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1ol:>o, o tv, W T e By Rita Schmidt Sudman East of Eden in the Valley of the San Joaquin a sim- ple element, salt, is causing an insidious problem by quietly turning some productive farmland into a des- ert, Some of this land suffers from poor drainage and with no outlet for the salt, the soil becomes unfit for crop production, Whole civilizations have been de- stroyed because of similar salt problems, including those ancient civilizations along the Tigris and Euphra- tes Rivers, Poor drainage continues to plague present- day Iraq and other Mid-East countries, impairing the land's productivity, Valleys, like the San Joaquin, suf- fer from heavy soils which trap irrigation water and form perched ground water basins which do not allow saline water to percolate down below the crop root zone, Salt within the soil is trapped near the plant root zone where, if it is not leached out of the soil, it can kill plants; the water then evaporates, leaving a salty, devastated land, Twenty-five percent of the nation's table food is produced in California, and most of it is produced in the dry but fertile San Joaquin Valley, The majority of the valley gets less than 10 inches of rainfall a year, but nearly 60 percent of the valley's water is import- ed. Much of the San Joaquin Valley's 8.5 million acres of land has a drainage problem, The land and crop losses will grow from 400,000 acres presently to 700,000 acres in 2020, with crop losses increasing from $31.2 million to 10 times this amount according to the Interagency Drainage Program (IDP) report sponsored by the state Department of Water Re- sources (DWR), U,S, Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), and the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB). The drainage problem can be corrected with subsurface field collector drain systems which carry excess water away from the shallow root zone, The field drains empty into a collector system which transports the drainage water to a discharge point. A Proposed Solution If built as the federal government plans, a partial solution to the drainage problem could be the propos- ed San Luis Drain from Kesterson Reservoir to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta which would cost $530 million in 1981 dollars, according to a Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson. A law recently author- ed by Assemblyman John Thurman (D-Modesto) and signed by Governor Brown, has brought the San Joa- quin Valley's drainage problem into the limelight, The 4 San oa LEGEND EXISTING SAN LUIS DRAIN PROPOSED EXTENSIONS ,i\l~. EDGE OF VALLEY FLOOR 16 Modesto .