I woke up this morning to the sound of a huge tractor breaking new ground down the street from my house.  If it sounds familiar, it is because it is.  Last week "they" (whoever "they" are) finished ripping up a 600 acre or so field of previously unirrigated pasture land and sinking a new deep, very large well to provide water for about a quarter of a million new almond trees.  Today they seem to be starting on the parcel on the other side of the road.  It will undoubtedly be another one or two square miles of unirrigated pasture land turned to trees, and at least two more very large water wells.  The total will come to something like a million new trees planted down the street from my house in a couple of months.  This is not an isolated event - the new orchards are going in for miles around, many of which are on what has historically been unirrigated land.  This amounts to hundreds of millions of new trees and an unimaginable drain on the local aquifer because all of these trees are being watered via wells - mostly irrigated by new wells on previously dry land.

I see signed along side of the interstate highways saying things like, "Don't restrict our water use - farmers feed America."  That is true, farmers do feed America - however these particular trees don't do any of that, they grow nuts that are shipped to Asia and sold to the newly affluent Chinese.  They create money, but not food for America. I doubt if the bulk of the money even ends up in America.  Basically, these farmers are mining our water by pumping from the local aquifers to plant trees whose crops are not used locally, or even in the USA.  Not only that, but almonds are not an important part of anyone's basic food needs.  They are luxuries.

I have been talking to some of the local farmers, the ones whose families have lived and farmed in this region for the past 150 years or so.  They are the ones that traditionally grow crops such as corn, alfalfa,  beets, tomatoes, wheat, rice, melons, onions, garlic, beans, walnuts, apricots, peaces, and things like that - crops that really do "feed America" - and a very large part of the rest of the world to boot.  They are expressing fear that their livelihoods are going to be destroyed by the extensive water mining to water these trees by draining the aquifer(s).  In order to keep up with the falling water levels they have been having to drill deeper, expand the size of their pumps, install new pumping equipment, replacing burned out pumps from wells that ran dry -  and even that is barely keeping up.  Even the ones who have leased their land for the almonds are becoming worried.  Some claim to have attempted to get out of their contracts before the land is planted in trees, but they are not being allowed to break their agreements.  These farmers tell me that they signed the agreements several years ago before the magnitude of the planting explosion was evident.  They were thinking in terms of a small number of trees on their own land - which they figured wouldn't be much different from what they were currently doing (even those who had traditionally farmed on dry land).  They were thinking of personal gains, not regional impacts.

However, now it is becoming evident that not only did one or two farmers sign these long term leases - but maybe all (or almost all) of them did.  Now that a large portion of the western side of the Sacramento Valley is getting blanketed by rapidly increasing square miles of heavily irrigated almond orchards they are starting to recognize the magnitude of the potential problem, and that it may well drain the aquifer. 

The problem with this is that the orchards are relatively short lived.  They start producing in two years, are in full production in three and pay off their initial investment in four to five years (a darned good return on investment by any measure).  If they last another four or five years, huge profits will be made.  It sounds like they are hoping for a production lifetime of ten years or so.  At that point, most of the orchards will be past their lease times and the ownership will revert to the landowner (the folks who have been here for many generations growing food and grain on unirrigated, or carefully irrigated, land).  The current investors who are leasing the lands, planting the orchards, and drilling the wells have short term goals in mind.  They want to make their profits in 6 to 10 years, and move on.

However, they are making their huge profits by "mining" the aquifers.  This term means that they are removing water faster than it is recharging - so they are emptying the aquifers.  This has the immediate impact of causing the land to subside, compacting the aquifer formations so that they can NEVER recharge.  In addition, much of the water that is stored in the aquifers, and the water that is recharging the aquifers is "ancient" water - the water seems to come from hundreds of miles away, possibly starting its journey during the end of the last ice age!  These basins are only partly recharged by annual rains, mostly it is water that took thousands of years to accumulate.

What the local farmers are slowly starting to realize is that these orchards are taking the water, and that when they obtain ownership of the trees and the use of their land again, the water is likely to be gone!  This scenario has already played out in the San Joaquin Valley (the part of the great valley to the south of Sacramento, about 80 miles south of my home).  In that region, many farmers leased their land to almond growers who planted hundreds of square miles of trees and "mined" the aquifers.  In many places the land has subsided 30-50 feet, and is no longer capable of storing water.  The leases ran out, and the farmers were forced to bulldoze the trees because there is no water for irrigation.  Unfortunately, there is also not enough water to maintain other crops either.  This is much of the reason for the big push to put two huge pipes (30 feet in diameter or so) to transport water from northern California to these now parched lands. 

I find this whole thing to be extremely scary - it is the kind of thing that we have watched happen in foreign lands (Brazil with the deforestation for farming and mining, Canada with the exploitation of coal sands ... the list goes on and on) where large corporations move into an area, take control of the natural resources until they have been depleted, and then move on to new places - leaving the local populations with huge environmental disasters and a ruined economy.   Now it is happening right here in my back yard (almost literally) - and there seems to be nobody noticing or attempting to do anything about it.  Everyone is happy happy happy - the leases are making 2-3 times what they land was worth for whatever it was being used for, so the farmers are "getting rich," the County is pulling in lots and lots of tax money, the State is getting tax money, and the investors are getting rich.  Nobody seems to care that this is a very short term situation and that in a very few years those trees will be torn out, but the water will no longer be there - just like happened to our friends and neighbors a mere 100 miles to the south in the same beautiful, productive valley.