Central Valley, CA, water or lack of it.....

Flying from Woodlake, California.

I came here to see the effect of the drought,

and found some real surprises.....

This is Pine Flat Dam, which holds water coming from the mountains,

and it's way low as expected.

That's a really long boat ramp to be able to get to the water now.

The air very smokey due to the many fires in the mountains.

There are many dry irrigation canals now....

So they're pumping from underground aquifers instead.

This is a new well and pump and fertilizer system for this future almond orchard.

To feed an efficient irrigation system like this.

Drilling the wells ever deeper, as the level in the aquifer goes down rapidly.

Local communities and small farmers have depended on shallow wells for generations,

but now those wells have gone dry as these deep wells suck the level down....

Now some communities have to truck in water to survive.....

But still planting almonds at an incredible rate......

Thousands of acres of new plantations, 

all sucking up the water from that limited aquifer 

that's not being naturally replenished....

And once it's sucked dry, the underground medium compacts 

so that it can't ever hold as much water again.,......

The underground water used to be used just to help carry through a drought,

but now it's being sucked up to supply a vast expansion which can't be sustained.....

It's genuinely 'water mining' an irreplaceable resource.....

Flying from Lost Hills, California.

Only from the air do you see how vast are these new plantings....

All almonds, because the profits are extremely high right now.

There's plenty of underground water for now, if they drill deep enough, 

but it still won't last very long at this rate.....

But long enough for a quick profit for corporate syndicates,

then who cares for the future for the locals???......

The clouds of dust near and far show where almond harvesters are working.

The almonds fall to the ground, and are easy to harvest.

With sweeper/vacuum cleaners like this.

Large crews working everywhere right now.

I guess millions of tons, mostly for the China market....

Here's a more traditional harvest, but look at the scale it it!

That's a whole lot of tomato ketchup.....

.........................................................................

But all that extraction of underground water is causing the surface to subside alarmingly!

in some places as much as a foot a year!

Of course water always sets a level surface,

so canals that have subsided now have the water surface right up to the brim

and nearly overflowing.

So some of the banks are being raised to compensate

and  some concrete lined canals have cracked.....

This is the site of the deepest subsidence, so it's well below the level of the canals...

If the forecast flood rains from an unusually strong El Nino happen this winter,

this could all become an enormous mud puddle.....

They've all prayed for rain, but it could be a disaster!

We're wishing them well, but I wouldn't want to live there....

It sure is productive country.

I'm told that the dollar value of agricultural produce from California,

is greater than all the rest of the USA!

And that includes all of that vast agricultural production of the central plains.....

This was all desert until man moved all that water from the Sierra Nevada snowpack

to feed these canals and aqueducts.

It's a truly amazing engineering project!

And I'm so glad that I got to have a look at it from the air.

I've been studying Google Earth and dreaming about it for years.....