California’s drought has produced a plot twist too singular even for Chinatown: farmers volunteering to give up a quarter of their water.



Scores of farmers in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers made the unprecedented offer on Friday in a deal to stave off even steeper mandatory cuts.

Agricultural players have fiercely guarded their water rights since the 19th century, rebuffing competing claims from cities and other rivals in the so-called water wars, a web of intrigues immortalised in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

The film’s fictional farmers never countenanced voluntarily cutting their water use but as California endures a fourth year of drought growers in the delta calculated it was the lesser evil.

By promising to forfeit a quarter of this season’s water – by fallowing land or finding other measures to cut usage – they have averted harsher restrictions from state authorities.

The State Water Board had warned it was days away from ordering some of the first cuts in more than 30 years to senior water rights holders.

“This proposal helps delta growers manage the risk of potentially deeper curtailment, while ensuring significant water conservation efforts in this fourth year of drought,” State Water Board chair Felicia Marcus said in a statement.

“It allows participating growers to share in the sacrifice that people throughout the state are facing because of the severe drought, while protecting their economic well-being by giving them some certainty regarding exercise of the State Water Board’s enforcement discretion at the beginning of the planting season.”

The agreement applies only to so-called riparian rights holders – farmers with direct access to streams. Those who participate can opt to reduce water diversions from streams by 25%, or fallow 25% of their land. In both cases, the reductions will be from 2013 levels.

The delta region represents less than 10% of the state’s total 6.9bn acres of farmland yet the deal is considered important. The Los Angeles Times called it “historic”. The Sacramento Bee said it was a “significant breakthrough”.

The reason, apart from the precedent, is that officials hope to make similar deals with farmers elsewhere. California’s agriculture supplies much of America’s nuts, fruit and vegetables but consumes 80% of the state’s water.

Meagre rain and unusually hot temperatures have stripped the snowpack and left some reservoirs, such as Lake McClure, down to 10% capacity.

Those farmers that can afford it are paying drillers to bore hundreds of feet underground to produce wells. But the scramble for groundwater is causing soil to subside and collapse.

To combat the crisis state governor Jerry Brown recently announced sweeping cuts for urban water systems. This put pressure on city dwellers to curb watering lawns, washing cars and long showers, spurred on partly by #droughtshaming – the act of naming-and-shaming water-wasters on social media.

This in turn put renewed scrutiny on farmers, especially those with senior water rights, beneficiaries of a venerable system which favours those whose ancestors farmed in the state a century ago.

Those with junior rights, especially in the Central Valley, have received little or no state water allocation, turning fields brown and dusty. In the past month the water board ordered roughly 9,000 junior rights holders in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins – farmers whose claims date back only to 1914 – to stop pumping from rivers and streams.

Senior rights holders were the next target, which prompted the farmers’ pre-emptive offer to cut usage. The delta reduction plan is voluntary. Each grower must submit a plan to the water board by 1 June.

George Hartmann, a Stockton-based attorney who helped devise the plan, estimated that if all eligible delta area growers participate roughly 225,000 acre-feet of water will be saved. An acre foot of water can supply two households for a year.