One Nurse’s Campaign
On almonds and water. A weekly installment of a photo chronicle by Avi Stachenfeld about a congressional race in California’s Central Valley.
“Under the almond tree, the happy lands/Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,/ And passing feet are chatter and clapping of those/Who play around us, country girls clapping their hands.” D.H. Lawrence, Letter from Town: The Almond Tree (1916).
Far from bucolic beauty celebrated by artists and poets of yore, modern nut farming in California’s Central Valley is a highly profitable business. But it demands a disproportionate share of the valley’s scarce water resources. A single almond requires a gallon of water to mature. Surging sales and overseas exports of nuts attract investment by massive corporate interests, translating into the continuous need to draw upon surface and groundwater, of particular concern during our drought years.
What it also translates into is a public health hazard. The USGS has found that nitrate pollution of both surface and groundwater in the valley is due primarily to the region’s intensive irrigated agriculture and its use of chemical fertilizer. The San Joaquin Valley is vulnerable to nitrate contamination because groundwater serves as the source of drinking water for almost ninety percent of its residents. While industrial nut agriculture draws the water to turn a huge profit, small farmers and farm workers get sick and have to rely on purchasing bottled water.
In the congressional race in CD-10, both the Republican incumbent Jeff Denham and one of his Democratic challengers Michael Eggman are nut farmers. Another candidate, Dotty Nygard, is a nurse who witnesses daily the effects of water contamination on her patients. Who do you trust to represent the interests of the majority of the district’s residents in Congress?
