It's dry down on the farm

California's deepest drought in nearly two decades has left reservoirs near historically low levels, causing concern — but not, as yet, panic — for Mid-Valley farmers preparing this year's crops.

State and federal water managers on Friday announced reductions in the water shares allotted to farms — including outright denial of water shipments in some areas of the Golden State. Most federal shipments were cut 25 percent, and state shipments were slashed by 85 percent.

While growers elsewhere in the Central Valley face the prospect of leaving fields fallow or even uprooting orchards for lack of water, many local farmers are looking to plant as much as possible, drill for more groundwater if necessary — and hope more rain can at least partly turn the tide of one of the driest periods in three decades.

"We've never had a situation like this. I can't quite say what's going to happen now," said Franz Niederholzer, a farm adviser at the University of California extension in Yuba City.

Rainfall and reservoir levels have reached depths last scraped in the Golden State in 1977 and the six-year drought that ended in 1992.

Lake Oroville, linchpin of the State Water Project, held about 1.1 million acre-feet as of Thursday at midnight, or about 1.4 million acre-feet less than average for this time of year.

Federally controlled Shasta Dam, which supplies other water districts, had about 1.6 million acre-feet — 35 percent of capacity.

The heaviest blows from Friday's water cutbacks fell on areas south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, including prime farmland from Tracy south to Bakersfield. Some water districts lost their entire federal allotments for the year, leaving them scrambling to buy supplies from other districts or else impose mandatory cuts.

Cutbacks to federal water supplies in 2008 battered the fruit and produce industries of the south valley, idling hundreds of thousands of acres and leading to more than $300 million in

lost or unplanted crops across the state. The Mid-Valley's cash crops have varying levels of vulnerability to a long water shortage, according to Niederholzer.

Rice fields are famously water-intensive because of the flooding needed to support plants in their earliest stages. Water demand for tree crops — including prunes and peaches in Yuba-Sutter, and almonds in Colusa — is somewhat less, but farmers are reluctant to quickly pull out trees because of the many years needed for groves to bear their fruit.

Most water contracts in the Mid-Valley have been made with the federal Central Valley Project, where allocations have remained relatively generous compared to the south. The system supplies water to about two-thirds of California.

Water users who had contracts before the project's founding get a larger share than those whose contracts were written afterward — a boon for local farms established a century or more ago.

Districts with federal contracts signed in later years received no water share on Friday, though they may get partial shares later as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reviews water supplies monthly.

With three-quarters of their usual water shares, farmers such as Brett Scheidel, a rice grower in south Sutter County, said they could avoid large-scale retrenchments for now — though the cost of opening more wells or arranging trades with other water districts likely would raise food prices later this year.

"I think we'll decrease the acreage slightly," said Scheidel, who cultivated about 1,400 acres last year across several water districts. "With 75 percent of our (federal) supply it's very close as to if we can grow the same acreage as before. We'll probably pump more groundwater to make up the difference.

"It's a frustrating year; with rice prices so good, it's hard when you can't grow all the crop you want."

Though the federal water cuts are the first in 15 years for many North State growers, another rice grower called the cuts survivable if dry conditions don't extend into another year.

"Everyone's getting anxious, but there's a lot that can happen in another month," said Joe Carrancho, a contract farmer from Maxwell who tends to about 1,200 acres belonging to various owners. "If this continued, we may run into a problem. But for this year, I think, we can make it through."

Yuba County also supports extensive fruit farming, but water officials there expected it to be less affected by drought. Many farms already lean on well water for irrigation in normal years, and the reservoir at Bullards Bar is nearly half full — fuller than almost any other surface water source in the North State, according to Curt Aikens, general manager of the Yuba County Water Agency.

"At this point, we don't expect any deficiencies in ag water for this year," he said. "If we saw dry conditions like we had from November to January, there's a possibility we would see (a cut) — but probably a 10 percent chance or less."

Local water supplies vary widely, however, even within the same county.

While Bullards Bar reservoir may be fuller than most, the Browns Valley Irrigation District said its water source, Collins Lake, remains more than 16 feet below its maximum level after two dry years.

In Colusa and Glenn counties, groundwater — or its absence — leaves some growers able to get by on reduced federal water supplies while others must scale back planting.

Even if late-winter rains bulk up the state water supplies, the shortage exposes severe stretch marks in California's water delivery and storage. Farmers in the Central Valley compete for water with growing city populations from Los Angeles to San Diego, while court orders to protect the Sacramento River's threatened salmon and smelt populations limit how much water can be pumped from north to south, said Dave Kranz, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

"You have millions more people in California than before," Kranz said. "At the same time you've got the Endangered Species Act and its enforcement, redirecting what little water is available in a dry year, and the system itself has not grown to accommodate that.

"So you have about the same amount of water storage available as 30 years ago, but the demands have increased. That means you're carving up more pieces of the same-size pie."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune at 749-4708 or hyune@appealdemocrat.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report.