Open Letter to the Governor

Another interesting week on the farm-

As I have mentioned before, my entire exercise program is Indy and Toby taking me for a walk every morning. On some walks we have a visitor, Sir Coyote. It is interesting, he will only come so close, but he of course he runs when Indy chases him. He has never threatened the boys and will even follow us closely on the way home. 
   Now that we are not running cattle any more and I don't have to worry about protecting calves I can say they are beautiful animals.

I am concerned. The almonds are pushing early this year. I hate when they do this. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing trees bloom. I just worry when they do it too early. There is still plenty of crappy weather between now and Spring. It can freeze. I can rain. And, it can hail. It can probably do all three at once if it wants.
    My sister's birthday is early March. One year while I was visiting the family for her birthday we had a black frost that weekend. I was back in the field Monday morning and it was raining almond buds. The floor of the orchard was thick with them and my heart broke. That season was done. One weekend of bad weather and a crop was lost. So, prefer when bloom is a late as possible. ANythign to give those little buds a chance.

Recent news has prompted the letter below. After waiting for two years for some decent rainfall we are finally getting some storms, and they are letting it run out to the ocean. Drives me nuts.

Open Letter to the Governor

Dear Gov. Brown

With all due respect, are you kidding me?

150% rainfall and 0% for farmers?

Yes, I am aware there is a difference between the state and federal water systems. I am also aware that state water users will get somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of their water. But, can you see how that makes my point? 150% normal rainfall and the people get 15% of their normal allotment.

As I write this, 100,000 acre feet of water a day are washing out to sea. We could refill the San Luis Reservoir in less than ten days with that water. We could refill Shasta in less than a month. And next June I am willing to bet you are going to be telling California why we still need water restrictions.

It is hard to see how you have any credibility left. You have spent the last two years getting Californians to conserve water and here you are letting billions of gallons of water per day wash back into the sea.

Since early last summer people have been signaling that if El Nino hit that would not be the end of the drought. Actually, yes it would. A drought is when there is no rainfall. Then end of a drought is when it starts raining. It really is that simple.

            Now the argument can be made that the impacts of the drought are not over with one wet winter. That may be fair. But, the impacts of the drought would be over much sooner if you weren’t running all the rainfall out to the ocean!

I have long said there are wet years and there are dry years in California and we are fools because we do not save the water from the wet years for the dry years. Yes, I know there are environmental concerns. I have written about this subject in my book, “Ten Reasons: Finding Balance on Environmental Issues”. We need a healthy environment and a healthy economy. Right now we have neither. After a decade of flushing water through the Delta the smelt are still in trouble and the pelagic organisms still are declining. In the meantime California’s farmers are getting crushed. Are we willing to admit our current plan is not working?

Since we have been doing this in the name of the environment let’s take a look at the bigger picture. What is your bigger concern water in the Delta or climate change? If we collapse California agriculture through water restrictions we will increase the carbon footprint of 38 million Californians. The United Nations estimates it takes 800 gallons of water per person per day to produce food. For 38 million Californians that is 31 million acre feet of water per year. Importing food from overseas will create a huge increase in transportation costs for our food and those farmers will not be under California regulations will they?

            My fellow farmers and I can lower the carbon footprint for 38 million Californians by growing our food here, but we are going to need some water to do it.

Yes Gov. Brown, I know a lot of this is driven by federal law, but this is happening on your watch in your state, this is your responsibility.

So, what do we do?

Of course we all still keep conserving water. Water is a rare and precious gift.

Second, Fill the reservoirs. If your credibility is important to you it is past time to crank up the pumps. You cannot expect people to make sacrifices when you flush this much water out to sea.

Third, I will be voting for the Water Priorities Constitutional Amendment on the ballot this Fall. (https://cawater4all.com/) I know high speed rail is important to you. That is a beautiful dream for the future. I love the train system and I ride it regularly. But, for one tenth the cost of the train we can fix the water system for every Californian starting now.

Confession from a Co-Founder of Greenpeace

It has been nice having some rain this week, even if it did slow down work. Next week looks pretty good. We will try to finish planting trees before the next storms hit.

   Of course, we have 150% normal rainfall. The state and the Feds have announced 0% water allocation for the year. I know the reservoirs are still low. They would fill faster if they didn't flush all this rainfall down to the ocean. Just saying.

Some of you think I am a little hard on the enviros. I thought you night be interested in hearing from a reformed environmentalist. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace. He stepped away a few years ago and he has been vilified by his former colleagues. I have met Moore. He seems to be a pretty good guy.

Environmentalism for the 21st Century

By Patrick Moore

As we begin the 21st century, environmental thinkers are divided along a sharp fault line. There are the doomsayers who predict the collapse of the global ecosystem. There are the technological optimists who believe that we can feed 12 billion people and solve all our problems with science and technology. I do not believe that either of these extremes makes sense. There is a middle road based on science and logic, the combination of which is sometimes referred to as common sense. There are real problems and there is much we can do to improve the state of the environment...

For me it was time to make a change. I had been against at least three or four things every day of my life for 15 years; I decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. I made the transition from the politics of confrontation to the politics of building consensus. After all, when a majority of people decide they agree with you it is probably time to stop hitting them over the head with a stick and sit down and talk to them about finding solutions to our environmental problems...

All social movements evolve from an earlier period of polarization and confrontation during which a minority struggles to convince society that its cause it is true and just, eventually followed by a time of reconciliation if a majority of the population accepts the values of the new movement. For the environmental movement this transition began to occur in the mid-1980s. The term sustainable development was adopted to describe the challenge of taking the new environmental values we had popularized, and incorporating them into the traditional social and economic values that have always governed public policy and our daily behavior. We cannot simply switch to basing all our actions on purely environmental values. Every day 6 billion people wake up with real needs for food, energy and materials. The challenge for sustainability is to provide for those needs in ways that reduce negative impact on the environment. But any changes made must also be socially acceptable and technically and economically feasible. It is not always easy to balance environmental, social, and economic priorities. Compromise and co-operation with the involvement of government, industry, academia and the environmental movement is required to achieve sustainability...

As an ecologist and environmentalist, not a political scientist or political activist, I have always shied away from strong opinions on poverty and class. But it seems unacceptable to me that so many hundreds of millions of people live at a material standard that we in the industrialized countries would not consider acceptable for a dignified life. I believe there is a great deal to be learned by exploring the relationships between ecology and politics. In some ways politics is the ecology of the human species. The two subjects have developed such completely different disciplines and terminologies that it is hard to think of them together. But I believe we must if we are to gain a truly holistic understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our society, and the Earth on which we ultimately depend...

MAY THE FOREST BE WITH YOU

If you would like to read Moore's complete statement you can find it at-
http://www.maninnature.com/Management/Conservation/WConservation1f.html

Wasting Rainfall

Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Associated Press have been reporting this week that we are NOT refilling our reservoirs with the recent rains. Federal regulators are concerned about----wait for it---the Delta Smelt. So let me get this straight, AFTER TWO YEARS OF DROUGHT RESTRICTIONS we are finally getting some needed rainfall and THE FEDS ARE LETTING THE WATER RUN OUT INTO THE OCEAN!!!

This just proves what I have been saying, they want all the water.
We cannot pump to fill the reservoirs in the summer because the fish need the water.
We cannot pump to fill the reservoirs in the Spring because the fish need the water.
Now we cannot pump to fill the reservoirs in the winter because the fish need the water.
Does it make sense yet when people say we have a man made drought?

One of the main points in my book, "Ten Reasons: Finding Balance on Environmental Issues", is that we need a healthy economy and a healthy environment. Now we have neither. Instead of finding solutions to our problems, they just clamp down.

Here is a portion from "Ten Reasons"

Ten Reasons-Reason 7-Solutions

#7-I’ll start believing environmentalists when they start offering solutions. What I usually see is a presentation of a problem and then they jump up and down and tell us to stop it. For example, they will tell us how bad over population is. Then tell us to stop it. What kind of solution is that? It would be nice if the solutions made sense. One suggestion they had about dust on dirt roads was to water the dirt roads every day. Do you know how many miles of dirt roads there are in Fresno County? Do you know how much water that would take? Do you know how many of those roads have no traffic at all during the day? That wasn’t much of solution. Watering the roads we use makes a lot more sense. But, the farmers had to suggest that, the enviros didn’t figure that one out.

            My experience working with the environmental community is they are not

interested in problem solving.

            As I have shared elsewhere, my introduction to the environmental community was

a Sierra Club meeting in San Diego when I was sixteen. [remember this was years before

I started farming.] The sum of the meeting was as follows, “Well, we beat the nuclear

guys on that issue, who do we go after next?” It is not that I am getting old and I can’t

remember, I never found out what issue they beat the nuclear guys on. The whole point of

the meeting was, “where is our next victim?” Even as a starry-eyed idealist ready to enlist

in the cause I was repulsed by this approach, and I was out of there. I will gladly work for

a cause I believe in, but I don’t go around picking fights to throw my weight around.

            Another experience was working with a Bay Area environmental group. In a side

bar conversation I tried to engage David Behar of the Bay Institute about how to solve

water supply problems to benefit both the environment and the farmers. Behar’s

comment was, “This is a Zero-Sum game.” He felt that if one side wins the other side

must lose. Can you see how this perspective automatically limits our ability to solve

problems?  Right off the bat he has eliminated one of the most powerful tools for solving

problems; The Win-Win. Or, as Fisher, Ury and Patton put it in their classic, Getting to

Yes!, “Seek Options for Mutual Gain” (Fisher, Ury and Patton 56). This experience

confirmed once again that the enviros not only do not want to “Seek options for mutual

gain”, they are not interested in problem solving at all.

            In Reason Three I talk about my experience on a Technical Advisory Committee

for the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. Each of the technical

experts on the committee was locked in to his or her specialty. The salt guys didn’t want

to consider any solutions until the salt issue was solved. The fertilizer guys didn’t want to

consider any solutions until all the fertilizer issues were solved. I think you get the idea.

THE ENVIROS HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY TO PRODUCE ANYTHING-

            Another reason I think we see a lack of solutions from the enviros is they don’t

have any responsibility to produce anything. When your prime directive is to protect the

environment at all costs everything else can fall to the way side.

            You and I have to produce something or provide a service to support our families

All the things we have in our lives do not magically appear. For example, the coffee you

drank this morning came from beans grown overseas. They had to be nurtured, harvested,

roasted, ground and shipped thousands of miles to get to your home. All of this does not

happen by magic or by accident. It takes a lot of work, a lot of planning, a lot of effort

and that is just for one cup of coffee. How about the rest of the food you ate today?  Or,

the clothes you wear. [I, for one, would love to visit half the places my clothes have been

to.]     

            Our environmental friends and neighbors feel zero responsibility in the production

of the necessities of life. Their over-riding primary goal is protection of the environment.

It is a noble goal, but it has no balance.

[If you want to read more, you can find copies of Ten Reasons on Amazon.com or at the Book Barn in Clovis, CA.]