When I travel north, I normally take Highway 99. It keeps me in touch with our neighbors: the smaller communities like ours based in nuts, tree fruit, vines and field crops rather than the Mediterranean orchards of citrus and olives. Of course, it also exposes me to the latest developments around our cities, sometimes a rude awakening.
But lately I’ve had reasons to swing
over to I-5 instead, which I used to avoid for its barrenness and lack of human
settlement. It took me a little time to
realize that the stretch of I-5 from Highway 198 north to Highway 152, which
(heading west) circumnavigates San Luis Reservoir through Pacheco Pass and
drops us into the verdant Santa Clara Valley -- that entire stretch of I-5
traverses the only a portion of the Westlands Water District's west side.
I was surprised by the amount of
green along that route. Vast plantings of
almond trees line the road where tumbleweeds used to grow until they became uprooted
and bounced along the highway. In small
triangles of unused or unusable land, the previous landscape was evident, with
a few groves of dead tree stumps remaining from the drought. In those unirrigated triangles were signs that read
“Congress Created Dust Bowl.”
I almost expected to see skulls of
dead cattle and abandoned Model A’s nearby, but the signs were really a form of
rural street theater. Something for the news photographers to focus on, after interviewing
a solemn farmer who’d just bulldozed his old, beloved almond grove. But the sense of increased greenery made me wonder how many trees were really lost. I decided to investigate.
By going to the Westlands Water District
website, it is possible to examine the crop reports for every year since
2000. In those years, the number of acres
planted in almonds has tripled, from 29,178 to 87,882. There was only one year with slightly fewer
acres of almonds harvested than the year before (2017 saw 30 less acres
harvested than 2016.) Acres of harvested
pistachios saw an even greater per cent increase, from 5,131 acres in 2000 to
44,103 acres in 2017. Other permanent
plantings almost tripled in that same time period, from 21,381 acres to
60,211. More than half of that 60,211
acres are trees and vines that in 2017 had not yet come into production.
What this means for us, the taxpayers,
is that we will be begged 2.6 times more and harder to send taxpayer-supported,
taxpayer-developed water in short supply to a district intended to receive
supplemental water supplies only. With
their political power Westlands will continue to get from Congress the
concessions they need to keep water flowing their way, with or without new dam
construction. Their few, large landowners
will export those easy-shipping nuts to China or wherever, and reap what we’ve
sown with water needed elsewhere.
Methinks we need some signs along
I-5 that read “Congress Created Boondoggle” on those miles of green almond
orchards.
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Trudy Wischemann is
an old-timey researcher who still uses paper and pen to line up her columns of
numbers. You can send her your I-5
sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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