Erik Hansen drives his pickup across a stark panorama of fields, dikes, levees and ditches and wishes more people would come out and take a look. As lawmakers wrangle about how to modernize California's overburdened water system, Hansen would like to show decision-makers the 15,000 acres of farmland he tills in the old Tulare Lake bottom.

It's a seldom-visited part of Kings County west of Corcoran, dominated by vast agricultural tracts, monumental engineering and legendary farming families.

Hansen wants to explain the ins and outs of a massive irrigation and flood control system that boggles the mind with its sheer size and complexity. He wants to explain why flood irrigation often works best, why you can't plant permanent crops out here, why it's important to keep the area in farming.

"If you don't have water, this land is not worth anything," he said, gesturing to sun-baked cropland stretching to the horizon.

In this place of enormous crop production, land that 100 years ago was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, the Hansen family for generations has participated in one of the biggest land transformations in the history of the U.S. -- draining Tulare Lake and turning it into an agricultural gold mine.

At 15,000 acres, Hansen Ranches would be a juggernaut in many parts of the country. Here it's like a compact car. Neighbor J.G. Boswell Co. has upwards of 100,000 acres. A dizzying array of crops grow in this soil -- cotton, seed alfalfa, wheat, corn, hay, pistachios, safflower, pomegranates and others.

And it's on ground that barely receives 6 inches of rain a year. Irrigation water generates a sea of crops almost year-round. From a satellite photo, the tiny dot of Corcoran appears on the shore of a giant circle of green taking up most of southern Kings County.

Many wonder where the water comes from. The once vast marshes and shallow water of Tulare Lake are long gone, leaving a layer of rich soil undergirded by a thick clay layer 100 feet deep that prevents water from percolating down any further.

Farmers here have channeled and redirected the rivers that used to feed the lake -- the Kings, Kaweah and Tule all end up here -- into a watering system of staggering proportions.

Some water also comes from distant Northern California via the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and State Water Project canals that move the liquid gold south.

Lake-bottom farmers like Hansen rely in dry years on wells that perforate the clay layer and draw deep from water that has slowly dribbled down from the Sierra Nevada. Lately, they've been turning more and more to that water, because environmental issues with Northern California water have limited pumping deliveries. In addition, three years of natural drought have cut flows into the rivers that flow from the east to disappear into a maze of manmade channels before they can reach the lake bottom.

Salt is a problem here, because it rises up as the water is pumped up, stunting crop growth and poisoning topsoil. Like others, Hansen has developed strategies to keep it at bay. On part of his land, he's installed something called a "tile drain system" that drains off water and stores it in basins where the salt can be trapped.

Another practice is to pool water over fields in the off-season to tamp down the salt. To an untrained eye, the big manmade lakes might give the impression that there's an abundance of water. Not so fast, said Hansen. The water is available because it's the off-season, and it gets reused, he said.

Ditto with flood irrigation, a practice that some believe to be wasteful. Again, not so, says Hansen. It's a necessary method to grow many of the shallow-root crops that thrive in the lake bottom, and because of the clay layer below, it isn't lost into the ground. It simply flows into the next downhill field.

"Every drop of water gets used here. Nothing is lost," Hansen said.

But the whole fine-tuned system is useless it if runs dry, he said.

Inevitably, the discussion with Hansen in his pickup as it bounced atop levees and along dusty roads soon got back to water.

Hansen has some water stability, with longstanding rights through the Kings River Water Association and what he calls "decent" well water beneath the clay layer. That's allowed him to avoid fallowing acres in the old lake bottom, although he did plant 1,200 acres of drought-tolerant safflower and he did fallow some Hansen land in Westlands Water District.

But Hansen is concerned about the potential impacts of a decision this year by the National Marine Fisheries Service that orders pumping cutbacks to protect Chinook salmon, steelhead and other fish species in the delta.

A decision last year to reduce pumping on behalf of the endangered delta smelt fish mainly affected the federally run pumps of the Central Valley Project. Hansen gets water from the State Water Project, a parallel system run by the Department of Water Resources.

The salmon ruling affects the entire delta area and so will have an impact on the State Water Project pumps that suck out water for delivery to Hansen.

The unreliability of state water deliveries recently led one Westside farmer with land in Kings County to sell $73 million in water rights to the Mojave Water Agency, a district based in San Bernardino County.

Hansen said he hopes it doesn't come to that.

"Hansen Ranches is devoted to doing everything they can to avoid having to do that," he said. "I've been here all my life ... it's not something you can just walk away from," he added.

He's telling his children -- and his partners are telling their children -- to be ready to farm, but not to count on it.

Hansen's three kids are all 7 years old or younger. When they get older, he'll put them to work on the ranch. But there are too many questions to even think about succession right now, he said.

It is even possible that the operation could be run by absentee owners, much like Sandridge Partners, which owns 50,000 Westside Kings County acres but is based in the Bay Area.

"There will be a future for Hansen Ranches, it's just not certain who will be there," he said.

Whoever takes over won't have an easy job. To keep track of what can seem like a small country of canals, drainage ditches, ponds and fields, Hansen has a bomb-proof laptop inside his mud-spattered pickup. His Bluetooth is on constantly, and he's entering data into the laptop often. Calls come in from crop dusters, irrigation managers, you name it.

Hansen has a bachelor's degree, as do his family partners, and he says it's not optional for an enterprise like this.

In an era where small organic farms and specialty growers are getting a lot of buzz, big growers like Hansen and Boswell have become targets.

Hansen has a quick comeback for that. It has to do with the unique dynamics of farming the bottom of what used to be an inland freshwater sea. Generally, the network of dikes, levees and canals redirects the water and prevents the old lake from seizing its former territory. But sometimes, Mother Nature gets the last laugh, and giant sections of the lake bottom become lake again.

The last time a significant amount of Hansen land got flooded was in 1969, when a giant snowpack melted and refilled parts of Tulare Lake.

In the last big wet year -- 1998 -- Hansen didn't lose much. He figures he's due for another 10-year flood soon.

So the size of the farm is critical to survival in the lake bottom, Hansen said. The system is set up to flood some tracts and save others in the event of a big runoff.

That uncertainty limits the cropping patterns to annual crops -- things like wheat, cotton and corn silage -- that can bounce back from a flood. Costly permanent crops -- pistachios, almonds and other trees and vines -- are seldom planted here. Those also happen to be the crops that do best with the most water-saving irrigation technology.

Hansen also has an answer for critics who bring up the fact that he gets federal subsidies for crops like wheat and cotton: "I take them because I've got them. We're playing by the rules they gave us," he said. But he also said that he'd be willing to live without them, assuming that everybody else did, too, and assuming a level playing field with foreign food producers.

"With a reliable water supply, we can compete with anybody," he said.

There's nothing he'd like better than to show people what Hansen Ranches manages to grow. Take the 3,500 acres of wheat he planted. This year. It produced 11,000 tons that went into pasta, he said.

"We do what we do to survive, but we also do what we do to grow food and fiber. And those can't be bad things. Now are there better uses for our water? I don't know," he said.

Hansen thinks a tour of his land answers the question. He just wishes more people would come out and take a look.

"I can tell you one thing. I'm going to fight like hell to prevent my water from being taken," he said.

The reporter can be reached at 583-2432.

(Oct. 15, 2009)