CA Delta Conveyance Project: Pros and Cons Impacting Agriculture
California Department of Water Resources released the draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Delta Conveyance Project. The proposed infrastructure plan would divert Sierra Nevada water from the Delta, to Southern California for farmland and residential use.However, this could negatively impact agriculture in the Delta. The project’s environmental program manager, Carrie Buckman, joins us again.
“There are adverse impacts to the agriculture community within the Delta. So we would be looking at converting some agriculture land to use as facilities as part of this project. So we could potentially affect agriculture resources by converting important farmland to other uses… in the Delta there are about 432,000 acres of important farmland, and so we are converting some of that… we are identifying that conversion would be a significant impact which we’ve proposed to mitigate with conservation easements… so we do have a significant and unavoidable impact to farmland in the Delta.”