Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

It would have been one thing, this whole game of Russian roulette with the most important anadromous fishery in the state, if the drowned lands in Tulare Lake were pumped out so they could grow valuable food. Most of them, however, have been planted in cotton for years. And as the lake was being pumped out, they were not even growing cotton. In March of 1983, just four days after the levee was breached and the floodwaters began to fill Tulare Lake, several of the big corporate farmers applied to the Department of Agriculture for enlistment in the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) program, which had recently been created to relieve the nation’s chronic problem of surplus crop production. Thanks to PIK, they would receive free grain from bulging silos in exchange for not planting crops. The Boswell Company alone got $3.7 million worth of wheat in exchange for keeping fourteen thousand acres idle. (Boswell has consistently received more money from agricultural price support programs than any other farmer in the entire nation.) No one knows how much the other farmers got, but most of the eighty thousand acres of the old lake bed were registered in PIK—even as they were underwater.