How can farming be done with out rain
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As California faces its fourth year of drought, the farmers who supply half of U.S. fruits and vegetables are trying to figure out how to conserve their scarcest resources
In late June, Mike Cirone began harvesting the apricot trees on his farm set in the dry hills of narrow See Canyon, a short, windy drive from San Luis Obispo, a sleepy college town on California’s Central Coast. For months, the chaparral surrounding his 40 acres of fruit trees has worn the drab brown of summer after the green of winter and spring was burned off by a record-setting March heat wave. Here, as in all but 0.14 percent of the state, history-making dry weather has persisted for more than four years; more than 70 percent of the state is suffering from extreme or exceptional drought.
Despite apocalyptic headlines promising the End of California, a dire prophecy for the broad swath of semiarid agricultural land that feeds the country, Cirone is optimistic—a rare attitude for a farmer to have toward the weather here these days. “I think things look OK at the moment,” he said a few weeks before harvest, despite the dry, hot weather. “In fact,” when it comes to the apricots, “they look really good.” Stone fruit, he explained, like it a little dry.
That’s a far better assessment than you might hear on other farms around California. The drought, according to a new report from the University of California, Davis, could cost farmers $3 billion in 2015, with 18,000 jobs lost and 564,000 acres of farmland fallowed. With surface water deliveries at just 60 percent of normal and the high price tag for drilling a well down into the dwindling groundwater supply, other fruit and nut farmers are having to debate tearing out their orchards altogether.