Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
put pressure on agriculture because farmers will eventually end up
wanting to sell some of their water rights.”
The specter of a mostly barren Owens Valley as the verita-
ble hose that watered Los Angeles and its environs hangs over the
heads of politicians, water administrators, water gods, and more.
However, there's more to the story than meets the eye, says water
wholesaler Kightlinger, whose organization has developed its own
approach to purchasing water rights from agricultural interests.
“There's often amisperception of Owens Valley,” says
Kightlinger. “Obviously interbasin water transfers today are done
much differently than they were in the early 1900s. Then, the city of
Los Angeles went out and acquired tracts of land to acquire water
rights, paid all the farmers for the land, bought them out, and
developed that system. That approach worked a century ago.”
Kightlinger and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California have taken a different approach. “We've put together
a program that seems to work very well with farmers in the Palo
Verde Irrigation District,” he says. “We approached the farmers
and said we'd like to buy a thirty-fi ve-year lease on their land; pay
them for it; they will continue to farm it with certain restrictions;
and every two to three out of ten years, we can tell them to fallow a
third of that land. So effectively, we bought up the rights to fallow
a third of the valley at any given time only so often. (For example,
the program will fallow nearly 26,000 acres August 1, 2010, through
July 31, 2012.)
5
“We pay them the profi t they would have made had
they farmed the land. We also paid them for the lease. The farmers
like it because in an uncertain economic climate, we offered them
a pretty steady income fl ow. They also liked it because we would not
entirely fallow everything. We fallow a rotating third, which would
rest the land and also provide water supply to us when we need it
in dry years. So that was a more nuanced, sophisticated deal where
you transfer agriculture water to urban [use] while preserving farm-
ing in the community,” Kightlinger adds.
More such programs are being developed today, Kightlinger
says, adding that he doubts water providers will simply buy out
an entire valley, fallow the land, and walk away from it as they did
a century ago. “Agriculture communities are eager and interested
in today's programs because it's truly a win-win.”
