many stakeholders, including between traditional foes such as business leaders and environmental activists to attempt to minimize the local impacts of potential land fallowing. Local stakeholders must develop sustainability plans by 2020 and implement them over the next several years to achieve groundwater sustainability by 2040. The timetable is helping to fuel these discussions and Petersen is hopeful that rational minds will prevail and action will occur before the point of no return. He listed several different major projects on expanding existing or constructing new water storage reservoirs and improving water conveyance infrastructure that could help the effort, including the enlarging of San Luis Reservoir, the raising of Shasta Dam, constructing Pacheco Reservoir, expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir and updating flood control manuals and operations criteria of several others, including New Melones, Oroville, Folsom, and Friant. He added that there are also state and local projects that can be part of the solution, including expanding partnerships between wildlife refuges and agricultural water districts like those served by the Authority and increasing local groundwater storage. Phillips of the Friant Water Authority also seemingly subscribes to the theory that something will get done because it has to. He said the devastating economic impact to California if roughly a third of the irrigated land in the southern San Joaquin Valley has to be fallowed is unfathomable. “It will be an absolute train wreck,” he said, if action is not taken very soon. Some land has already been fallowed and he said beginning next year there will have to be permanent fallowing if additional water sources aren’t developed to recharge the overdraft in the San Joaquin Valley. Phillips is also optimistic that action will occur largely because it seems so logical to him…and he can point to specific projects that can help mitigate the problem. Solving the problem, he said, requires a multi-thronged approach, including the development of new storage capacity (Temperance Flats and Sites), expanding others (Shasta Dam) and, just as importantly, greatly increasing the conveyance capacity in the state. For example, he said the Friant-Kern Canal is designed to deliver one million acre feet (AF) of water annually to 15,000 farms
14 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com MAY | JUNE 2019
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