A growing population, increasing environmental demands and climate change are combining to pose long-term questions for water availability, especially in the western part of the United States, and California in particular.
“I’m not an engineer, I don’t have a PhD, I’m just a farmer,” said California Farm Bureau president Paul Wenger during a workshop on water availability at the American Farm Bureau convention last week. “I’m a farmer that uses less water today and produces more crop. In California, we’ve more than doubled agricultural production on the same amount of water that we’ve used in the last 40-50 years.”
An almond and walnut grower, Wenger made the argument that agriculture is using water more efficiently than governments and urban areas. “There’s a lot of people that say the environment has to survive the way it has for millennia. No, it doesn’t,” said Wenger. “If we’re about results we can have great results.”
California Farm Bureau president Paul Wenger at AFBF convention