Global Rice News

As California entered a second year of drought last spring, the slash in water allocation didn’t catch Rachel Krach and Greg Massa, owners of Massa Organics, by surprise. The real shocker came when they went to plant their Sacramento Valley rice fields: an unprecedented, three-week delay in their expected supply.

“Normally, you have your water within 24 hours [of ordering it],” says Massa, a third-generation rice farmer in Hamilton City. “You can flood your fields in a few days and you’re good to go.”

With the region’s main reservoirs—Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville—at historic lows, the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District had drastically reduced the amount of water they would distribute each day. “It really impacted us badly,” says Krach of the erratic delivery, which resulted in a massive weed infestation, lower yields and a wrench in their October harvest.

For generations, Sacramento Valley farmers have had the assurance of some of California’s oldest and most secure water rights. They’ve protected historic irrigation districts such as Glenn-Colusa with prescribed limits to curtailments, even during dry spells. But as drought worsens, those priority rights, along with any certainty of timely distribution, may potentially hold little water.
According to the Department of Water Resources, the state needs 140 percent of average precipitation to erase existing deficits. With little relief in sight, it’s creating an uneasy future for hundreds of farmers in the heart of California’s rice country and sending ripples to a $5-billion regional economy dependent on the steady production of an important staple.

Rice runs a close second in water usage to alfalfa, California’s thirstiest crop, requiring about five acre-feet per growing season. With more than 500,000 acres of rice fields in California, a normal year could total 2.5 million acre-feet, or almost 55 percent of Shasta Lake’s full capacity. While that figure doesn’t reflect full consumption—more than 40 percent is returned to surface supplies as tailwater or percolates through the soil to recharge groundwater—there’s no doubt that rice farming is a water-intensive proposition.

“I’m worried that scarcity of water… could end our way of life here,” says Tom Knowles, owner of Chico Rice in Willows, located in California’s Glenn County. He and his son, Carter, grow about 1,000 acres of rice—70 of those acres organically—on their fourth-generation farm. “There are over 500,000 acres [of rice fields] and hundreds of farming families like mine in this valley,” he adds.

Source: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/03/california-growing-rice-water-drought/