Less food, less jobs and $1.7 billion in agricultural losses are preliminary projections of the damage that will be done by the epic ongoing drought in the nation's largest agricultural state, according to a new study by the University of California-Davis.

Done at the request of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the study by the UCD Center for Watershed Sciences made the following estimates:

• Surface water deliveries to farms in California's Central Valley this growing season will be 32.5 percent less than normal.
  
• As a result, 6 percent of the region's 7 million acres will be fallowed. (Estimates by other groups and individuals have been as much as double that amount.)
  
• Extra pumping of underground water supplies to help make up the shortfall will cost $450 million.
  
• Total agricultural losses this growing season will be $1.7 billion.
  
• 14,500 full-time and seasonal jobs will be lost.

Less farm jobs has already translated into an exodus of workers to other areas hit less severely by drought, which has caused one school official to predict a catastrophic impact on student enrollment.

Baldomero Hernandez, superintendent of the Westside Elementary School District in Fresno County, recently told KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, "Within a year or two my school district will be closed. Bottom line. With a zero allocation of water, that means next year 80 percent of the workforce in my area is laid off. It's gone. They're going to leave."

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