water

Until three years ago, AW, who requested that only his initials be used for identification purposes, was an almond farmer. Now, he’s a grass farmer. AW farms in Tulare County, California, the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and California’s most productive agricultural region, the source of more than half of the produce the nation consumes. Five years ago, he was growing almonds across his 300 acres, a profitable crop that sold at a high value on the market. Now, he’s growing cover crop, a mix of various grasses intended to keep the soil on his land healthy, but that doesn’t bring in income anywhere close to what AW was making when he was growing almonds.

Why did AW make this switch? Not out of choice, but out of necessity. California agriculture is tied to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a bill passed in 2014 with the goal of reducing groundwater overdraft throughout the state, an agriculture-driven environmental hazard that is depleting aquifers and causing subsidence. The main tension behind SGMA is that the act is expected to cause between 500,000 to 1 million acres of San Joaquin Valley agricultural land to come out of production before 2040, and the act does not come with a built-in support system to help farmers figure out what to do with their land when agriculture is no longer an option. Neither SGMA nor the Valley farmers who it’s hurting the most are at fault—farmers are simply employing decades old agricultural practices to meet national food demand and SGMA is simply trying to preserve the state’s water resources.