It's much the same in rural towns such as Firebaugh and Huron, whose jobless farm laborers helped pushed the Fresno County unemployment rate to 15.4% in May, above the California rate of 11.5% and up from 9.4% a year earlier.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month asked President Obama to declare Fresno County a disaster area to boost federal aid. But that's not what the farmers say they want. At a recent town hall meeting in Fresno, while some women in the audience knitted, men in baseball caps and T-shirts shouted down officials from the Interior Department: "We don't want welfare, we want water."
But climate change is intensifying competition for this resource and may well force changes in the way the valley has been farmed for decades.
This area, once known as part of the great California desert, has always depended on water from somewhere else. In the early part of the century, homesteaders dug wells or hauled water from up north, but in 1952 they banded together to form the Westlands Water District. It later contracted to buy water from the federal government, which built a system of canals and reservoirs that captures water in the northern part of the state and sends it to farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Because of its subordinate water rights, the 600,000-acre Westlands Water District is often last on the long list of groups receiving water from this federal project. In the last two years, below-average rainfall and a shrinking snowpack have made the supply even tighter than usual.
Statewide runoff -- the amount of rainfall and snow melt that ends up in rivers and streams -- was 53% of normal in 2007 and 58% of normal in 2008, said Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources. The federal government-run water supply allotted only half the water that farmers south of the delta had been expecting in 2007, and 40% in 2008.
This year has been even drier after a federal court ordered that pumps moving water through the system be turned down to protect endangered species including delta smelt, salmon and green sturgeon. The pumps can reverse the water flow and trap salmon in the river, pulverize fish or ensnare them on screens, said Maria Rea, supervisor of the Sacramento office of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Farmers in the Westlands Water District have protested at Fresno City Hall, joined a March for Water that stretched from Mendota to the San Luis Reservoir, and posted signs along Interstate 5 declaring the area a "Congress Created Dust Bowl."
