Upon driving through Salinas, California this past week, we came across a new, compressed SWIIM set-up for telemetry in the field, utilized to gather flow data as a part of the water balance calculations we perform for our clients. If you blink while heading through the field, you'll almost miss it! This unit sits at [...]
Western Growers CEO, Thomas Nassif, authored this article speaking to the need for agricultural technology to help protect agriculture well into the future. SWIIM is mentioned in the piece. Tech Provides Beacon of Hope for the Future of Ag By Tom Nassif | December 11, 2019 In an accelerating trend, a litany of regulations — many [...]
Kevin France, SWIIM's CEO presented at the California Agricultural Irrigation Association 2019 Fall Conference in Pismo Beach. He spoke to the need for growers to take control of their agricultural water reports and not leaving it to others to monitor their usage. He discussed the importance of growers to manage their water use with solid [...]
Author: Faith Kearns Casey Walsh is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses in part on ways water, land, and labor have been organized to produce commodities in arid areas. He wrote a socioeconomic and cultural history, Building the Borderlands, of irrigated cotton agriculture in northeastern Mexico. This the second [...]
Cannon Michael is the president of Bowles Farming Company During times of water scarcity, like California’s recent drought, it’s tempting to take on a binary view of the world. This was definitely the case with agriculture, which appeared to be at odds with everyone: farms vs. fish, farm vs. cities, farms vs. regulators. As a [...]
The Colorado River is a crucial water source for seven states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California) and Mexico, and like many shared rivers has its share of challenges. We talked to Doug Kenney—director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado and a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center [...]
State officials want a new conservation approach that imposes a “water budget” on millions of urban customers. Some local water agencies say it’s a regulatory excess that could cost them dearly.AN EFFORT BY California officials to carry their success with water conservation beyond the drought is not sitting well with local water managers, many of whom [...]
One would be hard pressed to find a river more important to a region than the Lower Colorado.The river provides drinking water for nearly 30 million people from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Los Angeles. It irrigates millions of acres of farmland, growing the vast majority of our nation’s winter vegetables in places like Yuma, [...]
California’s water managers face many challenges—from a changing climate to a growing population.We spoke with Celeste Cantú, chair of the PPIC Water Policy Advisory Council. Cantú served for more than a decade as general manager of the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority and is stepping down this month. She talked about how the profession must [...]
California’s first formal, centralized market for individual landowners to buy and sell groundwater has been launched on the Oxnard Plain, and the United States Department of Agriculture has awarded a $1.9 million grant to expand the pilot project later this year.California Lutheran University faculty members Matthew Fienup, executive director of the university’s Center for Economic [...]
