Dry year has wine and cattle ranching industries feeling the pinch.

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For wine grape growers, most of whom have switched to drip irrigation to reduce water use and increase efficiency, it would seem that lack of rainfall wouldn’t necessarily affect operations. But lack of rainfall means mineral build-up in the soil and salt toxicity. It also means the well water that growers use has mineral build-up because the rain isn’t recharging the wells.

“If we don’t get normal rainfall this year, we will have far more problems than in the past,” says Steve McIntyre, president of Monterey Pacific Incorporated. McIntyre grows grapes on more than 7,400 acres, selling them to such premium wineries as Eschelon, Clos du Bois, Phelps, Morgan and Bonnie Doon.

“What’s interesting about this drought compared to others we’ve faced is we’re starting to see an impact on wells on the east side of the Salinas Valley, dropping water levels,” McIntyre says. “So farmers are faced with lowering pumping levels where bowls sit on the intake of their wells to bring water up out of the ground.

“It’s alarming to see that after one year of drought.”

Lindley says he recently looked at rain data for the past 100 years, and only found five years in the past 100 in which Monterey County has had less than five inches of rain.

“I would guess that most of the vineyards in Monterey County were not ‘affected’ by drought because our groundwater levels are still adequate, but it helps to get rain in the winter when the vines are in full dormancy,” he says. “It leaches out the salts, it gets deep moisture to the vines and if we don’t have to irrigate we don’t have to pay PG&E as much. There are lots of good things about wet winters.”

As much as Lindley wants it to rain this winter, he also wants it to stop by the middle of April. Nothing good ever comes of rain after the middle of April, he says, “not even for the row crop guys.

“We have this increasing population, and with increasing population, water conservation and water efficiency will not solve the whole problem,” Lindley says. “We need additional surface storage. We need more Lake Nacimientos and San Antonios, particularly those that are naturally fed.”

McIntyre, too, supports the idea that more storage is needed, but acknowledges that “the polar extremes of activism make it difficult to do anything” in California.

“Luckily in Monterey County, we’re pretty progressive,” McIntyre says. “We’ll be alright for a few years, but there’s going to be some real impacts. It’s time to have some major capital projects in California, and the smart thing is offsite storage so you’re not damming rivers, but storing capacity in canyons so as not to affect fish and wildlife as much.”