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A year after my grandmother arrived, the grapes exploded. Armenian and Japanese farmers had planted so many dried grapes that Sun-Maid could not sell half of them. Who can buy the other half became a question of strange, sad and humorous drama, so much so that even Fresno philosopher William Saroyan could have become rich. we can be eliminated, he said.
Just as the devastation hit, the great drought of the 1920s hit again, exposing the folly and greed of California agriculture. It was not enough that the farmers took five rivers. They were now using turbine pumps to capture groundwater, an ancient lake at the bottom of the valley. In the land of the glut, they were planting hundreds of thousands of acres of seed. This growth was not ideal fields but poor, salty soil that could not reach the rivers. As the drought intensified, the new fields produced so much water that their pumps could not come down. Their harvest was ripe.
Agricultural officials shouted to politicians: “Let us cross the river.” They could see the floodwaters of the Sacramento river in the north. If the plan sounded more effective, such a burglary had already been carried out by the City of Los Angeles, reaching the top and top of the hill to steal the Owens River.
This is how the federal government, in the 1940s, came to build the Central Valley Project, demolish rivers and install huge pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to transfer water to dead farms in the middle. This is how the California government, in the 1960s, built the State Water Project, installing more pumps along the river and a 444-kilometer canal to move more water to grow more farms in the middle and more houses and swimming pools . Southern California.
This is how we have come to the conclusion today, in the most difficult decade in the history of the state, that farmers in the valleys have not been reduced to water scarcity but have added half a million acres of perennial crops — abundant almonds, pistachios. , mandarins. They have lowered their pumps and hundreds of feet to chase down dwindling springs even as they shrink, absorbing millions of acres of water from the earth’s surface so that the soil dries up. This descent is the culmination of a series of canals and drainage, reducing the flow of canals that we have created to make the water run.
How can natives talk about such madness?
No development has ever made a major way to transport water. It spread to fields. It spread to suburbia. It made up the top three cities in the world, as well as the fifth largest economy in the world. But that did not change California’s essential culture. Drought and California. Flood and California. In one year our rivers and streams produce 30 million acres of water. The following year, they produce 200 million acres. The average year, 72.5 million acres, is a lie we tell ourselves.
I live on the porch of a 100-year-old farmhouse, eating kebabs and pilaf with David “Mas” Masumoto. We look out quietly at its 80 acres of orchards and vineyards along the River of Kings. His younger men have returned home. His wife, Marcy, serves as a volunteer worker overseas, and their three dogs, all of them smelly, know no bounds. The whole place looks tired, like a farm where a farmer has died. But Mas, now nearly 68 years old, is as alive as ever.
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