Water Overview
Water in Kern County
Water is the key ingredient to life in Kern County. Everything – from pizza parlors to beauty salons, oil pumps to pistachio farms – needs water to survive and thrive.
Water fact: One acre-foot of water is 326,000 gallons. This is enough to supply two families with water for one year.
That’s approximately one football field covered with 1 foot of water
Who uses the water in Kern County?
Municipal and industrial: 400,000 acre-feet
(Homes, auto shops, restaurants, factories, schools, etc.)
Agricultural: 2,700,000 acre-feet
(Farms that grow the food we eat – and feed the nation. California and Kern County farmers grow over 250 crops.)
Water in California
Californians rely on a complicated network of rivers, canals, dams, conveyance systems, pumps, reservoirs and other water structures for their water supply. This is primarily because precipitation – rain and snow – fall mainly in the northern part of the state. However the greatest water needs are in the southern part of the state.
Some of the most important water supply systems in California include the State Water Project (California Aqueduct, built by the state); Central Valley Project (federal project); Colorado River systems (federal project).
How much water is there in California?
The average annual statewide precipitation is about 23 inches. That’s about 182 million acre-feet, spread over the entire state.
About 65 percent of this precipitation is consumed by transpiration in trees and other plants and lost to evaporation. About 35 percent is left for use as runoff.
