Tom Philp: California's smart and vocal farmers are silent about Trump as he wasted their water

Tom Philp, The Sacramento Bee on Feb 7, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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Agriculture is a form of legalized gambling here in California, our land is prone to deluge or drought. Our farmers, relentlessly adapting, are as innovative as any set of suits in Silicon Valley, learning new ways to grow more food with less water.

As sure as the sun, our farmers have always shared their views of California politics as they relentlessly pursue the water necessary to grow much of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Yet now, an eerie silence has begun descending over California farming.

A candidate many of them undoubtedly supported for president, Donald Trump, has shockingly wasted some of their water in a downright dangerous stunt unlike anything in memory.

When I spoke last week before two water conferences in two different states filled with Central Valley farmers, the first question I confronted in Sacramento was basically how to make all this Trump stuff go away. When I theorized at the second conference in Reno that Trump may not know what he’s doing out here, I got no eye contact from more than half the room as we all exited.

When California farmers aren’t vocally fighting for every last drop of water supply, something is not right with our world.

“I don’t think they’re willing to speak out,” said Lester Snow, a water veteran of the highest order for decades in both Arizona and California. “Farmers not only want more water, they want more certainty.”

How a Trump water promise was dangerously fulfilled

Trump wasted no time in issuing two executive orders about California water in his first week. He set the stage to eventually increase water supplies from Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, site of the state’s two largest water projects. The directives, fueled by a false claim that fire-ravaged Los Angeles had been short on water, signaled a desire to fast-track regulatory changes that took former President Joe Biden nearly his entire presidency to accomplish.

And then suddenly one night last week, Trump said he just sidestepped environmental law and brought in the armed forces instead.

On his own social media platform, Trump announced that he had increased California’s water supply. “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” Trump wrote.

Never mind that precious little of California’s water supply originates in a southern Oregon watershed. Trump’s statement was widely analyzed to be untrue by The Bee and elsewhere.

And then the plot took an unexpected twist. Somewhere in the White House, whoever is in charge these days decided to make this fake news story about the military providing water and turn it into reality.

But there was only one horrible way to do it.

The Army Corps follows an awful order

The military in fact does run a handful of the few thousand reservoirs in California. Two of them are in the San Joaquin Valley on the Kaweah and Tule rivers. The names of the dams aren’t exactly household names, Terminus and Lake Success respectively.

The southern Sierra, like Los Angeles, has been cursed by a lack of storms for months. Last Thursday morning, there was little snowpack behind the dams to worry about. Releases from the dams had been barely a trickle. And then word began to spread that the Corps was about to release a bunch of water (credit to Bakersfield’s Lois Henry with the scoop).

Last Friday, the Corps increased releases from Terminus Dam from 22 gallons a second to about 11,220 gallons. Releases surged from Success Lake as well.

The water never had a way to get to the Delta and the water projects to reach Los Angeles. These rivers end in the Tulare basin. Fortunately, this pulse of high flows caused no damage. . While some of this water will percolate into the basin’s ground, for farmers upstream, this water for them has been wasted. Credit the Tulare County Farm Bureau for speaking up.

Will California farmers find their voice?

Nothing gets California farmers angrier than a government mismanaging water. Had Newsom tried something similar, tractors would have surrounded the state Capitol building in protest. “They would be all over the place saying…LA doesn’t need our water,” Snow said.

Instead, there is mostly a silence from the farming community that thunderously speaks for itself.

Maybe Trump catches a break in the San Joaquin Valley. Maybe drought turns into deluge and the farmers upstream of the Tulare basin will get full supplies. At the beginning of February, it’s too soon to predict our water year.

Farmers for a generation have been up against some tough political headwinds in Sacramento. The urban Democrats in charge here simply don’t understand farming and rarely take the time to care.

Yet now, Trump has betrayed California farmers by placing a political tactic above promised water supply.

The release of waters down the Kaweah and Tule rivers is now over. But no California farmer should pretend to forget, or dismiss, how Trump made politics out of some of their precious water.