Precious Delta waters growing food that rots…
California Families Are Hungry While a Third of Crops Rot in Fields – KQED 10/18/19
The Sanchez family is among the 22% of people in Fresno County who couldn’t afford the groceries they needed in the past year. Fresno ranks third in the country for food insecurity, according to the Food Research and Action Center.
At the same time, the county leads the nation in agricultural production. A new study from Santa Clara University revealed that a whopping one-third of the hand-picked crops grown in the state are left to rot in the field.
Exports continue to harm native fish species…
San Francisco Estuary health report offers mixed review – Marin Independent-Journal 10/21/19
“To me there are two messages about the fish,” said Letitia Grenier, senior scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute. “One is that people in the Bay Area cannot pretend that all this stuff in the Delta doesn’t matter to you. It does. All of the problems in the Delta are affecting the full ecosystem and it’s not like there is a magical wall that is separating the Delta and the bay.”
Part of the impacts to fish may be coming from the lack of freshwater flowing into the bay from the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed. Chronic drought conditions in the estuary have persisted because of human development and agricultural operations, with dams and water diversions blocking the water from entering the bay. The report states the four lowest flow data points recorded over 79 years have occurred in the last decade: 2009, 2010, 2016 and 2018.