FIREBAUGH, Calif. — His thick fists angrily gripping the wheel, Marvin Meyers turned his pickup truck down a pale dirt path between two fields where sprinklers were casting streams of water over rich green onion plants.
Out the open truck window stretched the great Central Valley, where a mulch of cheap water, elbow grease and perseverance turned a vast expanse of grasslands into the most productive garden in the world, a proud place where the U.S. grows 45 percent of its fruits and vegetables.
Inside the truck, Meyers turned red as a beet. "I remember when you used to tell people you were a farmer, and they were impressed," he said.
Today, California farmers seldom are hailed as heroes or portrayed by Hollywood as poor victims of evil Los Angeles land barons. In the Central Valley, many are berated as fat cats growing rich off taxpayer-provided water to grow surplus crops at the expense of depleted rivers and endangered fish.
As the stakes have risen in the water wars of the West, the roles of the major players have changed and new alliances have emerged. The changes reflect the diminishing importance of agriculture relative to the health of the environment and the continued expansion of thirsty cities such as Los Angeles despite drought, recession and disaster.
California farmers are under increasing pressure to give up their traditional lock on 80 percent of the state's water. Federal officials have reduced irrigation water for the Central Valley to help endangered fish, and a landmark 1992 law opened the door to farmers selling their water to urban areas.
Farm leaders warn of fallow lands and serious harm to California's $18 billion agriculture industry. But many economists say the industry can become more water-efficient without hurting the nation's food supply. And farm critics say the state's looming water crisis makes it high time farmers give up the water subsidies they have enjoyed for decades.
California has known water scarcity throughout its history, but the growing number of users and the abandonment of past dam-building solutions lend new urgency to an old problem.
A report by California officials predicts a huge water shortfall unless new sources are found and conservation methods are implemented. The Los Angeles/San Diego area, projected to grow from 16 million population to 25 million by the year 2020, will come up short by as much as 2.5 million acre-feet of water in dry years, according to the report. (An acre-foot is equivalent to 326,000 gallons, enough serve two average families for a year.)
The state, estimated to grow from 30 million residents to almost 50 million by 2020, could suffer a shortfall up to 9 million acre-feet in drought years.
The recent six-year drought provided Californians a look at a future of rationing and hardship if water isn't better managed and moved to new users who more urgently need it. The message was punctuated by news that rainfall again dropped last winter to drought level after a one-year reprieve.
"We may go through a painful period, with shortages that I think are unnecessary, but eventually the water will have to move," said Timothy Quinn, an economist with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the agency charged with securing water for the Los Angeles area.
"If not, the economic stakes are extraordinary. If we're not successful in meeting our supply goals, the losses stack up into the tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs."
With farmers promising a fight, few have ruled out a return to the kind of infamous water war that erupted in the 1900s when Los Angeles began to drain Owens Valley farmland in the Sierra Nevadas, a scheme that gave director Roman Polanski a backdrop of intrigue and greed for his 1974 movie "Chinatown."
"I don't think the water problem in California will ever be settled," said Rita Schmidt Sudman, director of the non-profit Water Education Foundation based in Sacramento. "As Mark Twain said, `Whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.' "
Along with population growth and the drought, the sorry state of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, California's main drinking hole, has led to the state's current water problems. Unknowingly, hundreds of Central Valley farmers like Meyers have been one of the main reasons.
The 60-year-old son of a Los Angeles shopkeeper, Meyers joined others in the 1960s by going into debt and farming cotton, sugar beets, cantaloupes and lima and garbanzo beans on grasslands west of Fresno that were newly irrigated from the Central Valley Project.
Approved by Congress in the 1930s, the federal project is a massive network of aqueducts, canals and reservoirs. It spurred the settlement of central California, providing thousands of jobs to enterprising farmers, poor Okies, migrants and others in the post-World War II era.