Forget new dams. A healthy aquifer is better for family farms and the environment

Most of the people who fight over water fall into two categories: Water users and water protectors.

The opposing sides really have more in common that they might believe. Agricultural water users enjoy and appreciate our natural world, and revel in its beauty. Environmentalists eat the beef, poultry, salad and nuts the water users grow, and have no problems with family farms and small businesses.

A third voice in California’s water wars is the richest and most powerful. Big agribusiness has a totally different goal than your local farmer, rancher, or environmentalist. Their motive is profit.

They are extremely successful. For example, almonds have generated over $1 billion of revenue in Stanislaus County, and almost $5 billion statewide in 2019. The water to feed those thirsty trees often comes from wells drilled into our aquifer.

The last 20 years has seen a 46% increase in irrigated agriculture in the Modesto Sub-basin, an area bordered by the Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers to our north and south, and the San Joaquin River to the west. Most of this expansion has occurred in the eastern area where groundwater is the only option. Pastureland has been converted to almond orchards at an alarming rate, and the aquifer’s water levels have been declining rapidly. In the San Joaquin Valley, 6,100 new water wells have been drilled in the last six years.

Our aquifers are not a bottomless pit of water, and don’t get refilled in drought years. With drought becoming more prevalent due to climate change, this is a real concern. The state of California predicts that 40% of wells in the San Joaquin Valley will go fully or partially dry by 2040. In the last 20 years powerful agricultural wells have taken more water from the Central Valley aquifer than what fills Lake Tahoe.

Who suffers when our aquifer is depleted? Our rivers are in distress. The delta smelt is virtually extinct. In the last year, 98% of winter-run Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River have died.

Last year, over 1,000 household wells in the San Joaquin Valley were compromised by declining groundwater levels. This includes small farmers and small water districts who can’t afford to dig their wells deeper than an industrial farm sucking from the same source. Some Stanislaus cities such as Riverbank, Oakdale and Waterford rely solely on groundwater, and much of the city of Modesto’s water supply comes from groundwater. As aquifers shrink, the percentage of toxic chemicals from agricultural pollution increases, sometimes poisoning wells.

How is it justifiable that industrial farms and rich businessmen take water from the ground at minimal cost, use it to grow crops that don’t belong in a semi-arid area, make a huge profit, and trash our environment in the process?

State government is playing catch up and in 2014 passed a series of laws intended to reduce aquifer depletion, but they won’t take full effect here until 2042. Our county government has taken some steps to reduce the number of well permits, but only after being on the wrong end of a lawsuit that required the California Supreme Court to intervene.

The next time you hear that our water problems can be solved by building more dams, ask yourself: Wouldn’t it be cheaper and less disruptive to the environment if we took stronger steps to prevent our aquifers from being drained, and use excess water to refill them instead of putting it in a new dam?