Reuters

Two farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley are proposing to do with their water rights what farmers around the country have done for decades: sell them to developers.

The agicultural enterprises are part of the Dudley Ridge Water District, which originally had the right to draw a maximum of 57,343 acre-feet of water annually from California’s state water project. The Tejon Ranch is paying the farmers $5,850 an acre-foot for the right to receive 2,000 acre-feet annually, meaning that the sellers will net $11.7 million. (An acre-foot is generally considered the amount of water two average households use annually.)

The fields, within the Dudley Ridge Water District, a small 30,000-acre area in southern Kings County, northeast of Los Angeles, produce fruit and nut trees — pomegranates, pistachios and the like. Given the successive years of drought in California, the last time the water district got its full allocation was in 2006; in 2008 the allocation was cut by 65 percent; this year it was cut by 50 percent,

But those holding the water rights must pay the annual cost of maintaining the water infrastructure and transferring their allotments regardless of the changes in allocation. The uncertainties have created new incentives for farmers to give up their rights — and their annual expenses.

Farms in the district have been the source of large water transfers to developers before.

One local legislator has been a vocal opponent of long-term transfers of water from farms to cities. Last year, after a separate sale of 14,000 acre-feet for $73 million to the Mojave Water District, which serves cities in San Bernardino County, State Assemblyman Juan Arambula told The Fresno Bee, “What am I going to tell folks when farmers sell their water and put farm workers out of a job — and they make millions at the public’’s expense?””

Mr. Arambula introduced a measure to prohibit long-term farm-to-city water transfers. It failed.

Farmers in the region have complained bitterly about water cutbacks from the state system in recent years; the cuts were necessitated by droughts and court decisions requiring more water be left in Northern California rivers to improve the habitat for endangered fish like the tiny Delta smelt.

An $11 billion bond issue has been proposed to enhance the existing water delivery system and help farmers, but the vote was postponed.

Water managers in rural areas argue that without a consistent supply of water, farmers face economic chaos if not ruin. Among other things, they cannot be sure of the viability of longer-term crops like fruit and nut trees. Annual crops like tomatoes can be abandoned for a year and the fields left fallow, but trees must be watered in wet years and dry ones. So they say they need the option of selling their rights.

At the same time, it is inevitable that the push for new development, which is expected to resume if the economic recovery picks up speed, will mean a search for water rights for homes and industry. Some investors have long dreamed of an unfettered water market, but if that dream is realized, some agricultural areas will probably wither.

The latest sale brings that trade-off back into focus. The Tejon Ranch, most of which has been preserved in a major conservation deal that I wrote about in 2008, covers 270,000 acres and is the largest privately held swath of land in the state. It was assembled and owned by the Chandler family, long the owners of The Los Angeles Times.

But on the land that was not set aside for conservation purposes,

Tejon Ranch plans to build a planned community of 23,000 homes (12,800 single-family detached homes, 6,200 attached condominiums and town homes and 4,000 apartments), called Centennial, a smaller resort community called Tejon Mountain village and an industrial park.

The notion of taking water provided specifically to agriculture and selling it for a 10-fold profit to urban and suburban development is only going to get more controversial.

“The transaction set off a passionate debate in the region,” Diana Peck, executive director of the Kings County Farm Bureau, was quoted as saying in an article in The Fresno Bee on the Mojave District sale.

“There are those that say they should not be able to sell their water when there are others who desperately need it,” she said. “But some people feel as a landowner, it is their right to sell that water.”

An earlier version of this post made an inaccurate comparison of the selling price of water rights — $5,850 per acre foot — and the annual cost of transporting water through California’s state water project, which can be as high as $500 per acre foot.