California's Central Valley grows about 40 percent of the U.S.'s fruit, nuts, and produce, but has also used up too much groundwater. Now the state is searching for creative ways to refill its aquifers
grown in the United States, a 20-year-long drought has left growers and communities desperately short of water. To make up the persistent shortfall from rain and snow, they are pumping groundwater—and doing so far faster than water can trickle down from the surface to replenish underground aquifers.
A vast network of canals and ditches bring irrigation water to farms across the San Joaquin Valley. They could also be used to carry water for refilling aquifers.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Cameron has managed, a 5,500-acre farm in the San Joaquin Valley, since 1981, and he has long relied on groundwater. In the early days, that was easy: He and his team would hook up some 100-horsepower engines to wells and pump away. But over time, some wells dried up.
The water kept disappearing into the ground, so he just kept pumping—all the way through June, well after buds burst and leaves unfurled . Groundwater use, which makes up about 40 percent of all water use even in a wet year, shot even higherLike Cameron, other farmers found their wells running dry. Entire communities started to hear their pumps sputter. In some places the ground has sank more than 20 feet because its underbelly was drained of water.
Restoring more of the natural flood cycle to refill aquifers is something that many groups in the state agree on. The challenge, says Guivetchi, is how to get it done, not on a few hundred acres, as at Terranova Ranch, but likely on many thousands.about 2 million acre-feetNo one yet knows exactly how much of that deepening debt can even be repaid. Local water districts’ SGMA plans currently
“This is why we’re here at the research station,” says hydrogeologist Helen Dahlke, as she pulls her boot out of squelching mud in the flooded grapevines at Kearney. “Torturing grapes!” interjects a laughing Shulamit Shroder, a graduate student.
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