cal farmers to sell water to cities

looks like farmers and growers will have a larger role in the water politics world. according to today's la times:

The Bush administration plans this month to begin signing contracts that will position Central Valley farmers to reap substantial profits for decades by selling water to the state's expanding metropolitan areas.

very interesting, actually. a bit of background from the article about water in california...

The Central Valley Project is the largest water-supply system in the country. Reaching from the Cascades near Redding to the Tehachapis near Bakersfield, the 450-mile-long network of dams, reservoirs and canals has long been a polarizing symbol.

Conceived in the 1930s and built over the next several decades at a cost of $3.2 billion to U.S. taxpayers, the project propelled the conversion of California's dusty interior into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse of industrial agriculture. It dried up stretches of one of the state's biggest rivers, the San Joaquin, destroyed salmon runs and supplied Central Valley growers with a vast quantity of cheap water.

The valley remains the nation's biggest vegetable patch, producing $13 billion worth of crops a year.

But since the original contracts were written 40 years ago, California's population has doubled to 36 million, its farm acreage has dropped by roughly a quarter, and new environmental protections have set aside water for fish and wildlife.

a bit on the cost discrepancies that are part of this wild and wooly water world...

Irrigation districts will pay more for water under the new contracts. But it still will be inexpensive relative to what other users pay — a projected $16 to $61 an acre-foot, compared with an average $500 an acre-foot paid by Southern California's urban water agencies, which get their supplies elsewhere. An acre-foot, the amount of water that would cover 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot, is enough to supply roughly two households for a year.

importance of snow in california

according to the the mercury news, the winter storms have piled snow on the sierra snowpacks which is great news for the drought.

Some portions of the southern Sierra Nevada range had nearly double the typical snowfall for this time of year. The snow pack dwindled a bit farther north, but still was nearly half-again above average as water watchers conducted their second snow survey of the season. "The Southern California mountains are doing a lot better than they have in six or seven years," said Don Strickland, a spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources. "All of this water we had, which caused flooding in Southern California, helped fill a lot of reservoirs."

the article also had some good stuff to say about the importance of snow in california, which is my area of study.

Most of California's winter rain runs off into the ocean. Where it falls as snow, it accumulates into a vast virtual reservoir that slowly feeds rivers and groundwater as it melts each spring. California gets more than a third of its drinking and irrigation water from Sierra snow, while snow-fed hydroelectric plants produce about a quarter of the state's power.