Sun setting on water quality exemptions

races of diazinon are in the Sacramento River. T Chlorpyrifos has been discovered between the banks of the San Joaquin. Federal officials say tiny amounts of these and other pollutants impair hundreds of California rivers, creeks, streams and sloughs. The environmental group DeltaKeepers has filed a series of petitions and lawsuits to require cleanup of California surface waters. ”There are 5 million acre-feet of tail water coming from agricultural fields in California, transported through 6,000 to 15,000 miles of drainage channels to an unknown number of outfalls, at unknown locations with unknown pollutants,” DeltaKeepers executive director Bill Jennings says. “We need to identify these.” Farmers are also concerned, says John Garner, a Glenn County farmer who chairs the California Farm Bureau Federation’s water advisory committee. ”Our livelihood depends on being ecologically balanced,” Garner says. “Farmers are problemsolvers. We want to sit down with people involved in the process, come up with a workable solution, do it and get on with farming.” The federal Clean Water Act of 1972 set the stage for the current controversy. The law requires states to evaluate surface waters in order to determine where pollutants are adversely affectCalifornia agriculture’s exemption from Clean Water Act provisions is set to expire in 2003. Growers may be required to develop plans for limiting pollution of natural waterways to protect beneficial uses such as fishing, swimming and wildlife habitat. Four-year-old Eugene Long plays in source water for sunflower irrigation on his family’s Yolo County farm.