Alta Irrigation Will Deliver No Water This Year
Alta Irrigation District who supplies canal water to farms in northern Tulare County and southern Fresno County will deliver no water this year, the first time in its 127 year history. Runoff on the Kings River is expected to be only 9% of average. The water district has some 250 miles of open canals supplying what is the stone fruit basket of the state. Officials worry that vigorous water pumping this summer will cause many wells to go dry.
Tulare Basin Uses More Water Per Acre/Ft
The hotter, drier southern part of the SJ Valley requires more water to grow the same crop vs the Sacramento Valley says a UC academic.
A senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, Josue Medellin-Azuara, calculated that it takes 4 acre-feet of irrigation water to grow an acre of almonds or pistachios in the Tulare Basin, where nut orchards have expanded the most in the last decade. In the rest of the San Joaquin Valley, it requires 3.4 acre-feet. But in the Sacramento Valley, these nuts need only 2.4 acre-feet. That’s a difference of roughly one acre-foot, or nearly 326,000 gallons, enough to supply two households for a year
