Gary Beene, a third-generation San Joaquin Valley farmer, will plant barely half of his 1,200 acres this year.
He may not have enough water for the second half of the bottle.
They're focusing on survival and getting through this year more than anything else, said Beene, who grows a tomato, almond, cotton, and garlic with his sons and grandson on property his family settled in California in the 1930s after sharecropping in Oklahoma.
Driest year in California
MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images
California is experiencing its driest year on record. No one in West Texas has ever seen such a small amount of rain.
The massive subterranean lake that feeds the Great Plains and contributes to the production of one-sixth of the world's grain is diminishing.
This is a historic drought with not just a year or two or three of dry weather, but a famine of rain so terrible that some believe you have to go back to the 1500s to find a competitor, stretching from the Pacific coast to Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
This could not have happened at a worse moment.
Food costs are already at an all-time high. Wheat prices have risen as a result of a scarcity caused by Russia's war in Ukraine, as per Forbes.
Soybeans are at their greatest level in ten years. Avocado prices haven't been this high since the 1990s, and corn prices are approaching an all-time high.
The drought in America will drive them and others higher.
According to Mike Wade, executive director of the pro-agriculture California Farm Water Coalition, consumers would face higher pricing and fewer options, or imported substitutes.
Despite higher pricing, drought has convinced farmers ranging from tomato growers to dairy producers to abandon their operations.
According to Wade, the first decision point is whether or not they have water. This year, many farmers have received zero allocations.
People are becoming more conscious of climate change as a result of Earth Day. Even while people like to assume San Diego is always 70 degrees and sunny, that is changing.
At Torrey Pines, Megan Parry from abc 10 News San Diego spoke with National Weather Service Meteorologist Alex Tardy to discuss the subtle shifts people are seeing each year that are now adding up.
New climate normals are announced every 10 years, and the most recent normal, released in 2021, revealed that San Diego is getting warmer and drier.
"Everywhere in the United States, except a tiny area of the northern plains, was warmer than their previous thirty-year norms," Alex Tardy added.
In December, it appeared like they are going to fill up the reservoirs, as they had record snowfall at Lake Tahoe, the greatest snowfall ever recorded in December, almost breaking the all-time snow record of any month.
While Southern California is in its second year of crisis, two-thirds of the state in Central and Northern California, where a significant portion of the state's water supply is kept, is in its third year of drought, with the current snowpack at only 38% of normal.
"When there's more energy in the ocean, you're possibly going to get greater storms, atmospheric rivers, hurricanes," Tardy continued.
However, it doesn't guarantee that it'll be wetter because they're also seeing longer droughts, more severe droughts, and recurrent droughts.
There is yet hope, but it is up to us to make it happen.
Everything we do or don't do has an impact on the natural cycle, so when we litter, squander, or aren't aware of what's around us, it all adds up, and it's not just about us; it's about the future generations.
