WATSONVILLE, Calif. — Pajaro Valley’s strawberry, blackberry and raspberry fields stretch for 10 miles along California’s Monterey Bay coast and are filled with berries from April through early December. The valley’s 30,000 acres of farmland are also filled with varieties of emerald green lettuces, Brussels sprouts and kale, bringing nearly $1 billion in revenue to the region each year.
All this abundance doesn’t come cheap.
While American farmers elsewhere irrigate their crops by freely pumping groundwater beneath their soil, growers in Pajaro are forced to pay high prices for irrigation water; This makes Pajaro one of the most expensive places in the country, if not the world, to grow food. Cost: up to $400 per acre; standard measurement, 1 acre equals water covering 1 foot depth. The fees generate $12 million a year, which is used to recycle, replenish and protect the area’s groundwater.
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The Pajaro Valley’s unusual system (essentially a water tax) was born out of the fruit-growing disaster that forced farmers to take action nearly 40 years ago. Today, as the country faces a dwindling groundwater crisis caused by a combination of climate change, agricultural overpumping and other problems, some experts say the Pajaro Valley is a case study in how to protect the vital resource.
“What they’re doing is cutting-edge,” said Felicia Marcus, former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board and current fellow at Stanford University’s Water Program in the West. While several other regions have imposed fees on groundwater for farming, Pajaro Valley has been one of the most aggressive and effective. “They are way ahead of the curve,” she said.
Experts from as far away as China and Egypt travel to the valley to study the system. But replicating this elsewhere may face major difficulties. First of all, “people don’t like taxes,” said Nicholas Brozovic, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska. “There’s nothing mysterious about it.”
New research on the program found a direct connection between paying for groundwater and protecting it: A 20% increase in the price of groundwater led to a 20% decrease in groundwater extraction.
One reason why experts see Pajaro as a model: Agriculture is developing in the region despite the high prices of water. It is the headquarters for major brands, including Driscoll’s, the world’s largest fruit supplier, and Martinelli’s, which grows most of the apples for sparkling cider in the Pajaro Valley.
Soren Bjorn, a top executive at Driscoll’s who will become CEO in January, said in an interview that he “absolutely” sees the region as a water pricing model that could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to Portugal. “Water can’t be free anywhere because you can’t provide a sustainable water supply without pricing it,” he said. “This is true for the world.”
But if the Pajaro Valley experiment were repeated nationwide, it could trigger changes across the economy that affect both farmers and shoppers, leading to higher prices at grocery stores while forcing farmers to abandon needed low-cost commodity crops. other purposes such as animal feed and textiles.
While corporate growers of premium products like fruit shipped to the shelves of major chains like Whole Foods, Safeway and Trader Joe’s can afford the price of Pajaro’s water, farmers who grow cash crops like cotton, alfalfa and soybeans cannot. Make the economy work, said David Sanford, agriculture commissioner for Santa Cruz County, which includes the Pajaro Valley.
In the years since the water price was introduced, growers of these crops have either turned to high-priced fruit and lettuce or left the area for cheaper pastures.
“There’s a big public policy debate about pricing groundwater,” said Louis Preonas, an agricultural economist at the University of Maryland. But if you were to try something like this across the country, he added: “It would mean farmers moving away from growing crops like corn or giving up agriculture altogether. Whichever way you cut it, it’s likely to cause food prices to rise. But the alternative is to run out of water.”
A New York Times investigation this year found that most of the groundwater resources that provide 90% of the nation’s drinking water systems are severely depleted due to climate change and over-pumping of water by farmers, industrial users, cities and others.
The day when groundwater loss will be calculated is fast approaching for many of the country’s agricultural regions. He came to Pajaro Valley 40 years ago.
With its loamy, sandy soil and cool night breezes, the Monterey coast is an ideal climate for strawberries. But disaster struck in the 1980s. Growers over-pumped coastal groundwater, allowing saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to seep beneath their fields, deep into the roots of fruit crops.
“You could see the yellow leaves, the discoloration, the slowing of growth,” recalled Dick Peixoto, whose family had farmed here since 1920.
Faced with economic disaster, Peixoto and other growers formed a local water agency with two goals: to protect groundwater and prevent the state from taking control.
The Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, which is still locally operated today, began operating. His first project was to install meters to measure how much groundwater growers were using. In 1993, it began charging farmers a modest fee of $30 per acre to cover the cost of managing and reading meters.
The water agency hired hydrologists and other consultants, who concluded that the aquifer was so inundated that it could become completely brine. In response, the agency built a $6 million project to collect and divert excess rainwater from a stream near the ocean and pump it into a storage pond where it percolates into underground wells and eventually will be used for irrigation.
Next came a $20 million water recycling plant that cleans about 5 million gallons of sewage each day and sends it to farmlands through a network of purple pipes. Purple signals that the water inside is recycled.
Now the agency is building an $80 million system to collect and store more rainwater for use in irrigation. Brian Lockwood, general manager of the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency for 18 years, said some of the cost of the agency’s projects are covered by federal grants and loans, while the rest is covered through the groundwater pricing system.
“These projects are worth millions of dollars and would never happen without this source of revenue,” he said.
As the water agency’s ambitions grew, so did the price of water. It is planned to reach $500 per acre by 2025.
In the first years, farmers were disturbed by interest rate increases. “You know, when water used to be free, pricing was really difficult,” said Thomas Broz, who has farmed about 75 acres in Pajaro since 1996.
Eventually, a group of growers challenged the water agency in court and managed to reduce prices for several years, even forcing the agency to repay nearly $12 million to farmers between 2008 and 2011.
But then, from 2012 to 2017, California was hit by the worst drought in recorded history; Farmland dried up and the rural economy was devastated. Growers across the state, especially in the Central Valley, reached an agreement with the state to sharply restrict their water use and leave their fields fallow.
Water became more expensive in the Pajaro Valley, but at least it still flowed. To save money, many Pajaro farmers have invested in precision irrigation technology that will distribute carefully measured water exactly where it is needed. Gone are the days of sprinklers indiscriminately wetting fields.
In the midst of the drought, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law requiring every part of the state to develop a plan to protect groundwater. Miles Reiter, the outgoing CEO of Driscoll’s, said he supports the legislation.
Suddenly the Pajaro became a model.
“We are now seen as trailblazers showing the way,” Lockwood said. “We’re getting calls from all over the state. ‘How did you do this?'” He gives some credit to local control of resources, saying, “It’s better than having the county or the state come in and take control. And so far it’s solid. It’s been tried. From lawsuits.” “he survived.”
Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency Board Chair Amy Newell said the agency last encountered virtually no resistance from growers when it raised rates in 2021.
Broz, who paid $20,000 for water last year, said he has come to accept the system.
“The farmer has very little flexibility to increase the cost of water, which means we have to price it into our product. That means we can’t actually be that competitive,” said Broz, who grows lettuce, strawberries, apples and other vegetables. “But pricing, if we want to protect the resource, “It’s allowed us to put in place the kind of measures that will help us have a sustainable system in the long term.”
At the Westlands water district in the central California valley, where many farmers are fighting against groundwater management legislation, the board will soon vote on a plan that would allow growers to pay for credits for using groundwater above a certain allocation. They could buy and sell loans starting at around $200 per loan. A handful of other water districts in California are implementing similar measures.
Many farmers are worried about the beginning of such a trend.
“The concern is that any pricing scheme or market-based mechanism that attempts to manage or distribute this resource will privilege a certain type of producer (a multinational corporation) at the expense of small-scale independent farmers,” Jordan said. Treakle is program coordinator for the National Family Farm Coalition.
And in some parts of the country, pricing groundwater could mean the end of existing crops altogether. For example, some experts have said that may be the case for producers of Texas cotton, a commodity crop that relies almost entirely on groundwater from the depleted Ogallala aquifer.
Driscoll’s Bjorn said Americans should be prepared to face just that outcome.
“We cannot avoid producing something that does not have resources,” he said. “We would be fooling ourselves if we continued to grow low-value crops in desert places.
“Getting over the hump of politics is the hardest part,” Bjorn said. “From now on, it’s just about managing the resource.”
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