Jennifer Peters signed on to have her Madera ranch become the site of an experiment in replenishing groundwater in California’s Central Valley.

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Though this pilot program led by a subdivision of the United States Department of Agriculture is far from the first effort to address the depletion of groundwater stores, it offers farmers like Peters hope for the future of agriculture in the region.

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“If the generation that’s running the ranch now, my son, doesn’t buy into this and start improving the water quality, we’re all going to be in a world of hurt by the time the sixth generation wants to come up,” Peters said. “There’ll be no farming.”

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Peters is a fourth-generation farmer who operates Markarian Family LP with her father and son. They cultivate wine grapes and almonds, crops that require irrigation to grow in the Central Valley.

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Their farm is among more than 35,000 in the nation’s fruit-and-nut hub that has suffered through a megadrought. The resulting conditions have required Peters and many others to pay a premium for water and live with the looming threat that one day, not that far off, their fields will be fallowed.

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Many have seen it already. A report by UC Merced estimated that 696,000 acres of Central Valley farmland idled between 2019 and 2022. Those years coincided with severe drought in the region.

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The search for water has led growers to dig deep into underground water supplies. Many aquifers, geological structures that hold groundwater, are so depleted in the Central Valley that they are considered at an “all time low” or “much below normal,” according to California’s Department of Water Resources’ live monitoring system. Scientists found last year, before the past few months’ extreme weather, that groundwater depletion in the Central Valley had been accelerating. In parts of the Central Valley, land has been sinking about a foot a year because of diminishing water, which also reduces the aquifer’s storage capacity.

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The depletion of water is a daunting problem that lawmakers and governmental agencies have tried to address for years. What is different about the project being piloted on Peters’ land under the so-called Environmental Quality Incentives Program is that a federal agency is involved directly with local landowners rather than funding aquifer-recharge projects administered primarily by state or local irrigation districts.

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This pilot lets the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) be surgical in the way that groundwater-recharge projects get built and tested, and encourages private farmers to get involved by covering a significant portion of the construction costs.

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“It’s nothing new,” said Greg Norris, the state conservation engineer for NRCS. “But what this is doing is we’re evaluating how we can do it through our programs.”

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Why the Central Valley needs help recharging groundwater

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This winter has brought significant rain and snow to northern California, which has boosted hope that the region may see some relief from the drought. Despite recent storms, major reservoirs that collect the water sent down to the Central Valley had below-average levels.

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“In the short-term, the early winter storms have helped, but in the long-term, we still have much catching up to do, especially in the northern part of our system,” said U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Regional Director Ernest Conant in the Feb. 22 news release.

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State and local agencies have long worked to mitigate the over-pumping of California aquifers. In 2014, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act to ensure local agencies oversee and reduce overdrafting groundwater, primarily from basins across the Central Valley, with the goal of stabilizing levels in most areas by 2040.

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While this effort has put into focus the need to stabilize groundwater supplies, the state has struggled to deliver results.

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State rules on who can use what water and balancing environmental concerns often leave Central Valley farmers feeling left out, according to previous reporting by The Sacramento Bee. Local, state and federal officials from the community on both sides of the aisle continually lobby to get and keep more water.

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Peters, who is a member of the local farm bureau board, said it is important to come together — and pitch in where they can. She dedicated a sandy stretch of land to the NRCS project in hopes of recharging the aquifer below for herself and her neighbors.

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“We have to start collecting water, even if it’s in smaller basins throughout the state,” she said. “We have to start doing it.”

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California has been artificially recharging groundwater since the turn of the 20th century. This recharging is often done by injecting water into wells that are connected to the aquifers or adding surface water to an area that is absorbed through the ground.

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The projects that NRCS is funding in its pilot program, Norris said, involve adding surface water to the Central Valley. The participating farmers will flood their fields and build trenches that can hold water until it is absorbed into the ground; they are referred to as on-farm recharge and basins respectively.

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One challenge of replenishing aquifers through adding surface water is tracking its complex movement through the ground, said Wendy Rash, a NRCS water quality specialist. Another is the risk of pesticides and other fertilizers being absorbed and, therefore, contaminating clean water.

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“We’re also working with farmers, looking at their nutrient and pest management practices, to try to do some risk control,” Rash said, “because as we’re putting water back into the aquifer, we don’t want to be degrading the quality of that water.”

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Dave Krietemeyer, the lead NRCS engineer for the Central Valley, said that the agency has more than a dozen of these pilot projects going on around Madera County. NRCS is also working on a few projects in Tulare County and is expanding to Fresno.

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Whether NRCS methods will be effective will take years to tell, cautioned Norris, as they study the benefits during the next three or four years. “Maybe they don’t have an effect at all,” Norris said. “Maybe they’re a waste of time.”

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Why federal involvement could help Central Valley farmers

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Though tackling the issue of groundwater replenishment is new for the NRCS, the agency that got its start during the 1930s Dust Bowl crisis has a long history of working with agricultural producers to provide technical and cost-sharing assistance as they confront challenges.

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There is a history of federal collaboration having a positive impact on the Central Valley’s water issue.

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The Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project, which runs 400 miles from the Cascade Range to the Kern River, delivers water to agricultural producers, homes, factories and environmental centers in the Central Valley and Bay Area. Construction on it began in the late 1930s, with many updates over the past several decades, to protect against both water shortages and floods. It delivers a lot of the Central Valley’s water today, though it has also suffered shortages during the drought.

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The NRCS groundwater-recharge pilot hopes to make a dent in the daunting depletion. The new pilot took a few years of planning to develop practices with actual implementation starting last year with farmers like Peters.

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For Peters, the NRCS is taking on 85% of the costs for the construction of 20 acres of on-farm recharge and 20 acres of basin, she said. The local Madera Irrigation District, which formed a groundwater sustainability agency in 2016, is covering the rest, she said.

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In addition to the risk of contaminating aquifers, another potential pitfall of this pilot is that the impact on groundwater levels will be too small to justify the cost and effort.

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However, if it does work, the NRCS could lobby to add groundwater-recharge projects to their catalog of services.

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“If we can show the evidence that it’s effective and that we can use it within our programs,” said Rash, “then we would be able to say, ‘Okay, now we have sort of a full-fledged practice standard here that we could then offer more widely outside of this pilot area.’”

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