That might not have mattered a decade ago when U.S. farmers could rely on domestic buyers or traditional foreign markets such as Mexico and Canada. Today, China’s swelling appetite for food is touching agribusiness everywhere and forcing companies to choose whether to adapt.

Those that comply are seeing dividends. American agricultural exports to China rose to a record $25.8 billion last year from $5 billion a decade earlier.

Until a few years ago, no one would have considered exporting much rice to China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of the grain.

Tim Johnson, president and chief executive of the California Rice Commission, called it “the ultimate example of selling ice to the Eskimos.”

But starting in 2012, China went on a spree, scooping up millions of tons of the grain from countries such as Vietnam, Pakistan and India. China is now on pace to import a record 3.4 million tons of rice this year — six times more than it did in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Other industries remain shut out. The U.S. beef industry is still trying to overturn a 2003 ban on American cattle over mad cow disease. Starting late last year, nearly a million tons of U.S. corn have been rejected at Chinese ports because of inclusion of an unapproved genetically modified strain. And some American pork imports were halted this month over fears they contained traces of ractopamine.

“Demand is growing so quickly in China for so many food products — and with so many places to get them from — China can pick and choose,” said Jim Harkness, a senior advisor on China for the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. “From a U.S. perspective, it looks like the Chinese are being picky and erecting non-tariff barriers for political reasons. But I think from the Chinese perspective, the U.S. is an outlier in some cases. Ractopamine is banned in over 100 countries.”

In addition to China, the European Union and Russia also ban the additive. It’s deemed a risk to people with cardiovascular problems.

While other products struggle to win access, the U.S. rice growers are hopeful that officials in Washington and Beijing can come to terms as early as next year. If they do, analysts estimate, U.S. rice exports to China could reach several hundred million dollars a year. That would make China a top buyer of the American grain, on par with Mexico and Japan.

Though it produces only 2% of the world’s rice, the U.S. accounts for nearly 10% of the rice traded globally — enough to make it the fifth-biggest exporter. About half the rice grown in the U.S. ends up abroad. Still, rice consumption in China is so high the country could eat through America’s annual production in 17 days.

California’s Sacramento Valley produces about one-fifth of America’s rice, generally a stickier medium grain that’s popular in north Asia and often is used in sushi. The rest is mostly long grain grown in the southern U.S. in states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

The growing Chinese appetite for imported rice may partly reflect surging food demand, analysts said. But it’s mostly driven by arbitrage, as government policies have kept domestic rice prices high to protect Chinese farmers. Rice mills in China decided it was cheaper to buy foreign supplies.

American rice producers can’t meet that sort of mass demand — nor do they want to. Their interest is in selling packaged rice to China to fill a high-end niche. The rice producers association’s survey of Chinese consumers buttressed that idea. Despite the concerns of Chinese regulators, shoppers in China overwhelmingly perceived U.S. rice as a safe alternative in a country hit by myriad food safety scandals.

Josh Sheppard, a fourth-generation rice grower in Biggs, Calif., about 60 miles north of Sacramento, said he’d welcome Chinese buyers because they probably would pay more for his grains than U.S. customers — much the way Japanese buyers currently do. That’s especially important now when drought has cut rice acreage in the state by 25%.

“We don’t want to compete down in the gutter. We consider ourselves a premium product, like a fine wine,” said Sheppard, who heads a rice farming cooperative in Butte County that’s already made plans to export to China.

The cooperative is managed by Stuart Hoetger, co-founder of Stogan Group, an agricultural consulting firm in Chico, Calif. Hoetger has arranged a partnership between the rice growers and Chinese food and agriculture conglomerate Wufeng.

Medium grain rice known as Calrose grown by the cooperative is being shipped in limited quantities to Chinese ports, where Wufeng is redirecting it to customers in small markets such as the Solomon Islands, the idea being Hoetger and his growers will be ready to ship to China shortly after a trade agreement is finalized.

“If China asks for something, you do it,” Hoetger said. “You ask any farmer that’s sold to China in the last few years and they’ll tell you they’ve made a lot of money.”

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:28-07:00August 29th, 2014|

Drought lessons from a sheep rancher

Source: Brad Hooker, UC Davis

While a severe drought continues to devastate California agriculture, one sheep rancher in Oroville has found a centuries-old solution at the bottom of his wood stove — and researchers at UC Davis are paying attention.

After dumping ash from a weekend cookout in his backyard, Mel Thompson noticed the grass grew a little better. On the advice of Glenn Nader, a UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor based in Yuba City, Thompson took the initiative to research wood ash on his own, going as far as to establish a connection with an Oroville-based energy plant 20 minutes away, which was paying millions to deliver wood ash to the landfill.

Today, the difference in growth from that wood ash can be seen in two adjoining pastures on Thompson’s foothill ranch. One layered in ash three years ago has chest-high grass despite the drought, while the untreated pasture has considerably shorter ground cover.

While the benefits of supplementing crops with ash have long been known, the UC Davis researchers were interested in specifically how it was altering the soil composition to promote plant growth and how it could help other ranchers in this Northern California region.

“It has improved our feed production significantly,” says Thompson. “With that, in conjunction with fencing and the rotational grazing, we seem to be doing OK through this drought period.”

Ken Tate, a plant sciences professor and a Cooperative Extension rangeland watershed specialist, recently surveyed more than 500 ranchers and says Thompson falls into the roughly 5 percent of California ranchers practicing these types of strategies in hopes of gaining more productivity from their land.

“Mel is what we call an early adopter, someone who has a large toolbox and a lot of information that he makes use of,” Tate says. “He’s an innovator and experimenter in the industry.”

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:28-07:00August 28th, 2014|

Reclamation Announces It Will Dump Water While Thousands Stand in Line for Food Handouts

The following is a statement by Dan Nelson, Executive Director of the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, regarding the release of water from Trinity Reservoir by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for speculative fishery purposes.

Today, United States Bureau of Reclamation announced it will dump precious Central Valley Project water while the people of our valley suffer from well-documented and widely reported social and economic destruction as a result of government policies compounded by the drought.

While over 2,000,000 acres of farmland throughout the Central Valley, which produces over half of the nation’s fruit, nuts and vegetables, continues to have a 0 percent water supply from the Central Valley Project, Reclamation has determined there is somehow enough water available to let it go down the Lower Klamath River in the hope it may help conditions for unthreatened salmon. This decision is wrong – both scientifically and morally.

At issue is fear about a repeat of a fish die-off that occurred in 2002 – the one and only occurrence in recorded history. It is hypothesized that the die-off was caused by a number of co-occurring factors: over-abundance of returning fish, low flows in the river, and the presence of endemic diseases such as Ich.

However, since recordkeeping of flows and the number of returning fish began in 1978, there have been six other occasions when conditions have been similar to or worse than today and no fish die-off has ever occurred.

Since the once in history die-off, Reclamation has provided additional flows upon request on occasions when a repeat was feared. Initially, Reclamation acquired the water from willing sellers but more recently they have simply taken the water from CVP water and power customers.

Again this year, Reclamation received a request to provide additional flows. However, on July 30 they announced they would not do so because the number of returning fish is far below previous levels of concern and, in light of the severe drought conditions, it is vital to preserve as much water as possible for the future. When Reclamation declined the request they stated they would monitor conditions for the outbreak of disease and if emergency criteria were triggered, they would be prepared to respond rapidly.

Today, none of the environmental conditions upon which all previous decisions have been made support Reclamation’s reversal. The number of returning salmon is still well below the established level of concern. In fact, reports from field biologists, fishing guides and fishermen along the Lower Klamath all indicate that the prevalent fish in the river is steelhead, not Chinook salmon.

There are no reports of any disease outbreak, which was the requisite condition for change Reclamation established just weeks ago. The only condition that has changed is the increase in volume in the voices of a few special interests.

Sadly, Reclamation and the Trinity Management Council squandered the 369,000 acre-feet of water they had available from Trinity Reservoir for fishery management this year. For years, they have been encouraged to set water aside for contingency purposes. This year, like all others, they have ignored that advice and have once again created a completely avoidable crisis.

No one wants to see a repeat of the fish die-off that occurred in 2002. And, our current understanding of the environmental conditions and science strongly suggests it will not reoccur. This makes the uncertainty that is the basis of today’s decision so egregious. Public policy decisions should be based upon a real and substantiated balance of the risks and benefits.

This is what we know – the fish claimed to be of concern are not present in significant numbers. There is no evidence that the disease of concern is present. The emergency criteria developed by Reclamation and federal fish agencies have not been triggered. The potentially bad side effects to other fish and wildlife, some of which are threatened, have not been studied. And, any potential benefits of undertaking this action are purely speculative.

In contrast, the damage being brought to the families, farms, rural communities, and vital wetlands of California’s Central Valley by government policies will continue. Reclamation’s response to the request from people losing homes, businesses, and hope, for even a little bit of CVP water to lessen the crisis, has been consistently no – there simply is not any more to provide. Until today.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:29-07:00August 26th, 2014|

Drought leaves Tulare County homes without water

By Associated Press

Hundreds of rural San Joaquin Valley residents no longer can get drinking water from their home faucets because California’s extreme drought has dried up their individual wells, government officials and community groups said.

The situation has become so dire that the Tulare County Office of Emergency Services had 12-gallon-per person rations of bottled water delivered on Friday in East Porterville, where at least 182 of the 1,400 households have reported having no or not enough water, according to the Porterville Recorder.

Many people in the unincorporated community about 52 miles north of Bakersfield also have been relying on a county-supplied 5,000-gallon water tank filled with non-potable water for bathing and flushing toilets, The Recorder said.

Emergency services manager Andrew Lockman, said the supplies of bottled water distributed by firefighters, the Red Cross and volunteer groups on Friday cost the county $30,000 and were designed to last about three weeks but are only a temporary fix. To get future deliveries, officials are asking low-income residents to apply for aid and for companies to make bottled water donations like the one a local casino made a few weeks ago.

“Right now we’re trying to provide immediate relief,” Lockman said. “This is conceived as an emergency plan right now.”

Officials said the problem is partly due to the shallowness of some residential wells in East Porterville that are replenished by groundwater from the Tule River, the Fresno Bee said. But river flows are way down due to the ongoing drought, leaving some wells dry.

East Porterville resident Angelica Gallegos fought back tears as she described being without water for four months in the home she shares with her husband,, three children and two other adults.

“It’s hard,” she told The Bee. “I can’t shower the children like I used to.”

Farmworker Oliva Sanchez said she still gets a trickle from her tap, but dirt started coming out with the water about a week ago.

“I try to use the least possible. I’ll move if I have to,” she said.

Along with experiencing inconvenience and thirst, some residents have been reluctant to speak up about being waterless because they are afraid their landlords will evict them or social workers will take their children away, The Recorder reported.

“We want to make it abundantly clear we are not going to make this harder for anyone,” Lockman stressed. “These lists aren’t going anywhere. (Child Welfare Services) isn’t getting a list. They (CWS) made it abundantly clear they are not going to remove children because of no water. We just want to help the people.”

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:29-07:00August 26th, 2014|

California has given away rights to far more water than it has

Source: UC Davis News and Information

California has allocated five times more surface water than the state actually has, making it hard for regulators to tell whose supplies should be cut during a drought, University of California researchers reported.

The scientists said California’s water-rights regulator, the State Water Resources Control Board, needs a systematic overhaul of policies and procedures to bridge the gaping disparity, but lacks the legislative authority and funding to do so.

Ted Grantham, who explored the state’s water-rights database as a postdoctoral researcher with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, said the time is ripe for tightening the water-use accounting.

“Given the public’s current attention on drought and California water, we now have an unprecedented opportunity for strengthening the water-rights system,” said Grantham, who conducted the analysis with UC Merced Professor Joshua Viers.

Better information might enable state regulators to better target water cutbacks in times of drought, Grantham said.

Grantham and Viers verified that water-rights allocations exceed the state’s actual surface water supply by about 300 million acre-feet, enough to fill Lake Tahoe about 2.5 times.

The state has allocated a total maximum allowable use of 370 million acre-feet of surface water — more than five times the 70 million acre-feet available in a year of good precipitation, according to the researchers’ review of active water rights on record. The analysis was published today (Aug. 19) in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The scientists said the California’s water-rights allocation system is complicated and backlogged, which contributes to the mismatched accounting. For example, people sometimes take water, apply retroactively for the right to use the water and continue taking it — sometimes for up to a decade — while their applications are pending.

Inaccurate reporting by water-rights holders worsens the problem. Some may even deliberately overestimate so they do not lose as much if cutbacks occur. The result is that in most water basins and in most years, far more people hold water rights than there is water. In the San Joaquin River basin, for example, water-rights allocations exceed the river’s average annual flow by eightfold.

“All those allocations mean that in times of drought, it’s hard to tell who should have to reduce water use, causing delays in issuing curtailments,“ said Viers, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at UC Merced.

During the current drought, the state water board has for some watersheds ordered curtailments for all water users, to protect fish.

Viers and Grantham, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, are working to iron out issues with its database and make the information available to policymakers.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:30-07:00August 20th, 2014|