When Gov. Brown announced the largest mandatory water restrictions in California history while standing in a snowless field in the Sierra Nevada, he gave hardly a mention to farms.
When reporters asked about farmers later, Brown replied that they are already making sacrifices. After all, this is the second straight year that most will get no federal or state irrigation water due to the paltry Sierra Nevada snowpack.
"Agriculture has already suffered major cutbacks," Brown added. "A lot of people are letting their land go fallow, trees are dying, farmers have been hit very hard."
California's historic drought is putting the amount of water used by farmers and other industries into sharp focus, especially now as urban Californians will soon be required to cut their water use by 25 percent. Each year, farms in this state gulp down as much as four times the amount of water consumed by cities and towns.
But that oft-cited statistic may not always reflect reality, especially in a year like this, according to farm groups.
"Farmers in the San Joaquin Valley have been the only ones to have their water actually completely cut off," said Dave Puglia, senior vice president with the Western Growers Association.
Puglia likens the "zero percent water allocation" that most of his growers will get to the ultimate kind of forced water conservation.
"I don't know how you can ask farmers to conserve more than zero," he says.
In good years, farmers tap relatively cheap, subsidized water flowing in federal and state canals down from the wet north to the arid south. It's what helped turn the dry, flat plain of the San Joaquin Valley into one of the world's most important food-growing regions. Farming wouldn't even be possible in much of California without irrigation – the Mediterranean climate here means that almost all of the state's precipitation falls in the winter.
So the record drought, and two years of severe water rationing has put the valley's farm economy in peril, according to Puglia.
"We've seen in the citrus belt, on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, thousands of acres of citrus ripped out, thousands of acres of almonds ripped out of the San Joaquin Valley," Puglia says. "So, it's happening."
Remember that agriculture is still a small part of California's $2 trillion economy — roughly two percent of the state's gross state product. And with the drought in its fourth year, there are renewed questions about the viability of growing water-intensive crops like almonds or alfalfa, especially as exports.
But also remember that California, if set apart from the U.S., would still be one of the world's top ten biggest economies. So suddenly that 2 percent of GDP doesn't seem so small.
Indeed, the industry is quick to point out that California now produces the bulk of the country's fresh food supply: lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes and yes, nuts.
For people like Dan Macon, who raises sheep near Auburn, Calif., it comes down to the question of what is the best use of limited water. Borrowing a line from the governor this week, Macon said that lawns don't feed people, but farms do.
"We have to have some hard discussions about what types of water use we're doing," Macon added.
Macon's sheep ranch is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, not far down the mountain from where Gov. Brown announced his water rationing plan on Apr. 1. Macon says the governor's staunch support of agriculture is encouraging.
"We are all trying to find ways that we can do more to make limited water stretch further," Macon says.
His livelihood is almost wholly dependent on rainfall that greens up pastures for his sheep. To cope, Macon is experimenting with planting more drought-tolerant grasses. He's also had to reduce his flock size by 60 percent and take a full-time job off the farm.
Macon says the drought may just be hitting home in urban California, but for farmers and ranchers, this is the fourth bad year.
"It really does feel like we've crossed some sort of threshold this year; it's really a scary year," Macon says. "This year is actually worse than last year in my mind."
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