Rice culture in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to mitigate past agricultural impacts, improve water quality and sequester carbon, 2011 - 2016

Collaborating Organizations:

Bachand & Associates, UC Davis, Hydrofocus, USGS, Stillwater Sciences, Wetlands and Water Resources, UC Berkeley, U.C. Cooperative Extension, Delta Science Center

Funding Organization:

USDA AFRI Grant Program

Project Description:

About two thirds of the 740,000 acres in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta) are in agriculture. The drained peat soils of the Delta have provided fertile soils for agriculture since the late 1800s when these lands were reclaimed from existing wetlands. Since then, the Delta environment has dramatically deteriorated as evidenced by subsidence.  2.5 billion cubic meters of peat soils have oxidized causing subsidence up to 20 feet or more below sea level on many Delta islands. 

Subsidence has been indicative of other severe consequences: extensive greenhouse gas emissions, construction of a 110 mile levee network, risks to California’s water supply through the California State Water Project, degradation of water quality.  If current agricultural practices remain unchanged, things will only get worse. Peat oxidation will continue resulting in further subsidence over decades; GHGs will continue to be emitted with an additional estimated 158 Mtonnes CO₂eq of C and N₂O will be lost to the atmosphere by 2050; levee failure risks will increase from deterioration and from increasing hydraulic gradients across the levees from the superposition of sea level rise and subsidence; and water quality will continue to be degraded.  Clearly, agriculture needs to change in the Delta.  

The primary long-term goal of this project is to demonstrate rice based cropping systems as an agricultural solution in the Delta with important environmental benefits: mitigating subsidence and concurrently mitigating GHG emissions and soil loss; reducing risks to California water supply, including the agricultural users throughout the San Joaquin Valley downstream of the Delta; and protecting water quality.  This project will assess the technical, engineering, logistic, economic and policy constraints and opportunities to expanding rice throughout the Delta and the regional and state-water project scale impacts.

This project was awarded in 2011 under the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Climate Change grant program (http://www.nifa.usda.gov/newsroom/news/2011news/climate_change_awards.html).