Download Free San Joaquin Valley Agriculture And River Water Quality Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online San Joaquin Valley Agriculture And River Water Quality and write the review.

When waterfowl began to die from selenium poisoning at Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in California's San Joaquin Valley, considerable alarm arose among environmental and agricultural specialists. This new volume suggests that Kesterson is not a unique problem and the events there offer important lessons for the future. Irrigation-Induced Water Quality Problems uses the San Joaquin experience to suggest how we can prepare for similar problems elsewhere. As one committee member put it, "There will be elsewheres"â€"trace elements and organic contaminants are being concentrated by irrigation in many river basins. This book addresses how the Kesterson crisis developed, how irrigation can endanger water quality, and how economic, legal, and other factors impede our ability to respond to water quality problems. The committee explores how to study these problems, unraveling complex issues and clarifying the varying perspectives of farmers, environmentalists, scientists, and other key figures. This dispassionate analysis of a controversial topic will be useful to policymakers, resource managers, and agricultural specialists and farmers, as well as specialists in hydrology, water quality, irrigation, law, and environmental quality. It will also be useful as a case study in the environmental policy classroom.
Since the discovery of selenium toxicosis in the Kesterson Reservoir in the San Joaquin Valley, California, public perception of irrigated agriculture as a benign competitor for California's developed water supply has been changed irrevocably. Subsurface return flows from irrigated agriculture were implicated as the source of selenium which led to incidents of reproductive failure in waterfowl and threatened survival of other fish and wildlife species. Stringent water quality objectives were promulgated to protect rivers, tributaries, sloughs and other water bodies receiving agricultural discharges from selenium contamination. Achieving these objectives was left to the agricultural water districts, federal and state agencies responsible for drainage and water quality enforcement in the San Joaquin Basin. This paper describes some of the strategies to improve management of water resources and water quality in response to these new environmental objectives. Similar environmental objectives will likely be adopted by other developed and developing countries with large regions of arid zone agriculture and susceptible wildlife resources. A series of simulation models have been developed over the past four years to evaluate regional drainage management strategies such as: irrigation source control; drainage recycling; selective retirement of agricultural land; regional shallow ground water pumping; coordination of agricultural drainage, wetland and reservoir releases; and short-term ponding of drainage water. A new generation of Geographic Information Service-based software is under development to bridge the gap between planning and program implementation. Use of the decision support system will allow water districts and regulators to continuously monitor drainage discharges to the San Joaquin River in real-time and to assess impacts of management strategies that have been implemented to take advantage of the River's assimilative capacity for trace elements and salts.
Jan van Schilfgaarde, USDA Agricultural Research Service and National Research Council Committee on Irrigation-Induced Water Quality Problems In 1982, a startling discovery was made. Many waterbirds in Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge were dying or suffering reproductive failure. Located in the San Joaquin Valley (Valley) of California, the Kesterson Reservoir (Kesterson) was used to store agricultural drainage water and it was soon determined that the probable cause of the damage to wildlife was high concen trations of selenium, derived from the water and water organisms in the reservoir. This discovery drastically changed numerous aspects of water management in California, and especially affected irrigated agriculture. In fact, the repercussions spilled over to much of the Western United States. For a century, water development for irrigation has been a religiously pursued means for economic development of the West. The primary objective of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was, purportedly, the development ofirrigation water to support family farms which, in turn, would enhance the regional economy (Worster, 1985).