LOS BANOS: San Joaquin Valley Sinking as Groundwater Stores Are Depleted
LOS BANOS — Flat as a tabletop, the furrowed, brown farm fields east of this San Joaquin Valley town are some of the most productive on Earth.
Every spring, they are planted with a smorgasbord of crops that in one form or another are trucked to grocery stores across America, from fresh juicy tomatoes to freeze-dried onion flakes, honeydew melons to tortilla chips.
Now that bounty is threatened by a crisis of geological proportions: The land is sinking - crippling the region’s irrigation and flood control infrastructure and damaging aquifers that are buffers against climate change.
Nature, though, is not to blame. This problem is self-inflicted, driven by the frontier-style exploitation of the last unregulated resource in California: groundwater.
“We are looking at a material impact of a magnitude that is potentially catastrophic,” said Cannon Michael, a sixth-generation farmer who grows tomatoes, onions and other crops near Los Banos.
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