New UC Davis clinic hopes to give small valley farmers some legal fire power to defend their groundwater stake
Nicole Larson is afraid for small farmers.
Before enrolling as a law student at University of California, Davis, she served a term on the Turlock City Council where she was appointed to a committee that would decide how to get local farmers to cut back on groundwater pumping.
“Everyone agrees that something needs to change,” she said of groundwater over pumping, which has caused drinking water wells to go dry and sunk huge swaths of land in the San Joaquin Valley.
But solutions will be painful and expensive for farmers – whether they rely on groundwater exclusively, or as a backup during drought. Larson believes that some farming operations can shoulder new groundwater restrictions and regulations easier than others.
“We don’t want to see the generational farmers, the smaller farmers, be forced into bankruptcy or forced to sell their operation.”
That is a guiding focus for Larson as she takes part in a new water law clinic at UC Davis.
Long-time attorney for the California State Department of Water Resources, David Sandino, started the clinic to provide free legal services to small farmers impacted by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).
The clinic is funded by The Water Foundation, a non-profit that received state funding to support implementation of the law.
SGMA is the first ever California-wide attempt to regulate groundwater.
In a dry year, up to 45% of water use in California comes from groundwater as opposed to water from canals, reservoirs and rivers.
Small farmers left out
When SGMA passed in 2014, it did not include any protections for small farmers.
“It did not identify or create a qualification of what a small farmer is in order to allow them to keep their operation,” Larson said. “Their effect on our groundwater – our groundwater levels – is not really an issue. They’re not the ones that we’re worried about.”
Right now, students at the Small Farmer Clinic in Davis are learning California water law and producing reports on critical SGMA cases. Once the clinic starts to attract clients, the students will represent farmers directly.
“The Small Farmer Clinic is designed to help small farmers manage this byzantine world of California water,” Sandino said on a class field trip to the headquarters of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) located on a ranch in Davis.
Farmers can get in contact with the clinic through its website at https://law.ucdavis.edu/clinics/small-farmer-clinic.
More than three quarters of farms in the San Joaquin Valley are small (less than 100 acres) according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California.
But while the San Joaquin has many small farms, the majority of farmed acreage is owned by large operations – 500 acres or more.
On a collision course
In 2023, the California Legislature passed AB 779 with support from the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. The SGMA add-on became effective this year.
It asks courts to consider the “water use of small farmers and disadvantaged communities,” in SGMA-related decisions.
For the purposes of this bill, small farmers are any farmers who earn between $10,000 and $400,000 in gross income.
“The challenge for small farmers is for the judgment to go beyond just ‘considers,’” Sandino said.
He hopes this means that courts will protect small farmers in a particularly sticky legal process known as adjudication.
“An adjudication is the traditional way that water rights were handled if a conflict came up over who could use what water. It’s a process that predates SGMA by a lot,” said Thalia Taylor, another student at the Small Farmer Clinic.
SGMA added to existing laws on adjudication, as did AB 779. The courts are just now resolving the particulars of how adjudication and SGMA will work together.
“There’s this kind of collision course,” said Taylor. “If they crash, it’s going to create an environment in which it will take a lot of money to create groundwater policy.”
Expensive and long
She is worried that small farming operations will not survive the potential expense of years-long legal battles.
“Adjudications were plenty complicated,” she said, “and plenty expensive before SGMA.”
There are two SGMA adjudication legal battles underway; one in the Indian Wells Valley in eastern Kern County and the other in the Cuyama Valley in eastern San Luis Obispo County.
In the Indian Wells Valley, the main drinking water district that serves Ridgecrest filed for adjudication in order to determine the U.S Navy’s water rights.
In Cuyama the nation’s two largest carrot growers, Bolthouse and Grimmway, sued for adjudication. Small carrot growers have since organized themselves to fight back.
Both regions are operating under approved groundwater plans so outcomes of these actions could have significant implications for SGMA’s legal standing.
Which locals are in control?
Larson also speculated, based on her experience in Turlock city government, that there might be a problem with SGMA’s main structure for implementation – local control.
Instead of mandating a set of regulations across the entire state, SGMA left it up to local governments to create their own groundwater sustainability agencies and come up with their own individual plans to stop over pumping.
“In order for that law to get across the finish line,” Larson said, “There was a huge push from virtually every Central Valley representative to vote against it because we knew it was going to affect the Central Valley so negatively.”
One compromise was local control over the process.
This becomes a problem, Larson explained, when groundwater agencies are staffed by locally elected officials that have nothing to do with water or agriculture.
“You see elected officials that have got into public office that may not have the technical expertise,” she said.
These elected officials then turn to irrigation districts for technical assistance.
“You might see bigger farmers, more successful farmers, that are involved in their irrigation district boards,” she said. “It’s simply to their advantage to be involved in those water management conversations.”
Small farmers, on the other hand, are more difficult to reach. Many did not know about SGMA’s existence until years after it passed.
They have fewer resources and less time to be involved in politics.
The clinic students are working on a set of suggestions that they would like to bring to these local agencies.
Evening the playing field
Larson knows how precarious small farming can be.
Her great-grandfather once owned the biggest dairy in Turlock, but the family operation has since downsized. Her uncles and cousins now run cattle in the area.
She says that the barriers to farming have been raised.
“Today,” she said, “There’s a lot less resources available.”
Sandino also comes from a line of small farmers. His grandfather immigrated from Italy to Merced, where he bought a plot of land to grow tomatoes. “All during high school, I worked out in the tomato fields during the summer,” he said.
In the mid-twentieth century, a new harvester designed by two UC Davis scientists revolutionized the tomato industry and put more than 80% of tomato growers out of business. Only those who could afford the harvester stayed in the game.
The bankrupt farmers got together and sued, which kicked off a decade-long legal battle that eventually led Davis to fund programs to help small farmers.
The tomato farmers were a driving inspiration in the farm-to-table slow food movement of the 1970s, and spun off into an organization that would eventually become CAFF.
Davis has long been an epicenter for the movements against farmland consolidation. Sandino says he still feels this momentum today.
But concern lingers that SGMA could reverse the trend.
“You also can see individuals being at the mercy of selling their farming operations to larger operations. So, almost an industrial farming monopoly could occur,” Larson said.