Dry spell reaching critical point

An old saying in the Valley is that when it’s farm show time (in Tulare) it will rain. Water officials and those in agriculture hope that is the case this year.

As of today, rainfall this year amounts to just 3.43 inches and only 1.04 inches of that since Nov. 19.

December was bone dry.

“Washing cars and farm show usually bring rain,” said farmer Bobby Nuckols with a chuckle Thursday. A dry-land farmer, Nuckols was much more serious when he said his dry-land farm crops need rain and need it soon.

Those growers may get their wish, but not to the extent they would like.

The first of two small weather systems are expected to arrive in the Valley Saturday.

“Any precipitation we get Saturday will be very light,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Cindy Bean. She said it will serve to moisten the atmosphere and lower temperatures that on Thursday ran about 10 degrees above average.

A second system is expected Monday and while that will bring a better chance of rain, it too is not that promising. Bean said the Valley could get less than a quarter of an inch from both storms.

It is not just the dry-land farmers hurting and it is not just the lack of rain that is causing concerns. While the dry conditions are obvious, the warmer weather has brought on blooms much earlier than normal and about a month earlier than a year ago. On Thursday, several orchards around Porterville were budding out.

“It’s a little bit early,” said Scott Cornett with the Tulare County Ag Commissioner’s office. He said the big danger with the early bloom is there is still plenty of time left for a hard freeze “that will drop blooms and we could lose everything.”

Lower Tule Irrigation District Manager Dan Vink said this year is every bit as bad as last year was good. Last year, rainfall measured 11.89 inches on this date. The weather year ended in June with 18.20 inches.

Vink said his district was running water from about Dec. 15, 2010 through Nov. 15, 2011.

Nearly every ditch, river, creek, stream and recharge basin had water. That helped to bring up the groundwater level 10 to 20 feet, but unless it begins to start raining soon, that gain could be gone.

“We’re going to wipe that out in one year,” he predicted Thursday if rainfall is not at least average for the remainder of the weather year that ends June 30. That would be 5.72 inches, counting average rainfall for February which is 1.99 inches.

Vink said this year is shaping up as bad as 1977. In that weather year, only 7.10 inches of rain was measured, but of that, just 2.35 inches fell from October through April.

Some good news is last year’s storms filled up reservoirs and while Success Lake still is limited in storage, as of Thursday it held more than 21,000 acre feet of water. Last year at this point that storage was closer to 40,000 acre feet.

“We’ll have a little bit of a cushion,” Vink said, adding that while no decision has been made on irrigation deliveries this year, it is likely they will hold what water they have until high heat arrives later this summer.

Nuckols said dry-land farmers are suffering the most right now, but that all farmers are feeling the pinch. Many growers are having to irrigate crops that normally they would not be irrigating right now. And, that water is coming from the underground supply and that pumping lowers the water table.

“It don’t think I’ve ever had one (dry year) to this degree,” he said, adding dry-land farming needs about 5 inches of precipitation during the growing season.

He said 70 degrees is a critical point for crops. That’s when the plants or trees start searching for water and if the ground is dry, the plant dies. Thursday’s high was about 70 and today should be the same.

But, the temperature will fall closer to the average of about 60 degrees on Saturday and remain there for a few days.

Bean did not offer much hope. She said after Monday’s weak storm, the forecast is for a return to dry weather at least into the next weekend.