California farmers are hopeful Trump administration will deliver more water to fields

Associated Press

Since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump has been talking about immigration, border security and government efficiency.

But in California farm country, his comments about water are also getting top attention.

The Golden State grows three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of its vegetables, largely thanks to a complex network of dams and canals that funnel water to the state’s fertile Central Valley.

In recent years, farmers have faced more limits on how much water they can access from this network because of environmental concerns, as well as on how much groundwater they can pump after years of overuse and drought.

Now, farmers are hoping the second Trump administration will ensure more stable water flows to their fields from the federally managed Central Valley Project and a plan for future water supplies. Trump recently posted on his Truth Social platform a criticism of the “rerouting of MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER A DAY FROM THE NORTH OUT INTO THE PACIFIC OCEAN, rather than using it, free of charge, for the towns, cities, & farms dotted all throughout California.”

“It is the number one issue,” said Jason Phillips, chief executive of the Friant Water Authority, which represents more than a dozen irrigation districts serving a large swath of the crop-rich valley. “You only need labor and you only need the products and the equipment and everything else to grow food if you have water.”

California relies on water supplies from the Central Valley Project and the state-run State Water Project. The federal project provides 5 million acre-feet of water to farms each year and 600,000 acre-feet to cities, as well as water to maintain water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides critical habitat to fish and wildlife.

During the prior Trump administration, government officials issued rules to allow for a greater flow of water to California farms.

The move was blasted by environmental groups. The Biden administration pushed back on those decisions and has been working on new rules aimed at balancing farming with protections for endangered wildlife such as the delta smelt, a tiny fish that is an indicator of the health of California’s waterways, and Chinook salmon.

In recent years, California farmers said federal water allocations have been more limited than they feel is necessary after two years of ample rain boosted the state’s reservoirs. The state previously grappled with a yearslong drought that in 2022 saw the driest January-to-March period in at least a century, with scientists saying weather whiplash will likely become more common as the planet warms.

That is a big concern of environmentalists and commercial fishermen, who want to see less water diverted to agriculture and more flowing to the delta. Salmon fishing has been banned off the California coast for the past two years because of dwindling stocks, and critics say Trump’s prior decisions moving water away from salmon-spawning areas are to blame.

“They delivered all the cold water behind Shasta Dam. It literally cooked the baby salmon before they were hatched,” said Barry Nelson, policy advisor to the Golden State Salmon Association, a nonprofit focused on restoring California salmon. “Math is a brutal master, and we’ve hit physical limits on the amount of water we can take from the Bay delta, and the sign of that is the collapse of the ecosystem.”

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a long-time Trump critic, recently called on California lawmakers to gear up ahead of another Trump presidency to safeguard the state’s progressive policies.

Environmental advocates, however, contend Newsom has not done enough to improve the situation in the delta for fish and wildlife. During Trump’s prior administration, Newsom opposed his rules for water flows, filing a legal challenge, but since then put forth his own rules, which Jon Rosenfield, San Francisco Baykeeper’s science director, said “were never that much different.”

Competing demands on California’s water have led to numerous battles over who gets how much. Advocates for fishermen, environmental interests and farmers all say more must be done to shore up future water supplies. But what that looks like depends on who is asked, with proposed solutions spanning from more conservation to expanding water storage to technological upgrades.

Aubrey Bettencourt, who oversaw Department of Interior water policy during the prior Trump administration, said she would like to see the system updated to respond to swings in climate rather than setting water releases based on the calendar. One of the issues, she said, is not how much water you get but knowing how much water you will get.

“It makes it very hard to plan not just as a farmer but as a city manager,” she said. “I would expect an emphasis on restoring operational certainty.”

The incoming Trump administration has discussed a series of economic policies that could also affect agriculture, including tariffs that could wind up affecting some exports and push up input costs for growers, according to a recent Rabobank report.

But when it comes to water, many farmers in California are hopeful.

Daniel Errotabere, a third-generation farmer and previous Westlands Water District president whose family grows tomatoes, garlic and almonds, is among them. As California ramps up limits on groundwater pumping, it is even more important to ensure a stable flow of surface water to grow the food the country is counting on, he said. Farmers have had to fallow fields and often don’t plant as much as they could because of water uncertainty, he said.

“If electricity was delivered this way there’d be a revolt,” Errotabere said. “This is not any way to operate resources.”