Happy Nice Mall

A year after my grandfather came, raisins exploded. Armenian and Japanese farmers planted so many grapes to dry that the Sun Servant was unable to sell half of them. Who to buy the other half has become such a wonderful, tragic, and hilarious theatrical affair that even Fresno sage William Saroyan would weigh in. If we could convince every mother in China to put a single raisin in the rice bowl, we’d cut out the excess, she thought.

As the great drought of the 1920s broke out, it exposed the frenzy and greed of California agriculture. It was not enough that the farmers had bought the five rivers. They were now using turbine pumps to seize the aquifer, the ancient lake below the valley. They were planting hundreds of thousands more acres in a land of abundance. This larger footprint was not prime farmland but poor, salty soil beyond the reach of rivers. As the drought worsened, the new farms were pulling so much water from the ground that their pumps couldn’t get any further down. He was drying the crops.

A cry went up from the agrarians to the politicians: “Steal us a river.” They were watching the flooding of the Sacramento River in the north. If the plan sounds daring, just such a theft had already been committed by the City of Los Angeles, reaching all the way to the mountain to steal the Owens River.

That’s how the federal government came to build the Central Valley Project in the 1940s, damming rivers and installing massive pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to carry water to dying farms in the middle. This is how the state of California built the State Water Project in the 1960s, installing a 444-mile aqueduct to carry more pumps to the delta and more water to grow more farms and more homes and swimming pools in the middle. Southern California.

This is how we got to the point today, in the driest decade in the state’s history, that valley farmers did not reduce their footprint to meet water shortages, but added half a million more acres of permanent crops, namely more almonds, pistachios. , Mandarin. They’ve lowered their pumps hundreds of feet to chase the dwindling aquifer, as it gets smaller, it sinks into the land, sucking millions of acres of water from the soil. This collapse collapses the channels and ditches, reducing the flow of the aqueduct we are building to create the flow itself.

How can a native explain such a frenzy?

No civilization had ever built a larger system to transport water. He expanded his farmland. It spread to the suburbs. He created three cities worldwide and an economy that would become the world’s fifth largest economy. But it did not change the fundamental nature of California. Drought is California. The flood is California. Our rivers and streams produce 30 million acres of water a year. The following year, they produce 200 million acres-feet. The average year, 72.5 million acre-feet, is a lie we tell ourselves.

I am sitting on the porch of a century-old farmhouse, eating kebabs and rice with David “Mas” Masumoto. Not far from Kings River, we gaze almost silently at 80 acres of orchards and vineyards. The small work crew went home. His wife, Marcy, volunteers abroad, and his three dogs, all stinky, know no bounds. The whole place looks exhausted, like a farm where the farmer died. But Mas, approaching 68, is alive as always.