In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is unregulated and unrestricted. There are few rules governing who can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to drain aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs, increasing dependence on this dwindling groundwater.
In many places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results were devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wells begin produce polluted water or otherwise dry completely, forcing families to rely on emergency deliveries of bottled water. Large-scale groundwater pumping also caused land to sink and form cracks, threatens to collapse key infrastructure such as roads, bridges and canals. This local impact has been the price of an economic model that offers large farmers unlimited access to cheap water.
At a tense twelve-hour hearing that lasted well into the night on Tuesday, California officials dealt a major blow to this model. The state water regulatory board voted unanimously to take control of groundwater in the Tulare Lake subbasin, one of the state’s largest farming areas, and impose a first-of-its-kind mandatory fee on water pumping by farmers in the area .
The decision to put the basin’s water users on “probation,” a penalty for not managing their water effectively, could force some of the region’s biggest land lords to pay millions of dollars in fees or to stop using large tracts to cultivate some of their agricultural land.
The vote leads to a high-stakes enforcement battle with some of the state’s most powerful farmers, who fight for years to avoid government intervention on their profitable dairy farms and tomato fields. The state will begin measuring water use and collecting fines later this year, but it has never taken such enforcement action before, and there is no way to know whether farmers will comply with the fees.
The bigger question is whether the state’s policing effort will succeed in enforcing a long-term reduction in groundwater use in the state’s agricultural areas. The success or failure of this effort is important not only to California, but also to many other pasture-rich states, from Nevada to Nebraska, that are trying to police their groundwater. If the Golden State can reduce water use without causing political or economic upheaval, it will leave a blueprint for other states trying to manage scarce water.
“Groundwater is one of these collective resources where your pumping impacts a lot of other people, and you have to have a mechanism to manage that,” said Ellen Hanak, an economist and water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California. . a brainstorming session. “I seriously doubt that the state wants to take over basins and manage them, but there must be a backlash.”
The tentative vote for Tulare Lake comes nearly a decade after California lawmakers passed the landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires water users in threatened areas across the state to develop plans to heal their depleted aquifers by 2040. The Central Valley pumps about 7 million acre-feet of groundwater per year, enough to supply more than 15 million average American households, and almost all of it is used for agriculture.
The vast majority of the state’s 89 troubled groundwater basins have already created viable plans to deal with the crisis, agreeing to leave some farmland fallow or replenish aquifers by collecting rainwater.
But six delinquent basins in the Central Valley have never presented adequate plans to the state to address their groundwater shortages. Tulare Lake has especially walked slowly his planning, even as aquifer levels in the area dropped and large swaths of land sank several feet. Water officials from the area have submitted several different water management plans to the state in recent years and even said during Tuesday’s hearing that they will soon introduce another plan that includes a commitment to use less water for farming. But none of this documentation convinced the state that it could trust local officials to halt the rapid decline of the area’s aquifers.
The trial period will force all significant water users in the basin to measure their well water consumption beginning in July, something that has never been done or even attempted in the Central Valley. It would charge these users a fee of $20 for each acre-foot of water they use, with exceptions for individual households, impoverished communities and public institutions such as schools. This fee is lower than the fees that water officials in other basins have voluntarily charged to large users.
The basin could exit probation within months if local water leaders present the state with a plan endorsing major consumption reductions. One government official said he hoped the trial period would be “short”.
“The reality is that probation is a step in the process,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, the chairman of the state water board. “This is the enforcement of something that the local population is not prepared to do.”
The major powers in the Tulare Lake area are JG Boswell, a massive farming company that has dominated Central Valley politics for nearly a century, and Sandridge Partners, another large farming firm owned by Bay Area real estate magnate John Vidovich. These two companies together own tens of thousands of hectares of tomato, nut and dairy farms. They both have representatives on the agencies charged with managing groundwater in the Tulare Lake Basin. (A representative for the group of groundwater agencies in the basin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The farmland owned by these two companies sits on top of the former site of Tulare Lake, once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. Farmers drained the lake in the late 19th century so they could cultivate the fertile soil below, but the lake reappears during wet years as flooded rivers rush down from the Sierra Nevada mountains and fill the Central Valley. When the lake reappeared last year, Boswell and other landowners temporary embankments erected to protect their valuable crops.
The implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act will transform this landscape and the rest of the fertile Central Valley. Despite recent investments in more efficient drip irrigation systems and recharge projects that can recharge aquifers, most areas in the state will have no choice but to farm less land to comply with the law by 2040. According to one study of the Public Policy Institute of California, the law would eliminate between 500,000 and 1 million acres of irrigated crops in the valley, or between 10 and 20 percent of the valley’s agricultural land.
Tulare Lake farmers who spoke at the hearing said the fees could ruin their industry.
“My concern is about the fiscal pressure you’re putting on the small farmers,” Aaron Freitas, a fourth-generation nut farmer who helps run a smaller operation in the basin, said at the hearing. “It’s just not encouraging for us to continue our work or to protect the future for our children.”
The state believes this reduction is necessary to protect low-income communities and critical infrastructure from the devastating effects of subsidence. But enforcing the transition will not be easy, especially since the big farmers have drawn water with impunity for so long. Some observers worry that the decision to send Tulare Lake into trial could lead to a dangerous confrontation between state regulators and local agricultural interests.
“There might have to be some kind of law enforcement agency out there when the state is going to measure wells for the fees,” said a person closely involved in implementing the groundwater law, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speculate on the consequences of the trial decision. “That’s the worst case scenario.”
