The study focused on revenue losses and pumping costs but didn’t estimate profits in the agriculture industry.įarming operations in the Central Valley have long turned to pumping more groundwater during droughts, and water levels have been dropping for decades. “It’s a lot of money, a lot of jobs,” Escriva-Bou said. The research shows a substantial economic toll on agriculture, especially in the Central Valley, where the economy depends heavily on farming, said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a coauthor and senior research fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California. The report’s authors cited statistics showing milk remained the state’s top agricultural commodity in 2020, followed by almonds and grapes. Over the past decade, the acreage planted with wheat, cotton and alfalfa has decreased, while new orchards with high-value pistachios and almonds have expanded across vast stretches of farmland. These shifts are occurring alongside other long-term changes in crops driven by the global market and other factors. His team found that the croplands left fallow included rice fields in the Sacramento Valley, cotton fields in the San Joaquin Valley, as well as farmlands that had been producing grains and other field crops. The researchers found the economic effects on California agriculture last year were comparable to the impacts in 2014, in the middle of the last major drought, which ended in 2016.īut they also found that this time the drought has been more severe in the Sacramento Valley and North Coast regions, leading to an increase in dry farmlands and revenue losses in those areas.įor example, the Russian River Basin has suffered from drier conditions over the past year, Medellín-Azuara said, “so the map of the dry areas changed a little bit.” The past year was one of the driest and hottest on record in California, and comes during a larger 22-year megadrought in the West that research shows is being worsened by global warming. If the state doesn’t get more precipitation in March, Medellín-Azuara said, “we are likely to see more severe cutbacks from water agencies to agriculture this year, and then the impacts can intensify.” The researchers’ analysis shows that the past year of drought had significant economic impacts, and these costs are likely to accumulate as climate change intensifies drought, and as California implements regulations to curb the chronic overpumping of groundwater. In estimating the costs, they factored in losses in crop revenue and higher costs for pumping more groundwater.Ĭalifornia’s agriculture industry is the largest in the country, averaging $50 billion in annual revenue and employing more than 400,000 people. In a report prepared for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, researchers calculated that reduced water deliveries resulted in 395,000 acres of cropland left dry and unplanted - an area larger than Los Angeles. Severe drought last year caused the California agriculture industry to shrink by an estimated 8,745 jobs and shoulder $1.2 billion in direct costs as water cutbacks forced growers to fallow farmland and pump more groundwater from wells, according to new research.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |