Perfectly aligned rows of spring time trees in bloom, flicker past my driver side window. These orchards fill just a part of California's enormous food needs brought about by multiple densely populated urban cities.
An orchard of plum trees in bloom, soon each flower will develop into a plum to be harvested later in the season. This stage is the most water intensive process.
I’ve started a garden in my own backyard, dotted with juicy red tomatoes, dark green zucchini stalks and crunchy tropically hued bell peppers. I use a gallon of water a day on my 6 square foot patch of dirt garden. I could only begin to imagine how much water these immense orchards consumed.
Eric Willard, a California State University Chico environmental science professor and Sunsweet Prunes farmer, owns a 100 acre orchard with approximately 13,000 trees. Willard says, “We use 1,000,000 gallons of water per acre, that’s 9000 gallons per tree, annually.” An impressive figure, but I soon learned all that water came from right below the orchard, in the ground water.
(Photo by totaldiabetessupply.com)
Every plum goes through an intense dehydration process before becoming a prune. They are placed into a giant oven until most of the liquid has evaporated from the fruit.
“Our farm is not directly affected by any California state water projects,” claims Willard, whose water needs are met without relying on irrigation from any nearby rivers. But this can't be said for all of California's agriculture. Water figures like these are similar for the thousands of farms and orchards across the state, those numbers quickly add up.
Water is an essential resource for life in any facet: drinking, cooking, agriculture, industry and sanitation. According to the textbook Environmental Science for a Changing World by Anne Houtman, Susan Karr and Jeneen Interlandi, out of all the water there is on the planet only three percent of it is freshwater and of that three percent less that 0.01% is in readily available reservoirs like rivers, lakes and groundwater. The rest is trapped in closed aquifers and frozen glaciers.
However, the wonderful thing about water is it is a naturally cycling and replenishing resource. Due to evapotranspiration, the combination of evaporation off of water bodies and the water vapors that escape from plants during cellular respiration, once water is used it is collected in weather systems and precipitated back to the ground. The key is not to overuse what the Earth's hydrologic cycle can replenish naturally.
Every gallon of water that Willard uses for his trees is either absorbed by the trees that transpire water vapor into the atmosphere or sinks through the porous dirt to rejoin the water table underground to feed the well.
With proper water management, disposal and use of natural filtration systems water can be used indefinitely. Because water is such a necessity for survival, keeping sustainability in mind is an absolute must.
Agriculture may be our primary need for water but it is far from the only one. According to California’s Department of Water Resources, Industrial and residential water needs must also be met, and large crowded cities like San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles can make that a difficult task. It is important for people to realize the necessity of conserving their water use, before it becomes a bigger problem than it needs to be. Los Angeles is geographically a desert and relies on water projects that divert water from the Colorado River and northern California resources like the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin Delta.
If I’ve forgotten to water my garden for even a day the once confident stalks droop under their own weight and the dark green leaves become pale and shrivel. My garden has shown me the incredible reliance of water to life. Remove water from the equation and Earth is a dusty, void, uninhabitable dessert.
A backyard garden is an incredible way to familiarize yourself with the inputs and outputs of agriculture on a small scale. Small gardens like this one take a fraction of a percent of the water and fertilizer that large scale farming operations consume.
A large scale drought caused by irresponsible water use and management could create one of the biggest anthropogenic natural disasters we've ever seen. And it is up to us to prevent that from happening; to prevent ever having to wonder where we will have to get water when the rivers run dry.
