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A Farmer’s Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge

 3 years ago
source link: https://www.wired.com/story/farmers-quest-beat-californias-drought-flood-climate-change/
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A Farmer’s Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge

Don Cameron went all in on a trickle-down survival tactic. It could help save America’s agricultural heartland—even if he doesn’t survive the new water war.
Photograph showing water spraying from a hydroelectric plant on the left while Don Cameron walks over a tilled field on...
Left: Spray from a hydroelectric plant on the Kings River in California. Right: Don Cameron walks some of the land he will flood in order to recharge dried-out aquifers.Photographs: Nicholas Albrecht

In the fields at Terranova Ranch, it was as if a disaster had arrived.

Don Cameron, clad in dark green waders, sloshed through the pond that had formed in his orchards and vineyards. More of his crops were underwater than at any time since he began farming in California’s San Joaquin Valley—a quarter of the almonds, a third of the grapes, half the pistachios, and all of the walnuts and olives. Most of his neighbors would have been racing to pump out their fields; accepted agricultural wisdom holds that too much water will suffocate the roots. About an hour’s drive southeast, farmers were so desperate to hold the flood back that they dropped sandbags from rented helicopters. At Terranova, Cameron took an entirely different tack. He measured the depth of the drink and inspected the new growth on his vines and trees. Then he ordered more water to come.


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