MENDOTA, Calif. (AP)--When Miguel Gonzalez looks out over the flat, barren field that seems to stretch from his front door to the distant Sierra Nevada, he sees 38 years of "eating dirt, night and day, behind a tractor."

The hard work provided him with one in a row of tidy cream-colored houses on the farm near Mendota where Gonzalez, his wife Maria, and other families have lived for decades. But now they have to leave. The land is useless for farming, poisoned by years of irrigation with salty water pumped in from the San Joaquin-Sacramento river delta, more than 100 miles away.

"It's the water here. It's bad, salty," said Sixto Rodriguez, who like Gonzalez, has until August to uproot his family and find a new job. Reyes Rodriguez, Sixto's nephew, also is being forced out.

On the west side of California's wide and thirsty Central Valley, salt damage is inexorably taking tens of thousands of acres out of production.

Some see this as an opportunity to free up the water for other uses. Instead, irrigation districts are quietly renegotiating contracts with the federal government that lock in--for at least 25 more years--control over the same amount of subsidized water they've received for 40 years.

What it amounts to, critics say, is a government giveaway, guaranteeing the districts a stream of profits for decades to come--perhaps even after the land involved is no longer farmed.

The land Gonzalez and Rodriguez have worked since the late 1960s is owned by the Murrieta Westlands Trust, a farm owned by a conglomerate of 23 individuals and trusts. Their representative, Ron Delforno, declined to comment on this story.

But the slow poisoning of the fields near Mendota is neither unique nor surprising. When the federal government built the Central Valley Project, bringing Northern California water to the inhospitable desert west of the San Joaquin River, officials knew about one-third of the nearly 600,000 acres served by Westlands Irrigation District had drainage problems.

In the decades since then, salt in the brackish water has gathered near the soil's surface, gradually ruining land for farming and ultimately eliminating some of the jobs it once created.

The irrigation district has taken 108,000 acres out of production, some of it with the help of a federal buyout. That deal compensated the landowners, let Westlands send the water to other more productive farms--and is leaving people such as Gonzalez without homes or jobs.

Critics point out that in other areas, urban development, environmental concerns and economic pressures are pulling farmland out of production, and increasing the demand for water. It's time for the federal government to reevaluate the old system of dividing up the region's water supply, they say.

Critics such as Barry Nelson, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, say these contracts are "locking in Depression-era water policies" at a time when the state's needs are changing.

Despite this, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the last few weeks has signed about 200 similar contracts with irrigation districts served by the Central Valley Project, largely guaranteeing them the same deliveries they've received for decades. None involve as much water as Westlands, the largest irrigation district in the country.

Environmental advocates are protesting.

"It's pretty clear: If you're farming less land, you need less water," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who has tried to reform the Central Valley Project. "The Bush administration is giving these water districts the same amount of cheap water they've been getting for decades. These agribusinesses get to turn around and sell the extra water and make a big profit that really belongs to the taxpayers who own the water."

Westlands expects to sign its contract renewal by summer, locking in deliveries of as much as 1.15 million acre-feet annually, enough to supply about 2.3 million homes for a year.

Authorized in 1936, the Central Valley Project was built with $3.2 billion in federal money to pump water from the delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers and deliver it to the valley's wide-open fields. Back then, farming led the state's economy, and large, expensive projects like the CVP were justified by the need to create jobs and develop land.

The plan worked. Agriculture in the state now generates more than $27.8 billion a year. The Central Valley grows much of the fresh produce that ends up on dinner tables across the United States, and farms served by Westlands contribute to that bounty.

For several weeks during the spring and fall, most of the lettuce grown domestically comes from farms served by Westlands, and the area produces enough tomatoes in the average year to fill about 5 billion bottles of ketchup. Farmers in the area take pride in supplying the country with safe, domestically grown food.

Within Westlands, farms are also the largest employers, hiring up to 18,000 workers a season, even though 750 workers lost their jobs in the area when land was taken out of farming between 2001 and 2003, and hundreds more, among them Gonzalez, Sixto and Reyes Rodriguez and their families, are still being pushed out.

So far, no water has been sold out of Westlands. In fact, the district has to pump out of the ground or buy at market rates up to 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. This supplements its deliveries from the CVP, which were historically never enough to irrigate the entire district.

Some Westlands-area farmers, like Brad Gleason, say the answer to the state's water shortage is not to push out agriculture, but to stabilize water deliveries, and use water more efficiently, growing permanent, higher-value crops like almonds instead of subsidized, surplus crops like cotton.

"Reliability is a huge issue for the farms in Westlands," said spokesman Tupper Hull. Farmers can't invest in long term improvements, such as efficient drip irrigation technology, or in tree crops like nuts and stone fruit, if there isn't a guaranteed water supply, Hull said.

Sitting outside his home in the soft morning sun, Sixto Rodriguez doesn't know the details of deals being cut.

But he does know that this year, they're not seeding the cotton, tomatoes and alfalfa he's harvested for so long. And he worries about the future.

"I left my life here," said Gonzalez. "I'm old now. If I can't work here, what am I going to do?"

Date: 3/22/05