More than five years ago, Jim Wegis, a lifelong farmer in central California’s Cuyama valley, could see the writing on the wall for his water-intensive alfalfa fields.
He switched most of his 140 planted acres from seasonal hay to permanent olive and pistachio groves, drastically reducing his impact on the local aquifer. “I cut my water use just about in half,” he said.
The change was costly and stressful. Wegis had to spend over $150,000 to replace his irrigation systems and equipment, and he lost years of earnings while waiting for his orchards to mature. “There was a significant amount of time with not much income coming in,” said Wegis. “And it’s not over yet.”
In spite of his personal efforts to cut back on water use, Wegis along with landowners and institutions in Santa Barbara county’s Cuyama valley were hit by a lawsuit by two of the world’s largest carrot producers, Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms. Together, those operations are big players in a $69m industry, and they’re requesting that a court decide just how much water they and all their neighbors can use.
The adjudication, which heads to state court on 8 January 2024, has wrangled in every homeowner, business, small-scale farmer, rancher and even the local schools in this series of state-defined “disadvantaged unincorporated communities” near Santa Barbara, which includes the townships of Cuyama, New Cuyama and Ventucopa. The nearly 1,200 residents throughout the valley all rely on the same dangerously diminishing basin for their water needs.
But the adjudication won’t be so simple. The geographic boundaries of the basin aren’t clear, so neither is which landowners will have to face off against the carrot companies in what’s bound to be a long process with multiple stages. The case will probably draw in neighboring residents from all of the small towns in the valley. And even when representatives for Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms seem to be clear about a property that should be included in the case, they can’t always find them. Company reps have resorted to attaching documents to stakes placed on properties in question, in an attempt to serve landowners for adjudication.
If they don’t show up in court, these residents – who have no other source of household water – could potentially lose their right to pump forever. They are on the frontline of a national groundwater depletion problem, in which 40% of groundwater sites have hit all-time lows since 1920.
The 230-sq-mile Cuyama groundwater basin – which spans Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Kern and Ventura counties – is one of 21 basins in the state that are in “critical overdraft”. More water is being consumed than replenished; the valley gets an average of 8in of rain a year. And locals are angry they have been forced to lawyer up to preserve that increasingly rare resource.
Grimmway and Bolthouse are, by far, the top extractors. Most of the water in this dry valley comes from underground. Last year, it’s estimated that 66,700 acre-ft of water was pumped out of the Cuyama basin, with just 28,200 added. This year, two companies will probably pump more than 35,000 acre-ft of water – more than 75% of the water that’s been allocated to the entire valley. That’s enough to supply 70,000 California households, blasting from the companies’ overhead sprinklers. The verdant carrot fields stand in stark, bright contrast to the muted sandstone of the surrounding hillsides.
As the valley’s water levels have dropped, so has the quality. Harmful elements, like boron and arsenic, have begun turning up in tests in some areas of the basin. “The little town of New Cuyama had to install an arsenic removal system in order to meet drinking water standards,” said Stephen Gliessman, professor emeritus of agroecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-owner of Condor’s Hope Ranch vineyard and farm. “They’re drawing ancient water from so deep it has high levels of contaminants that have accumulated over thousands of years.”
To help remedy these critical overdrafts, in 2014 the California legislature enacted the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). It requires local agencies and stakeholders to prepare a groundwater sustainability plan (GSP) to map out necessary measures for these basins to reach sustainable conditions by 2040. This includes determining a minimum threshold that aims to ensure the basin is replenishing itself and to prevent overdraft issues, like sinking land, saltwater intrusion and decreased water quality. For Cuyama to reach sustainable conditions, groundwater pumping might have to be reduced by as much as 50% to 67%.
The Cuyama basin groundwater sustainability agency (GSA), which is run by county officials and major landowners, including Grimmway and Bolthouse, announced its first cuts this year. The department of water resources signed off on a 5% decrease in pumping from 2021 levels, a particularly hot drought year when everyone was forced to pump about 20% more. These restrictions apply to the central part of the valley with the most extreme overdraft. This flat, prime growing acreage is also where Grimmway and Bolthouse manage more than half of the land.
Though the companies voted for the reductions in April 2021, they later filed suit, asking a judge to assign specific water rights to each of the 73 wells in the hardest-hit section of the basin as part of the adjudication.
A spokesperson from Grimmway Farms said that the company filed due to “significant opposition at the GSA board to study the interconnection of pumping areas across the basin or to consider basin-wide cutbacks across all major Cuyama valley water users”.
While the GSA can set rules, it does not have the authority to determine groundwater rights. That requires a court ruling by a judge. Figuring out the fate of every well could take years – possibly decades – to resolve. The nearby Antelope Valley groundwater basin adjudication, another California water rights case in which Grimmway and Bolthouse were both involved, lasted 15 years. “These things usually draw out for so long that all the small folks go broke trying to retain our water rights,” said Gliessman.
Before California began requiring groundwater sustainability plans, courts favored the principle of historic use, recognizing each party’s consumption over time as the basis for future water allocation. That may be what the carrot companies, which were able to pump as much water as they wanted prior to the GSA cutbacks, are hoping to get out of the suit.
“It’s an almost paradoxical situation that the people who were successful in the depletion of the basin are the ones who get the water rights moving forward,” said Casey Walsh, a sociocultural anthropologist who studies water at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It seems a strange result of water adjudications in the past.”
This Cuyama suit is the fifth such adjudication filed in the state since the SGMA passed. And it’s probably a chance for the companies to roll back the previous plan – and win more water by extending the cutbacks to every resident and small farm in the region.
Though the GSP should be taken into consideration by the judge, this is essentially a test case to see how far or close the ruling will be to the already approved plan. “I don’t understand how the adjudication and the GSP aren’t highly connected, but somehow they’re supposed to be separate parallel paths,” said Brenton Kelly, chair of the Cuyama basin GSA stakeholder advisory committee. “The big unknown is who has authority at the end of the day.”
The suit is affecting the cash-strapped Cuyama Joint Unified school district, which recently had no emergency funds. The district, which mostly services low-income Latino families, has already spent about $6,000 on attorney fees and is preparing to spend another $15,000 to $20,000 to retain an expert to figure out its water usage. “That’s a big chunk of the reserves we are supposed to have,” said Superintendent Alfonso Gamino.
If the bills get too big or some other unexpected expenses come up, like a major roof repair, there’s a chance the school could slip back into another county-overseen fiscal solvency plan. And, if the school district were to lose rights to its water, there would be no drinking fountains, no sinks, no toilets. “You can’t have schools without water,” said Gamino.
Grimmway Farms representatives said the company is “not in favor of cutting the water rights of the Cuyama community services district, the Cuyama valley high school, or de minimis residential water users”, referring to those who pump less than two acre-ft of water a year.
But many other residents and small farms fear that even their minimal water usage could be jeopardized if they don’t protect their interests in the adjudication process. Many have formed groups of 10 to 25 individuals to hire a lawyer and keep costs down.
Condor’s Hope Ranch’s Gliessman and his wife, Robin Jaffee, have spent $5,000 for a retainer even in a group and incur monthly expenses related to the case. They use less than one acre-ft a year for their home and five acres of dry-farm vineyards planted with drought-tolerant varietals purposefully picked for the hot, arid climate.
Wegis pumped far more water than Gliessman and the small users in the valley. Still, the 358.11 acre-ft he extracted from his well last year is a bit more than 1% of what the carrot producers used. He is on the other side of the boundary that is being litigated in the coming months, but he is fighting to keep his section of the basin separate from the main one used by the carrot producers. So far, it has cost him “a shit lot” of money, more than $40,000 in attorneys fees to date.
Those expenditures are adding to his financial strain and that of elderly neighbors who could lose water on homesteads their families have owned for generations.
“That upsets me most about Grimmway and Bolthouse – how unfair it is to a lot of people like that,” said Wegis. “We know who’s causing the problem, and they want to make everyone else share their pain.”
