Farmers face falling groundwater levels
Visalia Times-Delta
01/09/2010
When it came to water, 2009 wasn't a good year for Tulare County farmers.
Take Terry Langiano, who spent about $47,000 to drill a new well and install a new well pump for his 40-acre walnut farm near Tulare after discovering his groundwater levels had dropped to about 116 feet below the surface, nearly the full depth of his old well.
"And it was a foot from breaking suction," Langiano said. In 1987, he said, the standing water level in the aquifer below his farm was 26 feet below the surface.
Langiano is far from the only Tulare County farmer facing dramatic declines in groundwater levels.
Well drillers report waiting lists of farmers and homeowners needing their wells deepened or relocated.
Langiano said he expects to spend an additional $12,000 to $15,000 later this month to dig two new residential wells for his home and a rental home. He, like a lot of Valley farmers, was hoping for heavy rain and snow this winter. Based on current forecasts, that won't happen.
"I don't have any surface water allotments," meaning water from local rivers or canals, Langiano said. "My farming is totally dependent on what I can pull from the ground."
That's getting harder to do, and Langiano worries that at some point he'll have to drill deeper still to pump water.
"There are people sinking wells deeper than what we did," Langiano said.
While the amounts would not enough to compensate for three dry years, slightly above-average rain and snow forecast for the winter and spring should keep most farmers out of what Jim Clark of Visalia-based Clark Farms calls "very dire straits."
"To truly recharge the system, we will really need an exceptional snowpack," Clark said.
Langiano said that, "It's been a terrible dry year, but the part that compounds that is we have dry years, but we have had no additional storage or distribution of water."
Most of the water-storage improvements he's aware of have occurred at the local level, including the creation of more groundwater recharge basins in Tulare County.
