DOWN on the FARM
with Tom Willey
First Friday of the month at 5p.m.
KFCF, 88.1 FM Fresno
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I suffer a weakness for accumulating the written word, and to read it all during this waning lifetime is my ambition. My library’s most treasured volume is the large-format, visually stunning 1979 cartographic masterpiece The California Water Atlas, commissioned by Governor Brown’s previous administration during the 1976-1977 drought to enhance knowledge of our state’s hydraulic complexity. A brilliant mind behind that epic publication’s execution popped out of the woodwork last week. Project Director and Editor William L. Kahrl’s May 1st CSUF presentation to Friends of the Madden Library was provocatively titled: “Death in the Almond Orchard”. In an authoritative air, white- bearded Sebastian Cabot look-alike Kahrl lectured on principal differences between California’s then and now, and the adequacy of a water system whose infrastructure remains essentially unchanged. The Golden State’s nearly doubled [Read more…]
No air of anticipation, only resignation, imbued some 200 farmers attending Madera Irrigation District’s 2015 “Grower Meeting” last week as general manager Tommy Greci announced zero water will flow to our thirsty crops for a second consecutive year. Newly elected MID director and long-time Madera farmer Dave Loquaci delivered the day’s knockout punch: “The water use we are historically accustomed to in Madera Co. will never return, nothing will again be the same as it was before”. Australia National Water Commission member Jane Doolan, presenting recently to a Public Policy Institute of California audience, suggested a similar realization keyed revolutionary public policy response to her nation’s dozen-year Millennium Drought that commenced in 1997. [Read more…]