The raisin went bust a year after my grandfather arrived. Sun-Maid couldn't sell half of the grapes because the farmers planted so many. William Saroyan would weigh in on who would buy the other half. If we could only convince every mother in China to put a single raisins in her rice, we would have solved the problem, he said.
The great drought of the 1920s revealed the folly and greed of California agriculture. The farmers had taken the rivers. The ancient lake beneath the valley was being taken over by turbine pumps. They were planting hundreds of thousands of acres of crops in a land of abundance. Poor, salty dirt was beyond the reach of the rivers. The new farms were able to take so much water out of the ground that their pumps couldn't reach any lower. Their crops were in poor shape.
The politicians were told to steal the river. They were looking at the flood flows of the river. If the plan sounded audacious, it was already accomplished by the City of Los Angeles, who reached up and over the mountain to steal the Owens River.
The federal government came to build the Central Valley Project in the 1940s, damming the rivers and installing mammoth pumps in the Delta to move water to the dying farms in the middle. The State Water Project was built in the 1960s to move more water to grow more farms in the middle and more houses and swimming pools in Southern California.
During the driest decade in state history, valley farmers have added half a million acres of permanent crops, but have not reduced their footprint to meet water scarcity. They have lowered their pumps by hundreds of feet in order to chase the dwindling aquifer, which is sucking so much water out of the earth that the land is sinking. The canals and ditches are collapsing and the flow of the aqueduct that we built is being reduced.
How could a native account for such madness?
No civilization has ever built a system like that. It was on farmland. It was in suburbia. It made rise three world-class cities, and an economy that would rank as the fifth largest in the world. It did not change the nature of California. The state of California is experiencing a severe shortage of water. The flood is in California. 30 million acre-feet of water is produced by our rivers and streams. They will produce 200 million acres-feet in the next year. The average year is a lie.
I am sitting on the porch of a century-old farmhouse, eating kebabs and pilaf with David Masumoto. We are looking out at 80 acres of vineyards and orchards that are not far from the Kings River. The small work crew has left. His wife is doing volunteer work overseas and their three dogs know no bounds. The place looks like a farm where the farmer has died. Mas is as alive as ever.
