On the radio last week, I heard Johnny Amaral, the spokesman for landed interests in the Westlands Water District, complain about the April 11th announcement of the 100% water allocation from the CVP.
“It’s good news,” he said, “especially for those who have permanent crops and other high value crops like that.” But farmers won’t be able to use all that water. “There’s not going to be land or crop to irrigate because it’s come so late. It’s not because farmers don’t want to. Clearly, they want to. That’s, you know, what they do.” But: “In order for this to work, the allocation announcement has to come much earlier.”
In all the years I have lived here, I don’t remember a single one where the final allocation was not announced in April or later. The timing of the announcement is driven by the surveys of the Sierra snowpack, where the water is collected for those allocations. In some years, they (meaning the state’s Department of Water Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation) know earlier, but considering the 5 year drought behind us and snow still falling above us, the timing doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Considering that the water delivered to Westlands is Class II water, water deemed “surplus” to the Class I water served to most eastside irrigation districts from the Friant-Kern Canal, Amaral’s comments sounded like the words of a spoiled teenager to me. Who do they think they are?
They’re the landed. Those words are often followed by another,
like “gentry” or “aristocracy.” Amaral
refers to them as “farmers” to keep the dirt on their hands and off their
reputations, but most of the people who run the tractors, sprayers and
harvesting crews in the Westlands Water District are not the owners of the
land. Mostly they’re the landless. The landed keep their hands – and their noses
– clean.
I felt the same disbelief when I
heard that the decision to drop the Mother of All Bombs (actually, Massive
Ordnance Air Blast,) for the first time ever, was made over a piece of
chocolate cake. I don’t care how
beautiful it was. Eleven tons of
destruction that cost $16 million to build (according to the website Newsmax)
came down on and blew up a piece of earth never seen, never visited, much less understood,
with impacts we’ve heard little about except the hoped-for impact on other
nation’s views of our president’s willingness to go ballistic, literally.
His decision was dessert, nothing to
it. Made while eating a beautiful piece
of chocolate cake at a resort he owns, along with many other properties around
the globe. The purported words of Marie Antoinette, who was landed in
the worst way, filled my head. Let us
eat cake.
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Trudy
Wischemann studies land tenure from her home in Lindsay. You can share your thoughts on land c/o P.O.
Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below. 
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