California State Water Resources Control Board a Failure
Here’s another important blog we’d like to share with all of you. Written by Erik Wilson on 11-29-16 and published on the MJDOA website. https://www.myjobdependsonag.com/california-state-water-resources-control-board-a-failure/
If your tire has a leak, is filling it with air every morning going to fix the underlying problem?
If your home has termites would it be wise to spend money on fixing the damaged wood before exterminating them?
Sometimes I feel that those who sit on the State Water Resources Control Board would be the ones filling their tires and paying carpenters to continually fix their homes. For the life of me, when do RESULTS matter?
This board is trying to end agriculture and family farms in California.
This State Water Board needs to go. They have proven to be a failure by every measure in providing REAL solutions to California’s water problems. They purposefully ignore many factors, other than flows, to make their decisions. They are essentially taking the property rights, and equity of said property, without payment.
Farmers were asked to farm here, invest here, feed the country here. They did just that. Growers paid more money for land where water was promised. Now, without consent or question, an un-elected body can take water that was promised and they can take it knowing it will cause economic devastation, and they can take it without any compensation to the grower.
Today they will rule with an iron fist and force farmers to forever go with less water. They will use the water in reservoirs that were built for agriculture and California citizens for a purpose they are not being honest about. These flows they are demanding will be made by a stroke of a pen and without any assurances that the economic disaster that will ensue will even do what they say it will.
The continual denial of this water board to address the nitrates and predation issues tells you they are REALLY not concerned with the species effected or the health of the delta. I don’t want to hear another word how salmon and striped bass coexisted for a hundred years. That argument is a diversion to what was happening under the water. It took a hundred years for the striped bass to proliferate from the Delta to near Redding. Striped bass are voracious fish eating predators. Their numbers may also be declining, not because of flows, but because they can’t sustain themselves as they’ve eaten most of which has sustained them. The fact the California Department of Fish and Wildlife goes to great lengths to truck hatchery fish to the delta is truth to which they know they will be eaten.
Common sense will tell you how we can help the salmon. Denying the effects of striped bass is as dumb as refilling your tire every morning. It is my belief, until proven otherwise, that this board is trying to end agriculture and family farms in California. I believe as much as the public is taught to hate “Big Ag” these folks at the state are actually promoting the bankruptcy of the family farm. They need to be stopped. They are aligned with groups who pit farmers from the North against those from the South. Once thought of as just a South of the delta problem…..they have become emboldened and have their eyes on the farmers to the North.
Ag needs to stand together and expose these clowns. They are loin cloth environmentalists. There I said it.
Erik Wilson is a farmer and the owner of Erik Wilson Custom Spraying in Dos Palos, CA. He is also one of the co-founders of My Job Depends on Ag.