Usually by this time of year our yard is a pale yellow. Just inches below the surface is a limestone shelf.
So every time it rains, it greens up fast. Two weeks without rain in this heat, and it’s crispy brown.
I never can figure out if we need trees whose roots shoot deep, finding their way through the rock’s crevices, or those that spread horizontally.
So I plant both. Most every year.
Like most, I’m especially sensitive to the plight of Western states that are entering their third year of extreme drought.
The last 12 months’ precipitation has been the lowest on record for much of Arizona, Western New Mexico, Southern Utah, and Southern Nevada. In the Pacific Northwest, 87% of the region is in drought.
Both California and Nevada are 100% in moderate-to-exceptional drought. About one-fourth of California is in what scientists call an “exceptional drought.”
That means that for farmers all crops are severely impacted. The ground is a minefield of cracks. Wildfires and dust storms are to be expected. Aquatic life is at risk.
Kansas experienced such extreme conditions for six months in 2013, during the middle of a five-year drought. That year, our place lost 22 trees.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsome has asked everyone to reduce their water use by 15%.
If achieved, that would save roughly 850,000 acre feet of water, which is enough to supply 1.7 million households a year, according to the governor’s office.
So yeah, a drop in the bucket considering California’s population is bumping 40 million.
But what’s really changing the picture there is a law that curtails farmers from freely tapping into its most imperiled underground water basins, much like our farmers in Kansas do with the Ogallala Aquifer system out west.
It used to be if you owned the land, the thinking went, you owned the water under it. No more.
Adopted during California’s last devastating drought, the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act — SGMA, pronounced “sigma” — asserts that groundwater is a shared resource. While it upholds a farmer’s right to pump, it imposes rules on its use, including water meters and accompanying fees.
Overkill? Not by any means.
Beginning in the 1950s, farmers drew so much groundwater that California’s water table plummeted, permitting seawater to seep in.
This new effort, combined with other measures, has reduced annual groundwater use by 7.8%, on average from 2015 and 2019, according to the agency.
