Delta cutbacks put San Joaquin Valley farm town on edge

Susan Ferriss - The Sacramento Bee

In the San Joaquin Valley, the most productive farmland on earth, panic is more abundant than the crops that usually blanket the ground.

Drought and environmental concerns have led to severe cuts in irrigation water deliveries from Northern California over the past year, and unemployment in this town of 10,000 is approaching 40 percent.

Mendota may be proud to call itself the Cantaloupe Capital of the World, but with California in danger of a third year of drought and more water cuts planned, people wonder if they’ll get enough rice and beans to scrape by. It took volunteers at the Westside Youth Center’s monthly food giveaway less than three hours, not the normal two days, to distribute a record 750 boxes of a few days’ worth of groceries.

Much of the debate over how much water to pump out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for thirsty farms to the south has focused on the fish endangered by deteriorating conditions in the estuary.

But thousands of people here and in other little San Joaquin Valley towns are worried about the human toll: They fear that without water, they won’t be called back to work as the growing season heats up.

"They’re worrying about the fish but not about the humans’ life," said Jose Ruiz, 42, a foreman still clinging to the job he’s had since 1979 with a vegetable firm in Mendota.

At one end of town, Maria Avila de Romero can’t believe that in America’s cornucopia, she has had so little work for so long that she has to ration milk and boil it to stretch it past the expiration date. Her $61 weekly unemployment has run out.

In another neighborhood, Luis Cervantes, 38, and a father of four, stared into the brand-new house he lost to foreclosure in October that now stands empty. Cervantes was a vegetable farm foreman who earned good money, but his hours were steadily cut until he also was laid off. The crisis in Mendota offers a glimpse into a sober future.

Without a major restructuring of how water is moved in California, the Central Valley’s anchor industry faces a dramatic decline. "Why is nobody helping?" asked Mendota Mayor Robert Silva, who has a message for urban folk: "Get away from your lattes and see the real world. This is California, too."

Plantings, harvests, jobs cut

American consumers may not realize that a vast quantity of their food comes from here, Silva and others say. And if it isn’t going to come from here, then consumers, too, must prepare to swallow some big changes. It’s no bluff, the farm industry warns, that food from other countries will fill the vacuum.

For decades, water has been diverted from the Delta via canals to Los Angeles. That water created a farm behemoth in the Central Valley that produces more than 250 products.

Eighty percent of the world’s almonds grow in the Central Valley, and the land fanning out around Mendota yields most of California’s processed tomatoes, which are 45 percent of the world total. Western Fresno County alone produces 95 percent of U.S. lettuce sold in April and October.

Probably half the 600,000 acres in the area’s Westlands Water District will not be planted or brought to harvest this year, district managers estimate. Spring lettuce plantings are at 9,000 acres, compared with 16,000 last year, said Fresno County Supervisor Phil Larsen.

About 130,000 acres are permanent nut and pomegranate trees and grapevines that must be watered to survive. Some farmers will buy water on the open market to keep orchards alive but not invest in developing a crop.

Farmers with wells can irrigate, and those who can are sinking new wells at more than $600,000 each. But drawing from groundwater also raises environmental concerns.

A University of California study takes stock of what to expect: Up to $2.2 billion could be lost in the Central Valley this year, and up to 80,000 jobs. The shock will inevitably reverberate through a regional economy staggering from the housing collapse and recession.

"I want (Gov.) Schwarzenegger to list me on the California endangered species list," said farmer Todd Allen, whose family has farmed outside Mendota for more than 30 years.

Allen said this year he won’t plant cotton, known as a water guzzler. Last year, he laid off three of six permanent workers, one of whom had been with the farm for decades.

He is growing only wheat now, relying on rainfall but no irrigation water.

No one in Mendota denies that many already struggle because much farm work is seasonal and pays relatively low wages. Spikes in unemployment are normal, but work has usually bloomed with the crops — until now.

"We are facing catastrophe," said Maria de los Angeles Mendiola, 38, who wonders if she’ll ever be called back to pack melons and hoe vegetables. Residents fear the future

Mendiola’s daughter finished homework in a corner of a room at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church one evening, while Mendiola and others huddled around a table to recite Scripture in Spanish and try to harness their fear.

Those assembled were a cross-section of Mendota’s population, which resembles many other Central Valley towns. The city is more than 90 percent Latino, and a mix of U.S. citizens and legal and illegal immigrants, often within the same family.

Central Americans are a big presence, and stores advertise money wiring to Mexican and Salvadoran provinces.

"We must remain close to God," Mendiola suggested to her friends. "He will not defraud us. He will help us find a way to eat."

Undocumented laborer Gustavo Garcia, 47, prayed and then went home to finish packing his truck to seek work on the Central Coast.

Ruben Martinez, 50, a naturalized U.S. citizen and out-of-work truck driver who used to haul farm products, prayed for work. And he prayed for his wife, who has cancer and went back to Mexico, where they could afford treatment.

Juan Arambula, the area’s Democratic state assemblyman, compared unemployment figures in his area to those in the Great Depression.

Those are just the official numbers, he said, which leave out the undocumented. Even if they pay into the system, illegal immigrants typically don’t try to collect unemployment, preferring to avoid scrutiny.

Arambula, who rose from immigrant farmworker origins to attend Harvard and University of California, Berkeley, chides some environmentalists for "minimizing" the impact here of job loss.

"I know we’re going toward a service economy," Arambula said. "But a farmer in my district asked me how are we going to survive just shining each other’s shoes?"

"We also need to make products we want to buy from each other," Arambula said. "If we don’t have agriculture in the Central Valley, what is going to replace it?"

Struggling for answers

Carolee Krieger, a state water activist in Santa Barbara, said she doesn’t have a good answer yet for what could replace farming. Perhaps "green jobs," she said.

In fact, a solar energy plant and federal prison are being built in Mendota, but those employment prospects don’t allay the anxiety over loss of so many farm jobs.

Krieger is president of the California Water Impact Network, C-WIN, which has fought to preserve the Delta and its endangered fish, including salmon.

One of her fellow activists caused a cultural firestorm recently and resigned from C-WIN after he lashed out at the farm industry in a TV interview. Lloyd Carter of Fresno labeled farmworkers’ kids as uneducated, criminal and welfare users.

Krieger called his remarks "very sad." She said she feels great sympathy for farmworkers, but also for California fishermen who were idled last year to protect salmon.

State and federal water officials are to blame for creating a mess with poor management, Krieger said, and for allowing agribusiness to grow addicted to a fragile resource.

"Those people were being foolish," she said, "if they thought it was an endless spigot."

At Mendota’s Di Amici Cafe, which has free wireless service and some big-city sophistication, owner Sam Rubio talks of his hometown’s predicament.

"I used to go to protests to save the salmon when I was in college," said Rubio, 25, the son of a Mexican farm foreman who sent one son to medical school and Sam to California State University, Sacramento, for a degree in biology.

Rubio is on leave from medical school himself, trying to turn his cafe into a viable family business.

"People who aren’t from this area probably think the way I did in college. They think the farmers are greedy and won’t give up water because they don’t want to lose an easy million (dollars)," Rubio said. "Now that I’m back here, and seeing what is going on, I’ve asked myself, ’What was I thinking?’ "

He’s stuck in the middle, he said. He’s had heartfelt talks with people in town about the vital need for protecting water and species, whether they’re whales or tiny fish like the endangered Delta smelt.

But he also believes he was naive not to appreciate the pain that job loss inflicts.

"Farmers are saying, ’Just give us the water and we’ll give people jobs.’ Environmentalists are saying, ’No, we have to stop this and save the fish,’ " Rubio said. "Who is going to find the common ground?"