The Difference Between Farmers and Water Privateers

By Carolee Krieger, Executive Director, California Water Impact Network

California’s water conflict isn’t between farmers and everyone else. It’s between sprawling corporate interests that deplete public trust natural resources and society at large – which includes farmers. 

Productive agriculture is essential to civilization, but water privateering – the seizure of public trust water for exorbitant private profit – is not. California’s water privateers often present themselves as farmers. But while they may use the water they’ve commandeered from state and federal water conveyance projects for industrial-scale agribusiness initiatives, they’re not farmers. They’re water brokers.

If there’s money to be made in irrigating almonds or pistachios, they’ll do that. If there’s more money to be made by selling their allocated water to cities or other agribusiness operations, they’ll choose that option instead. It’s not about a devotion to agriculture – and certainly not about food security or land stewardship. It’s about maximum profit derived by gaming flawed water policies that favor the rich, the powerful and the few over the general public.

The California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) stands in solidarity with farmers and understands that successful agriculture requires reliable water supplies. We don’t support industrial enterprises that seize public trust water at the expense of farmers and ratepayers and impose great harm to the environment and local communities.

How do we parse the difference? Not to invoke religion, but Matthew 7:16 sums it up well: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” 

As a recent New York Times opinion video series, We’re Cooked, confirms, industrial food production “…is ravaging the air, soil, and water...” 

That damage ranges from the release of massive volumes of greenhouse gases to the contamination of virtually every significant waterway and aquifer in the continental U.S. with pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. It also extends to the wholesale acquisition of farms by large operations on a regional basis, resulting in de facto monopolies that control every aspect of food production from harvest through distribution. 

And in California, it also entails the exploitation of our scant water resources for the benefit of the very few.

In a Nutshell
Consider the foremost glamour crop of the San Joaquin Valley: almonds. In 2021, there were 1,622,633 acres of almond orchards in California – or 52 times the surface area of San Francisco. Five San Joaquin Valley counties account for a lion’s share of the production. While disputes remain about the amount of water used for almonds, the generally accepted figure is 10 percent of California’s developed water supply. A 2019 peer-reviewed paper published in Science Direct pegged the “water footprint” for a single California almond at 3.2 gallons.

So no matter how you cut it, that’s a huge slice out of the state’s water supply pie. And who benefits? Almond growers certainly: in an average year, California’s almonds generate about $5 billion. But almonds are not a staple food; they are a luxury crop, and an export crop at that. The state produces 80 percent of the global almond supply, and ships around 70 percent of the crop overseas – much of it to China. 

California agriculture consumes 80 percent of the state’s developed water – and much of that goes to the sprawling agribusiness complexes of the San Joaquin Valley. Further, San Joaquin Valley agribusiness receives water at below-market rates due to the establishing tenets of the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) and the State Water Project. But agriculture accounts for just 2 percent of the state’s $3 trillion economy – and at $5 billion, almonds are a mere 0.16667% of California’s GDP. The bottom line: industrial almond producers are using a vast amount of inequitably subsidized water to reap enormous profits while contributing negligibly to the state’s economy.

Looking to the Past for a Sustainable Future
It doesn’t have to be this way. For decades, Sacramento Valley almonds were dry-farmed or irrigated minimally, practices that produced a more flavorful nut. These methods still prevail in Spain, the world’s second largest almond producer. Given the certainty of diminishing water supplies and increasing water demand, it would be foolhardy not to revisit these methodologies. 

In an article in The Guardian on drought and agriculture, Steve Gliessman, a former professor of agroecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz – an authority on dry-farming, and a producer of dry-farmed wines and olive oil – noted that “Almonds are traditionally a dry-farmed crop that does not need irrigation...but when you’ve got 500, a thousand acres, you don’t have much opportunity to be a good steward of your land…”

That, of course, is the nub of the crisis: stewardship or exploitation? Farming or water privateering? If the former, public trust water is a proper investment. If the latter, it is not: it’s tantamount to seizure of a public resource for narrow and private ends. 

It should be remembered that the CVP, the massive system of reservoirs and canals that delivers water from the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta to the western San Joaquin Valley, was predicated on a 160-acre limitation for each recipient. The purported goal of the project was to establish a yeomanry of independent farmers who would steward their land and form strong and prosperous rural communities.

But that’s not how things turned out. Properties were consolidated among members of powerful, extended families, resulting in agribusiness enterprises constituting thousands of acres – all of which were irrigated by federal water, provided at rock bottom prices. Today, the San Joaquin Valley remains dominated by a handful of sprawling water brokering fiefdoms. Two examples: Stewart and Lynda Resnick, whose Los Angeles-based corporation, The Wonderful Company, includes 80,000 acres of almond and pistachio orchards, mostly in Kern County; and John Vidovich, whose family corporation cultivates 140,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley. The Resnicks also control 57% of the Kern Water Bank, a 32-square-mile subterranean recharge basin originally authorized by the State of California as an emergency water supply for ratepayers. 

Impaired Lands and Disenfranchised People
While these industrial growers have profited spectacularly, the people who provide their labor remain mired in poverty: the western San Joaquin Valley farmworker towns of Firebaugh and Huron are among the poorest in the state. Meanwhile, the CVP continues to shunt scarce public water to salt-impaired industrial lands at subsidized prices. 

The crops that are grown, of course, are chosen for maximum profitability rather than domestic food security – that’s why the lion’s share of the almond crop is sold abroad, where it fetches top prices. It’s not capitalism; it’s not free enterprise; it’s plutocrat welfare, and California’s ratepayers, land, waterways, aquifers, fish, and wildlife are footing the bill. 

While industrial food production can mean cheaper staples at the supermarket, the real price tag it imposes on society and the environment is exorbitant. In the San Joaquin Valley, intensive industrial cultivation has impaired hundreds of thousands of acres of land with salt and toxic selenium and polluted waterways from the upper San Joaquin River to San Francisco Bay, imperiling native fish and wildlife. And by commandeering much of the state’s water, a few thousand San Joaquin growers – those irrigating more than 1,000 acres – have driven up rates and decreased water security for millions of Californians. 

And that’s not all. Increasingly, water privateers who have touted their agricultural roots are maximizing profits by growing – nothing. 

As noted in a 2021 New York Times article, water has become the most profitable “crop” of all. Central Valley industrial-scale growers with “senior rights” to public trust water are fallowing hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland so they can sell their water to thirsty municipalities in Southern California. Land baron John Vidovich is noted – or notorious – for selling annual rights to 14,000 acre-feet of water to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernadino County for $73 million. As reporter Marx Arax noted in his book The Dreamt Land, Vidovich “…isn’t farming dirt. He’s farming water.”

In sum, Vidovich and his small group of peers are maximizing their profits during drought by selling water that belongs to the public – all the while extolling the virtues of free enterprise and rugged individualism. 

Finally, there’s the damage done to our groundwater reserves by water privateering. Industrial-scale cropping is contaminating our aquifers with pesticides and nitrates. Millions of rural residents are threatened by polluted well water – and as a recent editorial in the Sacramento Bee notes, the problem is particularly acute in the San Joaquin Valley.

A Better Way
It’s a sham, and we can no longer afford such corporate welfare. There is abundant evidence that environmentally sound agricultural operations can be extremely profitable. One example: Curtis Stone, a farmer in British Columbia, clears $75,000 annually from tomatoes, microgreens, and herbs grown on a mere 1/3-acre plot. 

Is Stone’s approach appropriate for the San Joaquin Valley? No. But much can be done to moderate the abuses of San Joaquin water privateering. Mas Masumoto, a third-generation farmer who cultivates certified organic nectarines, peaches, apricots, and raisin grapes south of Fresno on his 80-acre family farm, stewards his water resources and his land with equal rigor. Unhappily, his dedication is the exception rather than the rule. 

So the first step in achieving equity and balance in the San Joaquin Valley is water reform. By implementing rational policies that include conservation, recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater recharge and impaired land retirement, there will be enough water for both farms and cities. But there isn’t enough water to waste – and there certainly isn’t enough to support the speculation and schemes of a handful of privateers and polluters. Water is a public trust resource. It’s high time the public reclaimed it.