The Latest Breaking News from San Joaquin Valley

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Downpours or drought, California’s farm belt will need to tighten up in the next two decades and grow fewer crops.

In a small San Joaquin Valley neighborhood surrounded by miles of nut and citrus groves, six electric vehicle charging stations sit abandoned. Their parking spots are empty, their screens shattered.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It starts to rain, and it doesn’t stop. Day after day after day. The rivers keep rising. Mud, ash and burned logs from recent wildfires clog the rapidly rising channels. Levees overtop or burst. Dams strain or buckle. Neighborhoods are submerged. Flood waters wash over freeways.

FRESNO, Calif. — Over concerns of a pair of Bay Area cities, the California High-Speed Rail Authority board finalized its choice of a route alternative for about 49 miles of tracks between San Francisco and San Jose.

As I drive across my family’s farm in the San Joaquin Valley, it feels as if I’m traveling on a chessboard. I cross one square with crops and then another without crops — our fields that must lay fallow. Our farm’s crops have been decimated by the drought.

LOS ANGELES — As pumps hum on wells and send vast quantities of water flowing to farms in the San Joaquin Valley, the dropping water levels are leaving underground spaces in layers of gravel, sand and clay, causing the ground to collapse and sink.

State regulators have ordered the city of San Francisco and scores of San Joaquin Valley farmers to stop pulling water from Valley rivers, the latest sign of worsening conditions in California’s drought.

This newly drawn San Joaquin Valley district would have voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 by a margin of 11%.

In the summer it can get up to 120 degrees inside the un-air-conditioned home Agustin Pedro Pedro rents in the San Joaquin Valley city of Madera, so unbearably hot that he sweats, feels faint and gets headaches.