Working in the agricultural industry, the weather can either be a friend or true economic enemy. All aspects of agriculture rely on the weather in some form or another.Essentially it all comes down to water, and when mother nature is going to supply you with that essential liquid. Without sufficient amounts of rain, our crops are prone to stresses which harm both the plant and us as consumers and producers.
Drought in this country seems to have a natural cycle, but its no secret that there is a major crisis going on in California. The current drought in California is something that that state has never seen before and the effects are hitting everyone in this country. Below is a picture of the current drought situation in the United States as of November 18th 2014.
As you can see a majority of California is in the Exceptional Drought range. The classification of exceptional drought range comes from the standard that the USDA set which states that exceptional drought implies that there is " exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies". This standard was taken from the drought mitigation website that produces the drought monitor.
Below is an image from October 2014 that shows just California's drought situation.
This image shows that around 95% of the state is classified as severe drought or worse. So these two images really revel the widespread crisis that is going on in California. But some may wonder how this affects us here in ND or in other parts of the nation. Well California happens to be very agriculturally productive, not in corn-soybean production like we see here in ND, but they produce a majority of our nations fruits, vegetable and most importantly their milk products. According to the California Agricultural Production Statistics, California's top-ten most valued commodities (in order from #1 to # 10) are milk, grapes, almonds, nursery plants, cattle, strawberries, lettuce, walnuts, hay and tomatoes. http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
Currently the drought has cost the state about 1.5 billion dollars in losses and about 17,000 agricultural workers have lost their job. The total forecast of net loses due to the drought are projected to be around 2.2 billion dollars. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/california-drought/california-drought-cost-2-2-billion-thousands-jobs-n159616I recently heard a speaker at NDSU talk about how the drought is affecting cattle production and the cattle industry in California. As a native of California she said she knows many of her neighbors have resorted to selling their stock. This due to the the hay crop which has been significantly damaged due to the drought, and it costs too much money to ship hay from other states so producers are left with no choice but to sell their cattle. This is an unfortunate occurrence as cattle is California's fourth top commodity.
When researching this topic I stumbled across an article that discussed how the drought is increasing salinity in California and soil born toxins. As these problems make perfect sense to me, it was a side of the drought that I did not think about. In dry weather conditions, we have more evaporation and transpiration than precipitation therefore causing drought conditions. When water evaporates out of the soil, only clean/pure water evaporates. This means that water with dissolved salts in the solution, will ultimately leave behind salts on the soil surface when evaporation occurs. Salts also are brought the surface through irrigation, as water used in irrigation happens to be saline in nature. So not only do producers in these areas have to worry about water deficiencies they have to worry about salinity issues as well.
Here in ND we know all to well the issues of salinity. Salinity causes plant stress and yield loss similar to drought conditions. Salts in the soil are often hard to manage as it takes massive amounts of water to leach the ions down into the soil profile. California does not have the luxury of water to leach these salts into the profile so producers are left to plant salt tolerant crops and tolerant varieties. These methods are often very expensive to implement, which makes it hard for producers to make this transition when they have already seen economic losses the past few years. Researchers are working on producing cheaper varieties and other methods to fight these issues. Below is the link of the article I found, it really does show another side to the California drought.
http://westernfarmpress.com/grapes/california-soil-toxins-worsened-drought
California has had to makes some very tough restrictions to help survive this economic and environmental crisis. As a resident if you are caught excessively watering your lawn of hosing down driveways/sidewalks you are subjected to a $500 fine. The state started offering incentives to homeowners, if they converted their landscapes from traditional lawns to "climate appropriate landscapes" which means they will plant natural dry desert plants in their yards. They have completely limited the use of irrigation, and now farmers have resorted to using ground water, which is starting to diminish.
While these water measures may seem harsh, California has came into the limelight on decisions regarding the water crisis. Many feel that while this is completely nature related they feel that there was many poor policy decisions made, which made the situation worse. People have urged politicians to make real changes, other than flushing less and not watering the lawn.
People state that not enough is being done in the eyes of long term conservation. The population say that agencies should have extra revenue to build water reclamation projects and start implementing water reuse strategies.
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/California-s-man-made-water-crisis-5236687.php
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