Cracked Ground in a Fractured Economy
Every rice farmer has a favorite field or two. This is one of my favorites.
37.3 acres of Maxwell clay, right off the back porch of our shop. Two checks, good water flow, low weed pressure, consistently high yields. What’s not to love?
Looking at it today, in this dry, cracked, hardpan condition is deflating.
I’ve never seen my favorite field look like this before. Under normal conditions, this ground would have been worked by now. At the very least, it would have a chisel pass on it, flipping over the top layer of soil, exposing wet underside, beginning the annual process of drying out the ground for the incoming crop. With the weather and soil being this dry in mid-March, 999,999 times out of a million we would by working this field with great enthusiasm. But this has developed into a one-in-a-million type of year, so instead, the field sits.
A typical dry March in the Sacramento Valley would be highlighted by fleets of tractors, slicing and churning the soil, with spiraling, squirrel tail dust plumes stretching miles into the blue sky; country highways filled with slow moving equipment, backing up motorists; fuel and fertilizer jockeying about, supplying the farm equipment that has set about its work on producing the next year’s food supply. White wooden hives stacked alongside almond orchards, with bees restlessly pollinating blossoms.
That is not the case this year. In the place of the farming bustle, you will not find much of anything. Rural towns are quiet. Fields are sitting idle, mostly barren, aside from a few weeds gawking at you. Farmers stare through windshields wondering when and how the 2022 crop year is going to play out. Never in the modern era has farming in California been wrought with so much uncertainty.
So, what’s the problem?
There are the well documented issues -- another year of drought, high fuel prices. There are the less publicized issues – fertilizer prices soaring to record highs, in some cases up over 200% from last year’s price. And there are the issues that many people don’t know or understand –freezing temperatures that came at the worst possible time for blossoming almond trees, essentially nuking the entire 2022 crop before it even got started.
All these issues lining up into a potentially catastrophic stack of dominoes, which will begin to topple the moment the United States Bureau of Reclamation and the California State Water Board determine what the water supply for agriculture irrigation will be for the 2022 growing season.
We all know it’s going to be the lowest water allocation Nor Cal farmers have ever seen. Fighting over water in California is nothing new to most of us, but this year is different. Rather than each group arguing over who gets the prime cut of meat, it’s become a pack of starving dogs fighting over who gets the nub of bone. It’s mid-March and Shasta Reservoir is sitting at 38% of historical average. In short, there’s not a lot of water to go around. So, when the freaky low amount of water gets doled out for food production in California, here’s one possible chain of events that could realistically unfold in the Sac Valley this year…
Farmers who have trees will push every bit of water they have to their orchards to keep their million-plus dollar investments alive. Except there won’t be enough water to cover all the trees, which means many orchards will dry out and die a slow death over the course of the summer. On top of that, the surviving trees won’t likely produce a crop of any sort due to the freeze. Across the way from those orchards will be barren row crop and rice fields, which never had a shot at water with all the trees facing the water me or die scenario. This means rice, processing tomato, hay, seed and grain production will fall well below the volume that this fertile valley typically produces. And for the small batch of acres which are blessed with water, input costs will be so high that farmers will have to compromise pre-plant and cultural practices to such an extent, that yields should fall below longtime averages.
This is just one possibility.
Drought… Inflation… Supply chain shortages… An energy crisis… Turbulent weather patterns… all adding up to a perfect storm like no one living person has ever seen.
If the water allocation is low as some of the more recently forecast numbers, there will be an inevitable backlash coming in the form of bankruptcy and massive unemployment. In Colusa, Glenn, Sutter and Yuba counties, many others too, most of the economy is tied to agriculture. And if agriculture is suddenly snuffed out, what then? It’s entirely possible that the cracks in my favorite rice field will be dwarfed by the cracks that form in the economic foundation of rural California.