Feeling parched

Part 1 of a 2-part story: Next month, learn about the tangled web of California water rights and how growers are finding new business in spite of the drought.

The state of California is reeling from a drought that climate scientists say may be the worst in 1,200 years. In April, Governor Jerry Brown announced the first statewide mandatory water use restrictions in California’s history. When that happened, the drought became a mainstream issue. California’s ample agriculture industry has become a punching bag for the state’s 39 million residents, many of whom are feeling the squeeze for the first time. If agriculture accounts for 80 percent of all water drawn from rivers, streams and the ground, why does the average Joe have to take a five-minute shower and refrain from washing his car every week?

Gov. Brown ordered a 25 percent reduction in urban water use statewide compared to 2013 levels. His directive also banned the use of drinking water to irrigate median strips in public roads, initiated the removal of 1,150 football fields worth of grass to be replaced with drought-tolerant plants; and ordered golf courses, campuses and cemeteries to significantly cut their water consumption.

On the agricultural side, the State Water Resources Control Board was told to crack down on illegal water diversions and “those engaging in the wasteful and unreasonable use of water.”

Sam Sandoval Solis, assistant professor and cooperative extension specialist in water management with the University of California-Davis, says most of the state’s growers have already cut down on wasteful water use. His conservative estimate of California growers’ average irrigation efficiency is 78 percent. The numbers back him up. According to the USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service, California Department of Natural Resources, crop production per acre-foot of water has increased 43 percent between 1967 and 2010.

“The pointing fingers game that’s happening right now will not create one more drop of water,” Solis says. “We need water conservation and irrigation efficiency, also the use of recycled water and water treatment plants, and better education at all levels. This is not complicated, but it is exhaustive.”

Solis supports the governor’s drought restrictions, because they have effectively brought the drought to the whole Californian society – not just the agricultural community that has been dealing with the drought’s impacts for the last few years. California agriculture is a $300 billion juggernaut that is larger than the economy of four states on its own, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. And it has been taking its lumps. More than 692,000 acres of California farmland were fallowed in 2014 as a result of the drought. That’s an area slightly smaller than Yosemite National Park.

Help isn’t coming from the usual source, either. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which is usually an essential source of water in the summer as it melts, hit record lows this year — 5 percent of normal in April — following the driest winter since records have been kept.

The U.S. Drought Monitor maps and measures drought conditions and provides forecasts. The maps are updated weekly and produced jointly by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Drought conditions are assigned a category from D0 to D4 based on their severity. The most recent drought map of California showed slight improvements and one worrying fact. At the beginning of 2015, 78 percent of California was categorized as D3 or D4, or in a state of extreme or exceptional drought. As of May 26, that number had dropped to 67 percent. However, more of the state is suffering from D4-level drought — 47 percent, compared to 32 percent on Jan. 1.

The drought has affected the horticultural industry in a wide range of ways. April and May are typically the two busiest months for growers and retailers, and business has been flagging. Scott Klittich, chairman of the California Association of Nurseries and Garden Centers, has talked often with members about how the drought has affected them. He estimates a 20-25 percent decrease in business across the board this spring. The governor’s restrictions have created a situation in which homeowners and gardeners have to think hard about whether they want to use their water allotment on a new plant or in another facet of their lives.

David House, CEO of Village Nurseries, says the drought has presented a set of challenges as well as opportunities. The Orange, Calif.-based wholesale grower has 900 acres of growing facilities in Northern and Southern California, as well as four landscape centers for easier service for their landscape customers.

“It has forced us to think harder about our irrigation practices, even though the latest governor-mandated restrictions and cutbacks did not hit agriculture, we still take it very seriously and are continually looking for ways to reduce the water we use,” House says. “Since the water cutbacks were mandated, it has been hurting demand at the retail level, so the end user has seen roughly a 15 percent softening of sales. People are concerned about spending their discretionary dollars on plants for two reasons: Will they live? And is it the right thing to do? That is why we are launching a ‘Save Water, Stay Green’ campaign, to get the message out that buying plants and having a beautiful landscape is still easy to do.”

(Editor’s note: more on marketing plants in drought next month)

Irrigation methods

Aside from being chairman of the board CANGC, Klittich is the owner of Otto & Sons Nursery. The Fillmore, Calif. grower is known for its roses, which account for about half its sales. The nursery grows more than 800 varieties from several companies, in 5- or 15-gallon containers. Klittich says the nursery gets its water from a well on the premises. Otto & Sons Nursery has reduced the amount of overhead irrigation and gone to more individual pot watering.

“We do our watering earlier in the day to avoid evaporation,” he says.

Village Nurseries is converting more of its acreage to drip irrigation systems, which greatly reduces the amount of water used versus overhead irrigation systems.

“There is a capital expense to do that,” House says. “We are moving toward that as quickly as we can. But not everything in the nursery can be monitored via drip. You cannot do it for one-gallon size plants or smaller.”

For those irrigation jobs, the nursery is moving to the use of pulse overhead irrigation systems. Pulse systems identify areas with plants, so less water is wasted irrigating areas with no plant material. Village Nurseries also is installing a new irrigation system at its Steele Valley facility in a shade structure that totals almost 11 acres. The system is composed of suspended modular sprinklers that allow freedom of activity below them and remain unobstructed by taller plant material. The individual sprinklers offer lower gallons-per-minute rates than conventional overhead sprinklers, and the density and uniformity of their output shown in field audits is at least 20 percent more efficient than conventional impact overhead irrigation, House says. Each sprinkler can be turned off individually to allow the nursery not to water open areas. “We’ve found that this type of system allows us to eliminate second cycles most of the year and reduces the need for supplemental hose irrigation needed with other overhead systems,” House says.

Village Nurseries also is using more reclaimed water where it’s available at some of its facilities. House is checking into the economic feasibility of a system that would combine water cleaning and irrigation to allow the use of 100 percent reclaimed water at an 180-acre facility. The nursery is also running more night crews to water when it’s most efficient.

Monterey Bay Nursery has taken a proactive approach to water conservation that has served it well through the lean times. Luen Miller, the president and co-owner of Monterey Bay Nursery, didn’t need to be forced by government mandate to improve his business’ water use. It was just something that needed to be done for the business to be more efficient. The nursery started recirculating its runoff water in 1991.

“We turned off the injectors,” Miller says. “We went to time-released fertilizer. We went to recovering everything that doesn’t hit a plant, stay in a can, and pretty much runs off because of our soil profile here.”

After the water is filtered and recirculated, the cycle begins again.

Miller’s 50-acre wholesale nursery is based in Watsonville, Calif., and sells mainly to independent retail nurseries, as well as some landscapers, growers and brokers.

Monterey Bay Nursery uses a combination of pulse irrigation and drip irrigation for most plant material.

“We used to do a lot of hand-watering, but as labor prices increased, and as we were able to afford purchasing it, we started putting in spot-drip irrigation, or pot-drip irrigation on all the big material, all the 5-gallons and larger,” Miller says. “Pretty much everything gets drip-irrigation, except for a few areas that are on sprinklers for cultural reasons.”

The gallon cans are also on sprinklers, but the nursery recovers the run-off water. The entire facility has run-off recovery capacity.

Miller runs a number of subsidiary pumps in the areas that drain away from the main catchment reservoir. There are fluid valves and pumps with holding tanks at the reservoir, and the nursery pumps that water over to the main holding tank and reuses it.

The danger of recirculating water is that you might be recirculating pathogens as well. That’s an easy way to spread a disease through your entire crop.

Miller spoke with Conrad Skimina, the chemist at Monrovia Nursery, about the repercussions of recirculating water. Skimina was the architect of a water recirculation system at Monrovia’s main facility in Azusa, Calif., that Miller had seen before planning his own system.

“The first thing you’re affected by is preemergence,” he says. “That’s the biggest factor in what you can see: which preemergence you’re using, what’s going to come back around in the water.”
 

Crop choices

Monterey Bay Nursery has seen a shift in the plants most often requested. Before the drought took hold, the nursery always sold a decent amount of drought-tolerant plants from the Mediterranean climate. The demand for those types of plants from South Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean have increased.

“We respond to what sells,” Miller says. “And there has been an increasing demand for the more difficult to propagate, drought-tolerant plants from climates similar to California, which don’t have as many cultural problems as California natives do.”

Miller says there has always been a strong demand for these plants in California because, besides being drought-tolerant, which most of them are, they’re easier to care for in yards. Whereas California natives tend to be relatively uncompromising during the hot, dry period. Thirsty plants just aren’t selling anymore.

“A lot of the water-demanding plants have just been falling off – falling out of the trade because designers don’t use them, nurseries don’t buy them,” Miller says. “It’s been a general trend by all users and all growers to shift into a drier, harder, more drought-tolerant and more water-conserving palette.”

House says there has been a shift, but it hasn’t been immediate. Village Nurseries has been gradually transitioning over the last 10-15 years to more succulents, which are very low water users, and more native California plant material. He says the plants that are selling well are widely-known as drought tolerant. He’s anticipating a shortage of those plants. But one of his goals is to help consumers understand that they don’t need to restrict themselves to a narrow plant palette to be drought tolerant.

“We grow or bring in plant material that we know will do well in this environment,” he says. “And roughly 70 percent of what we’re growing does not require a lot of water to thrive. It really is all about the irrigation system and irrigation practices.”

Greenhouse Management assistant editor Cassie Neiden contributed to this article.