As growers navigate SGMA, different avenues are being explored for access to the needed water for crops, including groundwater markets. This has been experimented with in the Mojave Basin, resulting in stabilized implementationand aggregate gains, but also a consolidation of water rights. At the World Ag Expo, UC Cooperative Extension Associate Professor Ellen Bruno discussed the findings on groundwater markets with Matthew Malcolm at California Ag Network. Watch this quick video and read more in California Fruit & Vegetable Magazine.
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A landmark law – representing one of the most revolutionary changes to groundwater management in California history – was passed more than 10 years ago. But many farmers across the state still have not even heard of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA.
Building on the relationships cultivated by the Small Farms Network of the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, a new team of educators will help small farmers understand the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Photo by Elena Zhukova
Jarin Tasnim Anika started as a SGMA technical assistance community educator for small farms with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources earlier this year. She said that of the dozens of small-scale farmers she has spoken with, “an extremely small fraction” of them had heard of SGMA.
Photo Caption: Building on the relationships cultivated by the Small Farms Network of the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, a new team of educators will help small farmers understand the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Photo by Elena Zhukova
“I’ve been driving around Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties – the counties I cover – and for almost all of the small farmers, I can honestly say that I was the first person who has talked about SGMA with them,” Anika said.
GSAs are making progress toward this goal. They’re developing strategies to prevent overdraft of groundwater and are addressing a host of related problems for farmers, residents and the environment – from wells running dry to poor water quality to land subsidence.
But while GSAs are required by law to consider all “beneficial users” in the implementation of SGMA, many of them overlooked a major subset of groundwater users: small farmers. Nearly 80% of farms in California can be categorized as small-scale farms, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition of small farm (a farm with annual gross cash farm income between $1,000 and $350,000).
In 2022, UC ANR and a coalition of partners published a report, “SGMA and Underrepresented Farmers,” that analyzed, through the lens of small farmers and socially disadvantaged farmers, the Groundwater Sustainability Plans developed by the agencies.
“We reviewed these 20-year plans to see if small-scale farmers are incorporated into that planning, and the results were alarming,” said Ngodoo Atume, one of the authors of the report. “We found that across all 14 plans we reviewed, none of those agencies were considering small-scale farmers.”
The result is that many small farmers (predominantly tenant farmers) with whom Atume has met are wholly unfamiliar with SGMA.
“We asked many questions: ‘Have you heard of SGMA? Have you heard of this groundwater regulation? Have you heard of the potential cutbacks? Has the landowner shown you any notice to attend a meeting?’” Atume said. “And we get ‘no’ across the board.”
Because the impacts and benefits of SGMA for small farmers are not addressed in those plans, the 2022 report recommended more focused engagement of those stakeholders. So this year, UC ANR hired a dedicated team to provide technical assistance, education, policy analysis and outreach for small farmers.
Atume serves as the statewide coordinator, and Anika is one of five regionally based SGMA educators for small farms, part of the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.
The others are Erik Rodriguez (Fresno and Madera counties), Luis Paniagua (Tulare and Kings counties) and Sonia Rios (Riverside and San Bernardino counties). Another educator is currently being recruited for Santa Clara, San Benito and Monterey counties.
The team of regional SGMA educators for small farms currently comprises (from top left) Erik Rodriguez, Jarin Tasnim Anika, Sonia Rios and Luis Paniagua.
Economists studied farmland parcels along the borders of neighboring GSAs, some with greater baseline overdraft (and ostensibly subject to more stringent SGMA restrictions) than others. Parcels near the administrative borders experience similar hydrological, climactic and agronomic conditions – the only difference being the expectation of greater future regulation.
The researchers then compared the differences in the planting of new perennial crops and the drilling of new wells between neighboring parcels of farmland, at a time before SGMA passed in 2014 and after SGMA, in 2020 and 2021.
“We found that SGMA had no statistically significant effect on the differences,” said Ellen Bruno, associate professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley.
In other words, farmers didn’t seem to be altering their practices in the face of impending regulation. Bruno and co-author Nick Hagerty concluded it appears that, in SGMA’s early years, potential restrictions were perceived to be so far in the future that short-term considerations – like well-drilling in response to drought or planting due to favorable markets – were taking precedence.
“The implication of people continuing business as usual so far is that the groundwater will continue to be overdrafted,” Bruno added. “And, of course, the point of SGMA is to try to correct that and bring the basins into sustainability.”
She said that Atume’s community education team can help small farmers learn more about groundwater management and take appropriate action.
“There’s a lot of variation in what people know; big farmers have many more resources to plug into changing regulations,” Bruno said. “I think Ngodoo’s team could be really instrumental in helping everybody stay informed – both on how they’re going to be regulated and what they can do to respond to the regulation.”
SGMA education team sees uneven implementation across agencies
Management actions outlined in the Groundwater Sustainability Plans include groundwater allocations, taxes or fees based on users’ extraction, pumping restrictions, and efficiency incentives, among other policy instruments (see a database summarizing strategies in those plans).
And while the agencies have laid out their long-term plans and actions, implementation has been uneven and inconsistent.
“It’s a very small percentage of GSAs that are actually implementing actions right now that might impact the stakeholders,” Atume explained. “In that sense, SGMA is still at the very beginning stages, and so people are not worried about it.”
Nevertheless, the team wants to begin a step-by-step education process. Piggybacking on personal networks and events established by their UC ANR peers, the regional educators are finding opportunities to introduce themselves and build trust with local farmers. They are planning workshops for later this year.
Eventually, they want farmers to see them as people to contact if they have questions about groundwater.
“If you have any questions related to a random fee that you’re getting, or somebody came out and told you that you have to install this specific thing on your irrigation infrastructure, you can call me,” said Rodriguez, the educator for Fresno and Madera counties. “I’ll help you figure it out and explain it.”
Some farmers are already reaching out, such as a small farmer in Merced County who recently experienced quite a shock. According to Anika, the local GSA sent an invoice to the farmer with a penalty of $15,000 for overextraction of groundwater. She was referred to Anika, who explained that the notice was sent to make the farmer aware of her potential penalty.
Communication barriers a major challenge for small farmers
Beyond the task of distilling the complex, technical wording of SGMA into an easy-to-understand format, language barriers are another challenge.
For example, the majority of small farmers Anika has met with are Hmong, and she expressed gratitude for the linguistic help of staff research associate Vong Moua. Other members of the UC ANR Small Farms Network who speak non-English languages have helped with outreach to speakers of Spanish, Iu Mien, Punjabi and Cantonese.
A complicating factor is that GSAs will usually send flyers and mailings only to the owners of land – not the tenant farmers.
“Reaching tenant farmers is difficult because it requires very targeted outreach in their language to engage them,” Atume said. “Even for GSAs that have made a lot of progress with outreach, most times those materials still stop at the landowner, and then the responsibility then lies with the landowner to communicate that information to the small farmers.”
On their end, the community educators are also struggling with a dearth of information for crops grown by their clientele. According to Anika, Hmong farmers, for example, cultivate herbs, spices and seasonal vegetables under mixed cropping systems that have not been studied extensively by California academics, in terms of crop water use.
While growers of almonds have a lot of research-backed information about their crops’ water requirements, small-scale farmers often lack those resources.
“As a scientific team, we always try to give data-based recommendations, but at this point, I can only provide theory in our discussions – not data – so that’s another challenge I face all the time,” Anika explained. “I think people are trying their best to gather more information, but there’s just not a lot of research on these crops that are very culturally focused.”
Ngodoo Atume, SGMA technical assistance for small farms coordinator, said that the team is planning workshops to spread awareness of the historic groundwater law. Photo by Evett Kilmartin
SGMA educators cultivate partnerships with GSAs
Another key task for the SGMA education team is engaging with the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies themselves. The team members regularly attend agency meetings to share feedback and farmer perspectives.
“For some of these GSAs, there is – for the first time – someone consistently attending the meetings and providing small-farmer input on agenda items,” Atume explained. “That’s a huge part of the team’s work.”
Rodriguez, in Fresno and Madera counties, said he is first familiarizing himself with the GSAs (and their respective Groundwater Sustainability Plans) before reaching out to small farmers to explain the nuances of SGMA. He wants to know the details of those plans and the exact scope of his role – and then prepare the most relevant and accessible resources for when he approaches the growers.
“We’re finally at a point now where we’re starting to consult with different GSAs on how their work is conveyed in the outreach materials,” Rodriguez said. “We’re trying to make these materials GSA- or subbasin-specific, and we want their seal of approval and logo on it.”
One community educator said more research is needed on the water requirements of culturally significant crops for small farmers. Photo by Elena Zhukova
Building and strengthening relationships with the GSAs is a high priority for the SGMA team members, as they get a better sense of the unique political pressures, legal situations or local interests that each agency must navigate. Anika noted that some GSAs have been eager to learn more about the needs of small farmers, and Rodriguez has found that agencies in his area are receptive to hearing from the community.
“They are open – they do answer questions, they do schedule meetings,” he said.
As the team assists GSAs in communicating with under-engaged stakeholders, Atume believes small farmers can be incorporated more meaningfully in the implementation of SGMA. She hopes all groundwater users contribute to a future where water is available for communities, agriculture and ecological health.
“Personally, I think everyone should comply with SGMA; I don’t think some stakeholders should comply and others shouldn’t,” she said. “But at the same time, I do think that there should not be disproportionate impact on any particular group of stakeholders. Overall, we all need to move towards sustainability.”
The SGMA education team is supported by funds from the state Legislature through the California Department of Water Resources’ Underrepresented Communities, California Tribes and Small Farmers Groundwater Technical Assistance Program. — By Michael Hsu, UCANR
UC Agriculture and Natural Resources brings UC information and practices to all 58 California counties. Through research and Cooperative Extension in agriculture, natural resources, nutrition, economic and youth development, our mission is to improve the lives of all Californians. Learn more at ucanr.edu.
When it comes to groundwater in the Central Valley, there have been many articles lately telling part of the story but very few telling the whole story. Those articles criticize communities and farmers for pumping groundwater to supply water to their residents and to irrigate their farms. Most of the articles place the blame for groundwater pumping squarely on the shoulders of farmers and urban water users. This is only part of the story. Urban and rural communities have increased their pumping of groundwater due to 25+ years of federal and state policies that have curtailed surface water deliveries. The management of the water system has caused water users to turn more often to groundwater to compensate for the surface water shortages. And, the government is failing to operate the system as it was originally intended. Predictably, Westlands has a challenge to get the media to tell the whole story, but we will continue our efforts. We will tell the whole story about groundwater and the failure of government to develop policies that meet the water supply and environmental objectives. When we explain the current problem, we will talk about the history of the Central Valley Project (CVP), the failure of government policies, and the ramifications of those failed policies. Here’s the rest of the story. Back in the 1930’s, both Congress and California State government recognized the need to develop the CVP to increase surface water supply to serve a “multitude” of purposes, including to remediate groundwater overdraft.
“Initial features of the project were built primarily to protect the Central Valley from crippling water shortages and menacing floods, but the CVP also improves Sacramento River navigation, supplies domestic and industrial water, generates electric power, conserves fish and wildlife, creates opportunities for recreation, and enhances water quality.” https://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvp/about-cvp.html Despite the original purposes, regulatory decisions along the way have systematically curtailed surface water deliveries and harmed those who built their farms and businesses around the assurances provided by the government through the construction of the CVP. The graph below clearly illustrates the correlation between the curtailment of surface water supplies and the inevitable increased reliance on groundwater.
More Groundwater Has Been Used in Recent Years to Offset Lost Surface Water Supplies
The story doesn’t end with government failing to deliver adequate quantities of surface water. Another part of the story that is often left out of news articles is the government’s rationale for withholding water supply. For decades, government policies focused on CVP pumping as the primary cause of the decline of fish populations. Now the rest of the story is being told. Federal and state officials, as well as academic experts, now recognize the many factors that are causing the decline in the fish population. With that major admission, Westlands and others are requesting that government fulfill its CVP obligations by restoring the delivery of surface water to the farms and communities that depend on CVP water. There is a tremendous amount of fresh water that could be delivered to communities, without causing the decline of fish populations, but instead is left to flow to the ocean. Our Water Supply Update shows that California sent almost 260 billion gallons of water out to the ocean in May – some of which could have been pumped for people, cities, and farms and other areas to replenish the state’s aquifers. As the debate over groundwater continues, Westlands will continue to tell the rest of the story and confront misinformation and incomplete explanations of water supply issues that currently serve as the basis for failed federal and state policies.
Merced, Calif., (February 28, 2018) – Following a six-week public process, the Merced Irrigation District (MID) Board of Directors approved both the start of irrigation season and the water rate for the coming year.
“So far, the winter weather has not been favorable to local agriculture,” said MID General Manager John Sweigard after the meeting. “We want to ensure that we are being as responsive to our growers as possible. We want them to have the water they need as quickly as possible.”
Water orders can be placed immediately. The first deliveries are expected to occur around March 1. There will be no restrictions on allocations this year and water will be made available to neighboring Sphere of Influence (SOI) lands. Those are lands just outside the District boundaries but still within the eastern Merced groundwater basin.
The in-District water rate for the coming season was set at $40 per acre foot for all MID growers. Neighboring SOI growers will have access to surface water at $100 per acre foot.
Today’s decisions were made following nearly two hours of open discussion between the MID Board of Directors, the MID Advisory Committee and other interested members of the public.
Options for ordering water include:
Orders may be placed anytime online at mercedid.org.
Orders may be placed anytime using MID’s automated water ordering system at (866) 825-2475. During weekday business hours, orders may also be placed by calling MID Customer Service at (209) 722-2720 or toll-free at (800) 750-2720.
Orders may be placed in person during weekday business hours at MID’s office, located at 744 W. 20th Street in Merced.
WATER SUPPLY – Following five years of drought, Lake McClure experienced one of the wettest years on record last winter. The reservoir easily filled to its maximum capacity and remains at its maximum-allowed operating level at
this time of year. That’s about 67 percent capacity or 667,000 acre feet. In discussing the water outlook for the year, MID opted to make all water available to growers for the coming season without restriction.
GROUNDWATER BENEFITS – Providing surface water from Lake McClure to area growers provides a crucial benefit to area groundwater. MID and SOI growers will not have to depend on groundwater pumping for irrigation. Additionally, MID’s operations result each year in up to 140,000 acre feet of groundwater replenishment as water flows through unlined waterways and MID-operated groundwater recharge basins. Groundwater management has become a top priority in the region since the state approved the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. MID is one of multiple urban and rural partners working jointly to address groundwater challenges in eastern Merced County.
Sacamento, Calif., (October 9, 2017) – The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), in collaboration with California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and other state entities, are hosting a Public Forum on Managed Groundwater Recharge to Support Sustainable Water Management. This all-day event will be held at the Sacramento Convention Center on November 8th 2017 and bring together a variety of speakers to address recharge opportunities and issues.
Groundwater recharge is an important topic for California as the state continues to recover from an historic drought that caused increased reliance on groundwater basins – resulting in overdraft, failed private domestic wells and impacts to environmental quality.
In June 2017, the California State Board of Food and Agriculture sent a letter to CDFA Secretary Karen Ross encouraging the convening of a forum to, “inform long term state policies related to ground water recharge.” California’s farm and ranching communities are important partners in helping to implement recharge efforts, but many barriers in federal/state policy as well as infrastructure challenges limit wide scale recharge opportunities.
This forum will bring together water authorities, agricultural organizations, regulators and other stakeholders to address groundwater recharge opportunities and associated policies.
Tualre, Calif., (July 14, 2017) – Farm Bureau wanted to alert our members that the County of Tulare has released a DRAFT proposal of a groundwater ordinance that will impact groundwater extractions and property rights. If approved, it would be a prohibition on groundwater usage that takes effect potentially before the enforcement of the new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act laws set to take effect in 2020.
Linked here is a draft ordinance that addresses extractions of groundwater in Tulare County. The County’s Ag Policy Advisory Committee (APAC) and the County’s Water Commission has participated in discussions on a Groundwater Ordinance over a year back, but neither advisory body has seen a draft until now. To date, this attached draft has not been presented to the Board of Supervisors.
Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Pete Vander Poel has directed staff to send the initial draft of the Tulare County Groundwater Ordinance to APAC and the County Water Commission to review and provide feedback to the Board. Staff to the board anticipate the attached draft will be presented to the Board of Supervisors for their first look at a regular scheduled Board meeting in early September.
Water Rights in California are unique in many respects, and this type of prohibition on extractions may impact agricultural users in many adverse ways, we encourage you to study this closely. The Tulare County Farm Bureau board of directors and staff will also be reviewing this in the weeks ahead.
