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Westlands, the nation's biggest irrigation district, where almost 1,000 square miles of semidesert in western Fresno and Kings counties bloom with crops grown with cheap federal water, may have to shrink to survive.
A diminishing water supply and an intractable drainage problem have the area's farmers cornered, but they're not going down without a fight.
Westlands Water District has been a matrix for political controversy since the late Democratic Rep. B.F. "Bernie" Sisk began lobbying for its creation in the early 1950s, asserting that it would create 6,000 "family farms." It is moving with characteristic aggressiveness to avoid reducing its acreage, which was mostly arid rangeland before the arrival of low-cost irrigation water from Northern California rivers.
The district is suing to increase and stabilize its federal water ration, attacking the Cal-Fed program created to end California's water wars and pressuring the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to build the sites it needs to take care of its wastewater.
Interior Department officials are due in U.S. District Court in Fresno today to present a plan for dealing with Westlands' drainage problem.
The district also has applied to the state to divert a third of the San Joaquin River flow now used by other districts, an audacious move that has alarmed and infuriated its valley neighbors and drained its political capital.
If its efforts fail, Westlands will almost certainly have to retire about 200,000 of its 560,000 irrigated acres from production.
A planned federal buyout to retire about 40,000 acres of salt-saturated, unproductive land for more than $100 million fell through on the last day of the Clinton administration. But negotiations are expected to continue with the Bush administration's Interior Department, which many believe will be more sympathetic to agriculture than its predecessor.
Westlands leaders are at their battle stations to resist the forced, and possibly uncompensated, land retirement that many farmers and landowners regard as inevitable, and they take an apocalyptic view of the district's predicament.
Environmentalists "persist in basically trying to put us out of business," said Huron area farmer Al Dingle, president of the Westlands board of directors. "They believe that (Westlands) was and should be a desert." The result of the environmental campaign will be "the elimination of agriculture on the west side of this (San Joaquin) valley," with the consequent loss of thousands of jobs and the ruination of entire towns.
Dingle said the combined effects of the Endangered Species Act, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act and the Interior Department's recent decision to reduce diversions from the Trinity River in northwestern California will leave Westlands with a shortage of more than 500,000 acre-feet of water in a normal rainfall year.
The Bureau of Reclamation has freed hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of Central Valley water for fish and wildlife habitat restoration in recent years,
and "much of that has come on the back of Westlands," Dingle said.
The assumption underlying Westlands' creation and feasibility was that its once-arid acreage would be served with ample surface water supplied by the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project.
The Central Valley Project harnesses the Sacramento, San Joaquin and Trinity river systems to ship an annual average of 7 million acre-feet. Westlands' contract with the bureau entitles it to 1.15 million acre-feet a year. That is 16.4 percent of the project's yield, enough to supply 5 million people.
In fact, Westlands has received less than its contracted amount of project water since 1990, with the exception of 1998, the El Nino year. Its preliminary allocation for 2001 is between 20 and 35 percent of the contracted amount.
"The bureau is operating the system in a way that is injurious to us to a degree we think is unnecessary," said Dan Errotabere, a Westlands director who farms lettuce, garlic, almonds and other crops in the Riverdale area of Fresno County.
The water shortage seems intractable unless the bureau relents, he said. Users can't pump from deep wells the difference between what is needed and what is available, "and we can't buy it," said Errotabere, who has drilled five wells since 1992.
In the 40 years that Westlands has been intensively irrigated, it has been criticized for absentee ownership, surplus crops and subsidized water. It also received a black eye from the discovery that its toxic drainage water killed wildlife in Kesterson Reservoir.
Although sold to Congress as a family farm project, with the promise that farmers would live on the land they farmed, Westlands in its early years was dominated by a handful of "paper farmers" who not only controlled enormous acreage but lived elsewhere. The district now says that it comprises "600 family-owned farms held by 2,600 different landowners," and that farms average 850 acres.
The district also was criticized for growing surplus crops, such as cotton, which were economically beneficial for farmers only because of federal subsidies. Cotton remains the district's principal crop -- 208,165 acres were harvested in 2000 -- but Westlands farmers have diversified and now grow 59 crops, ranging from almonds to watermelons, with an annual market value of $1 billion. For several weeks during the spring and fall, virtually the entire supply of lettuce grown in the United States comes from Westlands.
The cost of water, still cheap by urban standards, now averages about $70 per acre-foot throughout the district, when administrative and other fees are added to the basic $38 charged by the Bureau of Reclamation. Some farmers are paying in excess of $100.
Despite relentless criticism by environmental critics, farmers are unapologetic about receiving water that costs less than the bureau's cost for developing it. "You can't have agriculture without subsidized water," said C.W.
"Bill" Jones, who has farmed in the district since 1946.
The district's drainage problem dates to 1985, when the partially built San Luis Drain to Kesterson Reservoir was closed after the discovery of genetic damage to fish and waterfowl caused by selenium, a naturally occurring nonmetallic element that became concentrated at toxic levels in the drainage water.
Much of Westlands is underlain with an impervious clay layer, and where it exists, crop yields are declining because of salt buildup in the soil attributable to lack of drainage. In the Mendota area of Fresno County, a "perched" water table, extending into the root zone, has rendered thousands of acres almost worthless.
Closure of the San Luis drain has forced farmers to find innovative ways of dealing with irrigation runoff and seepage on their land.
J&J Farms, a 5,000-acre, five-family, diversified farming operation near Firebaugh in Fresno County, where the cotton crop has declined from three to less than two bales per acre on some ranches because of groundwater buildup, has sacrificed 160 acres as a dumping ground for its wastewater. Just finding acreage where processing tomatoes can be successfully planted has become a problem, said Wendy Jones Turner, J&J Farms' business manager.
The company, working with U.S. Filter, is getting ready to try a new approach to its on-site drainage problem with an experiment to filter and clean all of its wastewater.
Ideally, Turner said, the process will create a new water source. "It's a survival situation," she said. If it proves feasible, the process could be "an alternative to land retirement and shrinking the size of Westlands."
The Kesterson catastrophe left a residue of cynicism about Westlands that still colors attitudes about its current predicament.
Lloyd Carter, a Fresno attorney and former reporter who wrote prizewinning investigative stories about Westlands and the San Luis Drain, said he thinks district farmers are crying crocodile tears.
"These guys are all farming the government," he said. "The door to water marketing is just starting to creep open. . . . The water is more valuable than the land. They'll be selling subsidized water."
Two recent initiatives by Westlands are a measure of the desperation that its farmers are feeling.
In a move so drastic that some of its top staffers quit in protest, Westlands directors voted in August to apply to the State Water Resources Control Board to divert up to 750,000 acre-feet of San Joaquin River water, which has been under the control of the Friant Water Users Authority for more than half a century.
"They (Friant) don't like what we did, and I can't blame them, but we didn't have a choice," Errotabere said.
In December, the district sued to block the implementation of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's decision to reduce the diversions from the Trinity River to the Central Valley Project, Westland's principal water source.
The decision was environmentally unsound and failed to consider the impact on water and power users, said Westlands general manager Thomas W. Birmingham.
In the San Joaquin River case, Westlands argues that it -- not farmers in Tulare and Kern counties -- has first claim on the water because it is in the "area of origin" of the river. But it ignores that argument in staking its claim to the Trinity water, which rises in the Trinity Alps and flows through Trinity and Humboldt counties.
"There's a siege mentality here," said Paul Betancourt, a farmer who raises cotton and almonds near Kerman in Fresno County.
E-mail Eric Brazil at ebrazil@sfchronicle.com
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