Supervisors fund water needs assessment

The idea comes from previous meetings with members of the local agricultural community. In December 2014, Horsley’s office convened Coastside farmers and state and local experts for a conference on water reliability in agriculture. Several growers were frustrated over a lack of emergency resources given the drought and the red tape they encounter in trying to make changes on their properties.

“Last year we started convening key stakeholders in the agricultural water dialogue to talk about whether there was a high-priority collaborative project that we could bring everybody together around,” said Kellyx Nelson, executive director of the Resource Conservation District. “Everyone agreed we need to know what the needs for water are for agriculture.”

There currently isn’t enough information available about the local water supply to inform future decisions about agricultural needs, Nelson said. Farmers know a lot about the water supply available for their property, but with the lack of data it’s hard for them to know about the overall supply in the watershed or what future demand could look like.

“There are a lot of individuals who aren’t part of a larger water system,” Nelson said. “We don’t have a snowpack and we’re not on a state water project. It’s really very local. If the water isn’t there, we don’t have a way of piping it in. So it’s important to know what water is available for all these different uses and what the needs are to ensure the water supply will be sufficient.”

The first phase of the assessment will begin with gathering existing data on things like soil types and where they’re located, crop types and known evapotranspiration rates, the amount of water that evaporates from plants and the land’s surface. Then a conservation assistant will install monitoring equipment to determine optimum water amounts that crops should receive. The RCD will also measure how much water is in coastal creeks and streams and its flow rates.

Phase 2, which is slated to begin early next year, will consist of data analysis and recommendations. Nelson said the details of which farms might take part in the survey have not yet been worked out.

Peninsula Open Space Trust will also contribute $10,000 to support the needs assessment, according to a Board of Supervisors memo.

Horsley said the collection of data is integral for sustaining local agriculture.

“We want to take advantage of scientific knowledge to make sure ag producers can survive in the future,” he said. “El Niño didn’t have lots of water. If we go into what we heard now is La Niña, which means less rain in the winter, we’re going to have to be creative to sustain agriculture.”

Nelson added that this assessment won’t just benefit the ag community, but all water users.

“Fish, farms and people depend on the same very limited water resources on the South Coast,” she said. “If we want to balance competing demands on those limited resources, we need to understand what our total demand is and what it’s projected to be so we can best manage the resource.”