Semitropic Water Storage District’s New Well Telemetry Project By Jan Boling
An aerial view of Kern County farmland.
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22 | IRRIGATION LEADER | November/December 2020
Semitropic provides water banking services for its partners. The district uses grower-owned wells to recover banked water and delivers it to the partners. Since the banking partners pay for the energy required to recover their water, it is imperative that the district be able to distinguish the use of these wells to recover banked water from use of the wells by the growers for their own needs. Semitropic measures the water stored for its water banking partners and the amount used by farmers and creates an allocation report showing the amount of water pumped back to the partners and the energy consumed to do so. Until now, Semitropic had created the report using hand-taken meter readings and Pacific Gas and Electric Company power bills. Using manually collected data, it took up to 2 years to generate the cost accounting. Semitropic needed an automated method to get it done in a couple of months instead. With this aim, Semitropic approached REDtrac LLC in Bakersfield, California. REDtrac brings together software and hardware engineers with industry experts with extensive experience in agriculture. Semitropic tasked REDtrac with creating an energy reconciliation system for the district’s groundwater banking recovery operation to more easily divide the costs of well operation between the growers who own the wells and the district’s water banking activities. Greg Allen and Jeff Young of REDtrac guided Semitropic to a solution that involved a wide selection of meters with irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF RYAN HARVEY.
here there is water, people thrive. Many consider it their lifeblood—especially in the agricultural region of central California. They count on there being water to drink; to feed their crops; for recreational use; and, to put it in general terms; to enable their existence! With the ongoing battle between agriculture and environmentalists— especially during drought years—monitoring the use of this precious commodity has become a top-of-mind issue. One challenge for farmers is to demonstrate to the public that they are true stewards of the land and that they use only as much water as is needed to provide food and clothing for us all. They must be able to monitor their water consumption and adapt their consumption quickly to real-time weather and environmental conditions. The question is how best to do it. There are eight water storage districts in California; their mission is to store and deliver water to customers. Established in 1958, Semitropic Water Storage District is the largest water storage district in Kern County. It covers an area of more than 220,000 acres and delivers water to nearly 300 customers who together irrigate approximately 140,000 agricultural acres. Begun as an irrigation district for the purpose of securing State Water Project supplies to reduce groundwater overdraft, its three primary objectives today are to increase water supply reliability, decrease the cost of water for irrigation, and correct overdraft in the groundwater basin.
