-June 23,2021-
Kings River Water Association director Steve Haugen says runoff this season is likely to be the third driest in 125 years of record keeping. “We won’t know how it ranks for sure until the end of July with the chance it might be the driest ever”, he notes.
“Our last wet year was 2019″ and Pine Flat reservoir, on the Kings, built up a cushion of water supply that carried the farms in the old lakebed below last year. The cushion is gone after two dry years, he notes.
Haugen says Pine Flat Dam storage today is 379,000af compared to 758,00af this time last year. The reservoir holds up to million acre- feet.Ditto up and down the south San Joaquin Valley- home of the richest ag region in the world. There are dams on every river, built by the Bureau of Reclamation or Corp of Engineers with plenty of local control of how the water is delivered to area farms.
From north to south each watershed is storing around half of what they held a year ago after two dry years.
Millerton storage, above Fresno, is at 266,000af compared to 443,000af on this date a year ago.The upper San Joaquin River watershed can hold as much as 1.1 million acre-ft has some 600,000 af in the upper reservoirs.
On the Kaweah – Terminus Dam holds just 64,000af compared to 129,000af in mid-June 2020.
On the Tule River, the Schafer Dam holds just 17,000af compared to 44,000af as of mid-June 2020. In the summer of 2019 the reservoir had over 90,000 acre-ft.The dam is being expanded, ready to hold more water when complete in 2024.
South of Porterville,Lake Isabella in Kern County stands at 83,809af compared to 215,00af this time last year.
Water shortages & heat reduce planned tomato acreage
In the wake of water shortages, food processors have reduced the tonnage of tomatoes they plan to buy from California farmers.
Contracted processing tomato acreage for the 2021 season stands at 231,000, down from the January forecast of 240,000. Fresno County remains the top county in contracted acreage, at 62,000. Production should reach 11.6 million tons of processing tomatoes, down from 12.1 million tons in the earlier survey. Report from California Processing Tomato Growers. Growers say “ expected high temperatures in the coming months could have a significant impact”.