‘2022 Was Devastating’: California’s Water Crisis And Its Impact On America’s Food Supply

The lack of water availability for California agriculture has created a crisis that could continue for years to come and lead to a food supply shortage across the United States. The lack of water not only impacts the communities and environment of California, but has national security and global market implications.

Bob Amarel grows prunes in Yuba City, California, and is also on the Farm Credit West board. Amarel is based in California so he noted that many of his perceptions come from what has happened there. He discussed the sheer quantity of food that is grown in the agricultural region of the state, and the problems that come with cutting water to those regions.

“First of all, you’ll see less food,” he said, and he wouldn’t be surprised if there were international suppliers providing food to Americans.

“You’re going to start seeing the shelves being filled with made in China, or grown in China, grown in Mexico, more so than you are today,” he said. “You’re going to end up getting crop produce, but it’s not going to be anywhere close to the quality and safety that we produce as U.S. producers.”

Ryan Jacobsen is the CEO of the Fresno County Farm Bureau and is the descendant of two farm families going back generations. He is also on the Fresno Irrigation District Board of Directors.

Jacobsen noted that farmers haven’t felt the inflationary rise in prices as much as some consumers, but looking to the future, he said people will experience a shortage of many materials from California, which could lead to price hikes on some of them.

David Guy, the executive director of the Northern California Water Association, said that Costco is concerned about where it will source its food since it tries to use local products.

“We’re hearing from them that they’re just really nervous about where their food is going to come from,” he said, adding that this includes fruits, nuts, and meat.

“2022 was devastating. It just was devastating. It was devastating for everybody,” he said, adding that 600 square miles of Sacramento Valley land was fallowed, or left unplanted, this year. “Just brown dry, nothing grown there.”

He said they need the regulatory environment to let water be used to grow products on the land. “If they don’t, we’re just going to all suffer again like we did this year. It was devastating this year in the Sacramento Valley, on the west side of the Sacramento Valley … we just didn’t grow anything hardly,” he said.

Relationships between growers and international markets are also at risk. Guy pointed out that when a grower doesn’t have items to provide, buyers will look to get their products elsewhere.

The potential food supply crisis is also a national security and food safety concern.

JB Hamby is on the Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors and he made the point that “there is no more basic need that Americans need than food,” thus moving food supplies to international sources “puts us in a very vulnerable position.”

“We need to ensure that Americans are fed by food produced in America. And the more we continue to offshore and outsource our food supply puts us in an increasingly vulnerable and weak position if we want to maintain full reliability of food in our grocery stores,” he said.

Around two-thirds of the water that goes into California from the Colorado River is pushed towards agriculture, with the Imperial Irrigation District in Imperial County using a massive amount of it, CalMatters reported.

Hamby said many major farming areas that grow winter produce for the United States get almost all of their water from the Colorado River, but if Americans want to have full availability of products at the grocery stores, there needs to be irrigation to those crops, specifically during that season.

“What we’re facing right now is a significant situation on the Colorado River, where there’s more demands on the system than there is water flowing in the Colorado River,” he said.

He said Americans should start to look at where their broccoli or romaine lettuce comes from when they go to the grocery stores during the late fall and coming seasons.

“Most likely, over the next few months, almost all of that is going to be grown with Colorado River water. And so if we want to continue to have grocery store shelves that we can depend on to give us the food that we need, we need to ensure that we have water flowing to farms, particularly on the Colorado River,” he noted.

He said the short-term solution will be “some painful reductions across the board, across all sectors. … There’s going to need to be a collective effort and collective action on the part of all users across the Colorado River basin to reduce consumption.”

“However, in the long term, that’s not really a viable solution, and we

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