Episode 22: Nurturing Nature

The coming weeks will be busy in the Sacramento Valley, as highly-skilled pilots plant this year’s rice crop.

Farmers are no stranger to challenges, and this year is no different. Below-par rain and snowfall have led to water cutbacks of at least 25 percent valley wide, which will lead to an as yet undetermined drop in rice plantings.

“There are a lot of fields that won’t be planted on my farm and throughout the state because of a lack of water,” said Sean Doherty, rice grower in Dunningan. “That’s what you do in years like this. You cut back and work with what you have.”

Less rice planted has repercussions beyond farms and mills. Rice is an integral part of the Sacramento Valley, providing more than $5 billion to the economy and 25,000 jobs. Rural communities that depend on farming will be impacted, as well as the environment – fewer rice fields planted means less habitat for hundreds of wildlife species.

“Every year, we’re concerned about species that are already listed as threatened, endangered or species of concern,” said Meghan Hertel, Director of Land and Water Conservation at Audubon California. “Unfortunately, in a drought, it’s not just the species of concern that we’re worried about – the ones with the low populations – we’re also worried about common birds.” A recent study from Cornell University study estimates a plunge of the overall bird population by three billion over the last 50 years.

She said rice fields are vital for wildlife, especially in a dry year like this one.

“Every year, rice fields are important for habitat,” she said. “That’s because, in the Sacramento Valley, we’ve lost 90 to 95 percent of our natural habitat, so much of the ground that birds and other wildlife are using is actually in active rice production. We call it surrogate habitat for birds and wildlife, and in some cases it’s providing two-thirds of the diet of wintering waterfowl.”

She said this dry year will mean birds will have to congregate on the fewer acres where water is on the landscape, which means less available food for wildlife.

Hertel said there is excellent collaboration in the Sacramento Valley, to support farms and the environment. “Partnerships, communication and collaboration are key. Working together, we can make the best of what we do have.”

Collaboration is also a key to helping the state’s struggling salmon population.

Jacob Katz, Lead Scientist at Cal Trout has been working with rice farmers and water districts for years now, and said tremendous progress has been made to help salmon. He said rice fields can be used to mimic the incredibly productive wetland habitats that were in the Sacramento Valley before it was developed.

“It means slowing water down across the floodplain,” he remarked. “It means spreading it out, creating the puddles that typified the floodplain wetlands before development of the valley, that’s similar to the surrogate wetlands that rice fields are managed as. What we’ve found is those fields fill up with fish food, with bugs. It only takes three weeks or so to go from a dry field to a shallow, wetland-like environment, and three weeks later it’s teeming with bugs, with fish food. We’ve been working with farmers, water suppliers and reclamation districts to grow the food on these fields, but then to actively drain it back to the river where fish can access it in dry years like this. That’s a really important piece.”

“There’s extraordinary room for optimism,” he added. “We’ve shown that the Sacramento Valley can be resilient, can produce benefits for both people and for the environment. Look at the bird response over the last 30 years, as rice growers and water suppliers came together to offer our feathered friends some semblance of the habitat that they evolved in, that they were adapted to. And those birds recognized those flooded rice fields as wetlands.... We can do the same thing for salmon. We have every evidence to suggest that that’s true. That if we hit every link in the salmon’s life history, if we connect their juvenile and adult life phases, we can have a phenomenal response from our fish populations.”

Water management is always a balancing act, but the job is especially challenging this year.

Thad Bettner is General Manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, the largest water district in the Sacramento Valley, spanning 175,000 acres, including rural communities, many rice farms and three federal wildlife refuges. He is navigating through several subjects, including potential voluntary agreements and water transfers.

He said longer term additional water storage would pay major dividends in future dry years.

“Water storage would be huge,” he said. “We are looking at Sites Reservoir... we believe the time is now for that. One of the great things about Sites Reservoir is it’s downstream from Shasta Reservoir, so it provides this midstream bene...