Any day now, the rice farmers in the Sacramento Valley will burn, disk, furrow, fertilize and flood their fields and plant the crop that has made them the arch-villains of California's drought.
These men say the work will be a welcome distraction from the badgering of state officials who tried to the buy their water and the criticism of people from one end of California to the other who wonder why anyone is paid by the government to grow a monsoon crop in this desert landscape.
When Governor Pete Wilson inaugurated a voluntary "water bank" program to transfer water from the state's haves to its have-nots without the cost or ecological risk of building news dams and aqueducts, the rice farmers seemed the most promising donors.
But while the water bank was more successful than expected, the rice growers, who use more water each year than all the households in Los Angeles and San Francisco put together, hunkered down and refused to sell. State Offers to Pay Farmers
"None of us here want to be knot-headed about it," said Al Driver, who grows 1,046 acres of rice on a 2,400-acre ranch here. "But we don't care for it and we're not going to do it."Continue reading the main story
Under decades-old agreements, the farmers pay the government as little as $7 for the water they consume on each acre of land. This year, the state offered about $450 for that amount of water. But accepting the offer would force the farmers to idle land, thus losing income from rice. Some farmers would also lose a $260 Federal subsidy for each idled acre.
The farmers secured the rights to cheap, abundant water over generations, and their biggest fear is that selling water now would endanger those rights in the future.
They are not the only farmers to guard their water jealously, but no other group, not even the alfalfa farmers, whose crops consume more water, has been singled out for so much criticism. In large part, the rice farmers' special status reflects their historical privilege. History of Water Rights
The ancestors of these rice farmers were the first settlers on the banks of the Sacramento River, and they dipped their buckets into the water at their doorsteps and irrigated their crops. Under a system of property rights that harks back to English courts, Mexican pueblos and Western mines, these families owned the land and the water that flowed past it; it was their livelihood and their patrimony.
Then, in the 1930's, the Federal Government came calling, set on building the Shasta Dam to tame the wild snow-fed rivers that tumbled from the Sierra Nevada and pumping some of the water to the arid south where the population was growing. Would the farmers be willing to give the Government their water and then buy it back?
The farmers struck a tough bargain. Their water would forever be the cheapest and most plentiful in the state, with assured deliveries even in times of scarcity and prices as low as 1 percent of what others pay.
This winter, the rice farmers were asked again for their water, this time by state officials with open checkbooks and hard-luck stories about drought-striken cities and farms, about fellow Californians who could no longer flush their toilets or irrigate their orchards. This Time, No Deal
But this time virtually all rice farmers said, "No thank you." Their worry about jeopardizing their future water rights had special urgency because they face renegotiation of their water contracts with the Federal Government over the next several years.
"We don't trust the system," said Tim Leathers, the manager of Reclamation District 108, a water district near the town of Grimes.
Pat Tennis, whose grandfather began rice farming here in the 1920's and helped build the levees, worried that there would be nowhere to turn if promises about water rights proved hollow. "Are you protected by law or subject to the political arena?" asked Mr. Tennis, who farms with his son, Jim, and son-in-law, Darrin Schmidt. "Do you seek relief from the Legislature or the courts?" More Fear in Rice Fields
Such fears were fed when Governor Wilson said he might invoke emergency powers if the drought worsened and when Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who is the vice chairman of the House Interior Committee, pleaded with state and Federal officials to seize the rice farmers' water rather than let them "shake down" taxpayers by buying it for so little and then selling it for so much.
The rice farmers say they had other fears as well.
They are afraid that idling their land will cost them their subsidies, which are worth about one-third of their income. The subsidies bring the market price of rice, currently $7.26 for 100 pounds, to $10.71. The Federal program allows the farmers to idle half their land and still get 92 percent of their total subsidy payments. Under a complicated formula, if they idle more than that to sell water, some of them will retain their subsidies and others will not. It is unclear which farmers fall into each category.
A professor at the University of California at Davis has computed how the rice farmers would fare economically if they sold their water.
The state offered $125 for each acre- foot, enough water to cover one acre one foot deep. According to the professor, Richard Howitt, a farmer who loses his subsidy of $260 an acre would need to get $200 for each acre-foot to break even. A farmer who continued to get the payments would break even at only $60 an acre-foot.
The rice farmers are also wary of ruining their markets. Rice farming is a fragile industry, with growers scrambling for markets and battling foreign trade barriers. California, which produces 25 percent of the nation's crop, is the No. 2 producer in the nation, behind Arkansas, and the crop dominates the economies of half a dozen counties. The 1988-89 crop in the state was worth $442 million, with most of the sales to cereal and beer manufacturers.
Another fear of rice farmers is the economic collapse of their tightly knit communities if they idle land. Here in Robbins, equipment dealers and crop dusters would likely suffer, along with truck drivers and fertilizer dealers.
Driving through the hamlet of 100 people recently, Phil Illerich, a retired rice farmer, pointed to the hulking mill that belongs to the Farmers Rice Cooperative, of which he is a member. "What do you do with the help?" he asked. "Put them on welfare for a year? And there's a half million dollars in property taxes. What about that?"
The water bank, which stopped solicitations this week because its goal had been met, made most of its purchases from farmers in the delta area, down river from here, where growers took corn and sugar beets out of production. The water will be sold to cities and to fruit and nut growers in Kern and Fresno Counties, who have inferior water rights and have been forced to halt irrigation this year.
Proponents of the water bank, who see it as the best way to adjust for the historical irrationalities in pricing and distribution, say the rice farmers may be more willing to sell next time around, especially if local communities do not unduly suffer and if cooperative growers are rewarded with public appreciation and the sympathy of lawmakers.Continue reading the main story