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California drought to squeeze produce prices, but so will other factors
Price of lettuce has gone up 40 cents, but some of that is due to low Canadian dollar
Drought may have gripped California’s agricultural heartland for a fourth consecutive year, but it’s not the only factor putting pressure on imported produce prices at the supermarket.
More than 93 per cent of the state is currently experiencing “severe” to “exceptional” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and the governor recently implemented new rationing measures for cities and towns to cut water use by 25 per cent.
Farmers have so far been exempt from those restrictions — even though they use 80 per cent of the state’s developed water supply. Still, many have had their usual federal allocations of water reduced to zero for the second year in a row and have had to draw more heavily on groundwater sources or purchase water from contractors and other farmers — for as much as 10 times the usual rates. Others are switching to more efficient irrigation methods and less water-intensive crops or letting some land go fallow.
John Bishop, a produce buyer for distributor Fresh Start Foods in Milton, Ont. says his Californian tomato suppliers are planning for a smaller crop this June.
- California imposes water restrictions
- Cost of fruit and veg rising due to drought
- PHOTOS: California’s drought hits livestock
“They have told me that they are reducing their acreage by 20 per cent because they don’t have enough water to be able to continue to grow the way they’ve grown in the past,” he said.
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The Silver Lining in the California Drought
The Silver Lining in the California Drought
Denial, it’s been said, is not just a river in Egypt.
It runs, of course, through each of us. But Californians have displayed quite a dose of it as a record-breaking drought rolls through its fourth year.
It was just last week, propelled by the lowest snowpack in the Sierra Nevada in recorded history, that Governor Jerry Brown announced mandatory water-use cutbacks averaging 25 percent for the state’s 400 municipal water utilities.
With only one year of water supply left in the state’s surface reservoirs, and rampant depletion of groundwater, the world’s eighth largest economy and the nation’s premier producer of fruits and vegetables is in some trouble.
Scientists have determined that this drought, which began in 2012, may be the worst the state has experienced in 1200 years.
Yet cities still use potable water to irrigate grass along road medians. The Santa Fe Irrigation District in southern California, which, despite its name, supplies not farms but some 19,300 people, tallied residential water use in February 2015 of 345 gallons per person per day—4.5 times the state average for that month and up 30 percent from two years earlier.
The state’s water use in February 2015 was only 2.8 percent lower than it was in February 2013, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, officials called an “alarming trend.”
Clearly, the governor’s urging a year earlier for voluntary water-use reductions of 20 percent had come to little effect.
Meanwhile, some 44 percent of California’s 9 million acres of crops are flood-irrigated. That means far more water is applied to the land than the crops require. While some of it seeps down to groundwater, recharging depleted aquifers, it can pollute those aquifers with farm chemicals. Some of the irrigation water simply evaporates into the dry air.
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