California has put a water-stressed farming region on notice for having “inadequate” plans to curb its overuse of groundwater, bringing officials closer to directly intervening, for the first time in state history, in the way growers manage their underground water supplies.

Regulators said Thursday that they would first hold a public hearing on the region, the Tulare Lake sub-basin of the San Joaquin Valley. The decision to even consider stepping in signals a willingness to take farmers to task for not doing enough to protect their aquifers.

Officials will need to tread carefully, said Andrew Ayres, an environmental economist at the University of Nevada, Reno. “If you really come down and you say, ‘We want groundwater sustainability and this is how we’re going to do it,’ that has trade-offs for local communities,” he said.

If, for example, farmers respond to water restrictions by fallowing their land, those plots could become sources of dust, worsening the region’s already poor air quality.

Why It Matters: Central Valley farmers are pumping up lots of water.

Farmers in California’s Central Valley, which includes the San Joaquin Valley, grow a big share of America’s fruits, vegetables and nuts. But they do so by pumping out increasingly large volumes of water from beneath their feet, more than almost anywhere else in the country.

Groundwater is effectively a nonrenewable resource: It can take decades, even centuries, for nature to replenish aquifers, the layers of dirt and rock into which water seeps and collects.

In some parts of California, so much groundwater has been pumped out that the land has sunk irreversibly by a foot or more in a year. The most severe land subsidence has taken place in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley, where the Tulare Lake sub-basin sits.

Background: The state has ambitious, but far-off, goals for halting overuse.

California didn’t regulate groundwater at all until 2014, when a package of laws committed the state to ending overuse in the most depleted areas by 2040. The laws, known collectively as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, task local authorities with drawing up plans for their particular groundwater basin.

Sustainability plans for the first 20 basins were submitted in 2020. The state’s Department of Water Resources reviewed them and said in early 2022 that 12 basins had incomplete plans. It then asked for revisions.

After evaluating the resubmitted plans, the department in March said they were still inadequate for six basins, all of them in the San Joaquin Valley: Chowchilla, Delta-Mendota, Kaweah, Kern County, Tulare Lake and Tule.

On Thursday, the state’s water regulator, the State Water Resources Control Board, said it would first consider further action in the Tulare Lake sub-basin, a 540,000-acre area where farmers grow grain, tomatoes and other crops.

The plan for the basin isn’t specific enough about how it would address the damage caused by groundwater overuse, said Natalie Stork, a manager at the state board. Last year, for instance, 27 of the area’s wells went dry, and the state estimates that 700 wells could be tapped out in a future drought. The land has sunk by as much as six feet in the past decade or so, forcing residents to raise local levees to protect the city of Corcoran from flooding.

This year’s winter storms in California temporarily refilled Tulare Lake, which was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. But that didn’t fix the area’s groundwater issues, Ms. Stork said. Much of the water in the lake was of poor quality, and clay in the lake bed stopped it from percolating into the aquifers.

The other five basins that were deemed to have inadequate plans are also facing threats, Ms. Stork said. But the board isn’t ready to announce potential intervention in those places because it needs more time to assess the situation, she said. “We are working through this as urgently as we can, but with thought and consideration.”

Paul Stiglich, general manager of South Fork Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency, one of the local authorities that developed the Tulare Lake plan, declined to comment.

What’s Next: Officials will decide whether to step in.

If the state board decides, at its April 16 hearing in Sacramento, to place Tulare Lake on probation, farmers there will have to start reporting how much water they pump from the ground and paying fees based on their pumping volumes. But the state still won’t be able to limit pumping directly.

Only if local agencies haven’t come up with an acceptable plan for ending overuse after at least another year could the board then enact its own plan to stop the aquifers from being wrung dry.

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A field that has long grown tomatoes, peppers and onions now looks like a wind-whipped ocean as farmer Don Cameron seeks to capture the runoff from a freakishly wet year in California to replenish the groundwater basin that is his only source to water his crops.

Taking some tomatoes out of production for a year is an easy choice if it means boosting future water supplies for his farm about 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest of Fresno. He’s pumping 300 acre-feet a day — enough to supply hundreds of households for a year — from the gushing North Fork of the Kings River onto former vegetable fields and others dotted with pistachio trees, which can withstand heavy flooding.

“We knew long-term if we didn’t have water, we’d be out of business,” Cameron said. “We’re doing our part to protect communities downstream, but we’re also putting the water in the ground.”

The 70-year-old has spent more than a decade building and expanding a system to divert floodwaters from nearby rural communities and is a pioneer in the practice of on-farm recharge, or flooding agricultural lands during rainy periods to help restore the groundwater basin.

But he isn’t alone. Government agencies, water district officials and nonprofits are eyeing the practice as a way to weather swings in climate, especially as California muddles through a winter that has experts forecasting the Sierra Nevada snowpack could last for months.

Groundwater supplies are essential to both farms and communities across the fertile Central Valley, a key source of food for the United States.

That’s even more the case during drought years, when groundwater accounts for up to 60% of the state’s water supply, compared with 40% in non-drought, said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency.

But farmers have pumped ever deeper through years of drought, depleting what’s left and leaving wells dry.

Hoping to reverse that trend, valley water agencies have built basins to try to capture water in rainy years and allow it to seep back into the ground. Now many are hoping to enlist vast tracts of farmland for a similar purpose.

Groundwater recharge projects are a “critical, important part of our infrastructure future,” Crowfoot said.

The Tulare Irrigation District for example, has doubled the amount of water it can divert this year thanks to farmers who are willing to take it, said Daniel Mountjoy, director of resource stewardship at the nonprofit Sustainable Conservation, which supports expanding on-farm recharge.

“Farmlands are the thing you can expand to when you have a freak year like this,” he said. “They are the solution.”

The idea of using farmland to recharge groundwater has percolated for years. After California enacted a law in 2014 requiring regional agencies to manage their aquifers sustainably to avoid overpumping, more farmers faced with the prospect of fallowing fields began considering it.

With the potential for flooding in small towns and rural communities this season, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an order this month making it easier for farmers to divert floodwater to their fields.

While some farmers like Cameron are ready to flood their fields now, many others aren’t. Still, the rains and looming pumping limits have galvanized interest, said Wendy Rash, state water quality specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Last year her agency started a pilot program for 20 farmers, and more than two dozen in Fresno County alone recently were on a call about how to join the expanding effort in its second year. If successful, the program could be replicated in other Western states.

The McMullin Area Groundwater Sustainability Agency, which operates in a portion of the Central Valley, has developed an on-farm recharge university to train farmers in the practice. One of them, Mark Pitman, said he has always used water sparingly but may eventually flood his orange grove, which is close to a proposed canal.

“If you don’t flood it, you may not be able to water your crop next year when it’s rough,” Pitman said. “It’s six of one, half dozen of another.”

Some environmental groups support on-farm recharge but urge caution over concerns that pesticides or other contaminants could be flushed into a system that is also a drinking water source.

The worry is “you may cause a groundwater quality problem when you try to solve a groundwater supply problem,” said Michael Claiborne, directing attorney at Leadership Counsel, a nonprofit focused on valley communities.

With such concerns in mind, Newsom’s recent order makes dairy lands and fields where pesticides were recently applied ineligible. Also, farmers are required to report to the state when they divert water.

It isn’t immediately clear how farmers will be compensated, but some say they expect to receive a water credit in the future. Not all the water will come back to those who participate, but experts anticipate they will see a benefit and so will their neighbors.

Some soil conditions and crops are better suited for recharge than others. Grapes, for example, can withstand large amounts of water, especially in cold temperatures, and so can pecan trees, said Philip Bachand, an environmental engineer who has worked with Cameron on recharge.

In 2017, another wet year, Cameron tried flooding almonds, pistachios, walnuts and winegrapes and found they could survive so long as the water remained cold. He said it’s hard to track where all the water went, but he measured a 40-foot (12-meter) increase in the water table beneath his flooded vineyard.

Back then, Cameron said, he moved the water with a much smaller system that he has since expanded with help from a $5 million state grant to significantly boost his recharge capacity.

“We have the location, we have the soils.” Cameron said. “And we have the will to do it.”

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Eastern Municipal Water District

As we face the ongoing impacts of COVID-19 and a changing world, this summer is looking different for many of us than it has in the past. But no matter how you celebrate summer activities, we at Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) will continue to ensure you have the safe water you need.

EMWD serves more than 839,000 residents, businesses and agricultural customers in Western Riverside County. EMWD is one of the largest marketers of recycled water in the state which offsets our need to import water for irrigation. However, we still need to import the majority of our area’s tap water supply from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the Colorado River, with only 20 percent coming from local groundwater supplies.

Understanding the long journey that much of our drinking water travels to reach our system, EMWD has long been committed to investing in proven groundwater sustainability programs that will increase our local water supplies.

As a steward of this precious resource, we created Groundwater Reliability Plus, a series of programs to improve the quality and quantity of the water in our local groundwater basins. These programs include water recycling, healthy sewers, desalination, water banking and a future purified water replenishment program, all of which help EMWD use every drop of water to its fullest.

Our unique service area deserves unique solutions for water reliability and EMWD continues to plan for the future by expanding our groundwater desalination program, which increases the amount of local, drinkable water we get from otherwise unusable brackish, or salty, groundwater aquifers. The desalination process uses reverse osmosis to remove salt and other impurities from that groundwater, so it becomes clean, drinkable water. The leftover salt from this process is piped to Orange County for further treatment before being released into the ocean.

After completing our third desalination facility in early 2021, Perris II, the groundwater desalination program will remove up to 50,000 tons of salt from our local groundwater basins each year and generate enough water to supply up to 30,000 households. The addition of this new desalter to our two existing groundwater desalination facilities means we will cumulatively produce 14 million gallons a day of drinking water from brackish groundwater basins in Perris and Menifee. Groundwater desalination provides a cost-effective water supply in our area that is competitive with the cost of imported supplies.

Having reliable water available locally has a significant positive impact on our way of life. In times of drought or natural disaster, and during unprecedented times like those we are living in now, we have a local water supply source, which allows us to continue to thrive. By investing in our local water supplies now, future generations will also be able to enjoy an abundance of high quality, local water when they need it.

To learn more about Groundwater Reliability Plus and EMWD’s efforts to become more water independent, please visit our website at www.emwd.org/gwr-plus.

-Ronald Sullivan

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