(somber music) - [Narrator] Production funding for Tapped Out 2, a Valley PBS original documentary, provided by Harris Ranch Inn and Restaurant.

Escape to a place that's closer than you think with an experience that feels worlds away.

Harris Ranch Inn and Restaurant, where the West unwinds.

And by Sierra Valley Almonds.

From their natural farms to your healthy heart.

Sierra Valley Almonds is proud to support Valley Public Television and the stories of agriculture across California's San Joaquin Valley.

(solemn music) - Unfortunately, in the environment that we're in, really probably since the late 1980s, we now have a situation where I don't want to talk to you because you watch the purple golf ball channel and I watch the green golf ball channel.

And this is how it's come.

It's most unfortunate.

And so there are small groups of people who have managed to design the biggest megaphones, (solemn violin music) and it drowns out the grinding day-to-day work that people who are looking for solutions are actually working on now.

(solemn violin music continues) - Our country, if you look at the Constitution, the founders, much of our history was based on the idea that accessible land for a majority of the population would have beneficial attributes for the citizenry.

Now, we have 1% of Americans are on a farm.

(solemn violin music continues) - So the question comes down to who's regulating the water, and what takes priority to this region that's actually feeding the United States?

- During that time of working in fisheries, I did gain a really great understanding of how the salmon are sort of existing in the ecosystem that is here today and what a lot of their problems are.

Some which people know, which are obvious, and some which actually weren't very obvious to the public because they'd actually never been officially documented or studied, or even, I don't know that people actually wanted to address them.

(solemn violin music continues) - Can we capture all the water underground that we need, or is there gonna be a point at which reservoirs are needed in addition to groundwater?

That equation comes down to how much water is there relative to our demand.

- We do not need to be dependent on other countries to grow our food, but we're making it so difficult to do here that that's the path we're on.

- When you're talking about water, fundamentally, I think you need to ask a simple question out of Sacramento that says what does our legislature believe is the best use of the water of the State of California?

- There is a narrative, a theme that all these greedy people planted all these water-guzzling almonds, but if you look at the per acre foot requirement of an almond, it's not that much different than a peach or a plum or a canning tomato or a grape.

They're all within the variety of three acre feet per year.

- In the last couple of decades, we've seen more pressure on our groundwater in places that were never irrigated before.

We have tens of thousands of irrigated acres that we didn't have here in this county 30 years ago.

- If you look at history, most any civilization that has had intense irrigated agriculture has failed.

- Well, you see on the stock market, when you have a handful of people controlling all the things, it ends up really hurting the small guys.

(solemn music continues) (machine humming) - My name's Edward Baradian.

I'm with H&B Drilling and Sons.

We're a fairly new company on the reverse and mud drilling, been in business eight years.

Although we are third generation drillers, we were specialized in hard rock granite drilling.

We work here in the valley, San Joaquin Valley, all the way from Bakersfield as far north as Sacramento.

We specialize in large diameter ag wells, domestic house wells, and we still do hard rock granite drilling.

It's so interesting to drill in God's earth.

It really is.

We've drilled through everything that you can imagine.

It's a rewarding job, especially at the end.

We're there to get the people water.

And when we develop and we have a beautiful well in the end, you can't beat the feeling.

(somber music) - I run a firm called Harrison Co. We have about 25 people.

We advise family-owned businesses with a focus on the family farmer.

My background, I've been doing mergers and acquisitions for 26 years.

I spent a large percent of my time in New York, working in the M&A group at Credit Suisse First Boston.

At the time, they were the number one M&A firm in the world, so I had some of the best M&A mentors that ever lived.

So it was good training, but got tired of New York.

Got tired of working on big deals.

Got tired of doing deals with publicly-traded companies.

And my passion is working, advising, and really defending family-owned businesses.

'Cause there's really no one else out there that does that in our profession.

'Cause a lot of the investment banking firms, they wanna do deals for private equity or for large publicly-traded companies 'cause there's an element of continuity of revenue.

And our view is no one's actually out there defending the family-owned business or the family farmer.

So we set up our firm with the sole focus of if you're an entrepreneur or family-run business, we are here to defend you.

And there's some nuances to the profession where that actually gets important, where you actually don't have conflicts where you're advising the family and then advising the buyer.

We never advise the buyer, only the family.

- [Interviewer] So what's happening to the family farmer in the San Joaquin Valley?

- It's a great question.

And if you look at the family farmer and the Central Valley or what we called the 100 Mile Circle.

The 100 Mile Circle, if you take a compass, center it on Fresno with a 100-mile radius swing a circle, you touch Bakersfield to the South, Salinas to the West and Modesto to the North.

This region relative to any other growing region in the world is more prolific.

And the data is staggering.

So that 100 Mile Circle accounts for over 25% of all US organic produce.

More milk than the state of Wisconsin.

14 times the amount of peaches than the peach state of Georgia.

10 times the number of oranges than the state of Florida.

Has more Class I soil than anywhere in the world.

75% of all almonds eaten globally come from the region.

100% percent of the raisins eaten in the United States.

95% of pistachios.

The data is staggering, but the 100 Mile Circle accounts for less than 1% of US land mass, but accounts for 50% of all produce, fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States.

And if the a 100 Mile Circle was its own country, if you exclude grain and wheat, it would be the 11th largest ag-producing nation in the world.

(tense music) - My name is Sean Boyd.

I am a full-time geography instructor at Fresno City College and that's in the Division of Math, Science and Engineering.

I'm also a lecturer part-time in the Department of Geography and City and Regional planning at Fresno State.

You might say that I'm going through the 12-step program for former TV meteorologists.

Basically speaking, a place that is defined as a desert is a place where average annual precipitation is below average annual evapotranspiration, meaning more water going out than water coming in.

That's the basic definition of a desert.

Back in the late 19th century and revised at least twice in the early to mid 20th century, there was a German geographer by the name of Wladimir Köppen.

He was actually of Russian and German ancestry both.

And he developed a very simple system for classifying the world's climate that is still widely used today and that we teach in school.

Basically, the first five letters of the German alphabet, which are the same as the first five letters of the English alphabet.

The A climates are the tropical winterless climates.

The B climates are the deserts, and there are two classifications, arid or semiarid.

The C climates are the mid-latitude, milder climates with winters not too harsh.

Some of the C climates have precipitation in all months.

Some of the C climates, like parts of Northern California, have a summer dry season.

The D climates are the long, yucky winters and the brief summers.

Think Chicago, think Montreal, think Moscow.

The E climates are the polar ice caps.

So those are the basic five classifications.

Within the B climate range, meaning the arid climates, there are two classifications.

There are what we might call the true deserts.

Think Yuma, think Death Valley.

And the semiarid deserts.

Think Fresno.

Basically, on the valley floor south of Stockton, the San Joaquin Valley, the Central and Southern San Joaquin Valley, is a semiarid desert where average annual evaporation and the proxy for that, the measure of that would be temperatures, exceeds average annual precipitation.

So by that definition, the Central and Southern San Joaquin Valley and the adjacent lowest foothills are essentially, climatologically, a desert.

- So the farmer within the 100 Mile Circle has a lot of headwinds, and they can't port their business elsewhere.

It's not as though they can follow a lot of people that are taking their entrepreneurial businesses and moving to Texas or what have you.

So they have to deal with what's in front of 'em.

So the positive is there's a phenomenal food and ag infrastructure in Central California.

You have what is viewed as relatively unique climates, where you have this Mediterranean climates of warm, dry summers, cool, wet winters.

We talked about the Class I soil.

We talked about the legacy of families that understand ag, but the challenges they have are regulatory, cost, and access to water.

So just touching on water first, California's in a major drought right now, but if you look at the 2016-2017 year, that period had more rainfall than any time since 1895.

By 2019, it was another good year.

By the end of 2019, all the reservoirs in California were at or over 100% capacity.

So here we are two years later, and we're back in the period of a major drought.

So the farmers of California, the farmers within the 100 Mile Circle, have these headwinds associated with getting access to water.

So the question comes down to who's regulating the water and what takes priority to this region that's actually feeding the United States.

And there's a lot of data out there.

Our firm's not in the business of setting policy or recommending policy, but there's some staggering stats out there.

80 billion gallons or more, that's billion with a B, is being used to flush out to try to preserve the Delta smelt.

And UC Davis has said, this is data from UC Davis, but they said they have found four Delta smelt since 2018.

And 80 billion gallons of water being used to preserve the Delta smelt.

Now, I think we as a country need to make a determination as to what's more important.

And I don't know how important the Delta smelt is, but if you think about what's going on right now, really from what happened with COVID, MERS, SARS, everyone in the medical community and most business executives recognize that there's gonna be another pandemic.

It's inevitable.

And if you look what happened in COVID, a lot of countries inevitably shut down their export market.

So if the challenges for the California farmer and the growers within the 100 Mile Circle, which really are feeding this country, if the headwinds get to great, and we become an import nation of ag, the question is what happens the next time there's a pandemic.

- [Interviewer] As we started to use, quote-unquote, modern technology in the 1920s, let's say, with the first building of the CVP and the conveyance systems that followed that now make up the State Water Project and so on and so forth, is there a point at which we tipped the scale in the amount of water that's available to California to grow agriculture and the human population and the pressure on the environment, the use of that water put out of balance?

In other words, at some point, was it a good idea to grow agriculture in this desert?

Or was it in your opinion always a bad idea?

- It's a tough question to answer, but if you look at world history, any civilization that has ever in the long-term had irrigated agriculture as its sole mechanism for producing food, absent, of course, in ancient civilizations they didn't have the transportation system that we have to basically take food from where it's grown thousands of miles to another place.

But absent that, if you look at history, most any civilization that has had intense irrigated agriculture has failed.

We learned in grade school about Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers.

That was the Tigris and Euphrates.

We got hammered that in what, the sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, whatever it was.

And that today is essentially the sovereign nation of Iraq.

In the Southern portion of Iraq, where those two rivers meet the sea essentially, that soil is so tainted you can't even grow a weed there because of thousands of years of irrigated agriculture, which has basically leeched the soil of essential nutrients.

And since it's highly probable that area of the world when sea levels were much higher was underwater then you have an ancient marine environment, which already had salt in the soil naturally.

And salt in the soil and in the water plus crops, they're just not a good combination.

There aren't a whole lot of crops you can grow in soil that's salty and irrigating it with water that is also slightly saline.

(tense music continues) - [Interviewer] The business of farming is getting tough.

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] These regulations that keep coming down are tough.

Generationally, the old man's dying.

The 40-year-old kid's taking over.

The hedge fund guy's coming in, offering them 30,000 bucks an acre.

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] Give you a 401k.

I'll mitigate your tax liability.

You still get to farm, and we'll just take over.

And then when it's time for that hedge fund to realize the value of that deal, then the farm's gone.

- Yeah.

- And that family farmer dies.

And it goes to a larger, that writ is selling a lot of times to the bigger farmers that are just growing.

So I'm going on a big sweep here.

We're on a trajectory right now.

A lot of people are concerned that we're gonna see a dramatic decrease in the variety of crops that we're growing because we're gonna be just growing pistachios and almonds.

So talk about, kind of repack what that means.

Let's start at the family farm level.

What does it mean to the consumer if we lose a diversity of crops?

- If you look at the 100 Mile Circle, as of today, there's 250 different commodities that come out of that region, and the majority are family-owned farmers.

There are no publicly-traded companies.

There are a handful of farms that have private equity or institutional backing.

But most are first to third generational families that are in farming.

And they elect to be in farming 'cause they're passionate about the industry.

They like providing jobs for their employees, and they like providing for their families.

And this is not a path, for the most part, to get on the cover of Forbes or take a company public.

It's a passion about an industry.

So with the cost of regulation, the cost of operation, the inability to access cost-effective labor, and the inevitable increase in prices of the commodity that's being sold, it actually makes the import market more competitive.

And if you look at across asset classes and across commodity classes as well, there's a handful of examples out there.

So one is that within the 100 Mile Circle, citrus production has dropped by 25%.

In the same period of time, this is over the past 15 years, the import market into the United States for citrus has increased 4X.

So you think about why is this happening?

And it really comes down to it's the cost of doing business within the Central Valley of California, within the 100 Mile Circle, and the cost that the farmer incurs, even though they've gotten more efficient.

So if you look at the 100 Mile Circle has provided 50% of fruits, vegetables and nuts to the US consumer for the past 60 years.

That stat has been relatively consistent.

Over that same period of time, the amount of water that they've used does not increase.

It's been the same amount of water.

So you think about that, over a 45-year period, the California population has increased from 20 million to 40 million.

US population has increased by 100 million.

And this region continues to feed the United States without incurring additional water.

So they've actually gotten materially more efficient with the utilization of resources, but the cost of regulation goes up.

And there's a lot of data out there.

One, if you look at the cost of regulation in the Salinas Valley, UC Davis came out with the stat that it's up 800% over the past 15 years.

So those costs, even though efficiencies are being built into operation, has to be passed along to the consumer.

So the ripple effect of that really is the family farmer's gonna go away.

(solemn music) (gate rattling) - [Farmer] Well, I'll start from the beginning beginning.

- [Interviewer] Yeah, please.

- So my dad was an almond farmer, and at one point while I was still in graduate school, I had this eyeopening experience where like, "I need to go back and farm, this is what I need to do."

And so I called my dad and I said, "I really wanna come back and farm, Dad."

And he's like, "Okay, well, your brother's here "and you guys should be partners."

And so at that point, my brother and I started looking for land, and this was in 1997.

And so this was the first piece that we found.

Growing up, our house wasn't actually on any of the ranches.

It was out in the country and really central to all the ones that my dad worked.

But I did spend a lot of time going from ranch to ranch with my dad, especially when he was irrigating during the summer.

Back then, you could ride in the back of a pickup truck.

You didn't have to have a seatbelt on.

So I was really familiar with what it took to farm.

So going forward, when I was in high school, there just weren't a lot of women in ag then.

And I don't think my dad ever thought that that was something that I would do.

He thought my brother would be the one who would come up and do the farming.

I think that was always expected because he was a male.

And so I just went off, and I'm a very sciencey person, to go and get a degree in biology.

I had no idea what that was gonna lead to, but I did it.

And I went off to UC Santa Cruz.

And then I got into working with the US Forest Service and through that UC Davis, and then went off to get a master's in fisheries of all things.

And when I was completing that master's is when I realized I need to go back to the farm.

And it's not because I couldn't get a job.

In fact, I did get a job once I got back here.

And I thought, "I can do both things."

It was just there was a calling back to the farm.

Like this is how I'm supposed to live.

I'm supposed to grow things.

(solemn music) When I was here, working in fisheries here for two years, I actually worked with a private consulting firm, but they were contracted out to do work, mitigation work for irrigation districts.

And so we worked a lot in, kind of in tandem with what Cal Fish and Game were doing on the rivers.

And so we did a lot of the monitoring.

And we did a lot of the fish tag, the smolts tag and release studies that were going on here.

During that time of working in fisheries, I did gain a really great understanding of how the salmon are sort of existing in the ecosystem that is here today and what a lot of their problems are.

Some which people know, which are obvious, and some which actually weren't very obvious to the public because they'd actually never been officially documented or studied, or even, I don't know that people actually wanted to address them.

(solemn music) One of the things that I discovered back then was that we were radio tracking smolts.

We were the very first people to be radio tracking these little, the smolts going out to the ocean.

And we put radio tag plants in them.

And then we track them as they went downstream.

And as it turned out, all of a sudden we started tracking them going upstream.

Well, they're a smolt, they can't swim eight miles upstream.

So one of the things we discovered with the fish that were going upstream is we went in there and we electro-fished and it turns out they were in the belly of a striped bass.

And not just a striped bass, but like a giant striped bass.

So we documented that, and it became very clear to me that we had a food web dynamic problem here, that there was probably a lot of predation going on with these smolts going out to the ocean.

And this was back in 2000.

This was a long time ago that we saw this.

And at the time it really wasn't anything that anybody really wanted to address.

In fact, I wrote it up in my report, but I don't...

It was edited out.

- [Interviewer] It was edited out.

- Well, it didn't make it in the final report.

- Gotcha.

- And I didn't do the editing.

- [Interviewer] What do you think it's gonna take for consumers with regards to supporting agriculture over or in better moderation with environmental concerns like we're seeing now with wokeism and the disintegration of crime and the DAs that don't put these people in jail?

So you're seeing a backlash to the post-George Floyd, Defund The Police days.

What similar thing are we gonna have to see in agriculture?

Is it gonna be a $20 cantaloupe?

Is that what's gonna fire people up?

- Well today, if you go into a local supermarket 10 miles radius of where I'm standing, and we're right in the center of the San Joaquin Valley's supposed bread basket of the world, you won't find green grapes for 79 cents a pound as you did just three years ago.

They'll be $2.59.

You won't see a peach for 99 cents.

They'll be 2.99.

And they'll be even much higher in Palo Alto where I work or in the Bay Area.

And so why is that?

And the fact is that it's kind of a perfect storm.

So if you have these restrictions on water, and you force people to pay for pumping, or you charge exorbitant prices for the acre foot allotment, or if you have more and more regulations.

I can remember when we used to pack fruit in the '80s, we had three or four regulations and we kept stapling them.

And finally that packing shed over there was just full of regulations.

And labor now, nobody talks about the minimum wage because it's irrelevant in this labor-short market.

People who are working picking grapes, it's now an art.

It's almost like electrician or a plumber.

They're getting $25 an hour.

So all of that has conspired to be very expensive.

And the consumer is asked to pay for that at a time of a stagflation.

So that is one thing, that food now is exorbitant.

And that had not been true, and we're not used to it.

It's a new phenomenon.

It's complicated.

It's partly the demand that came after COVID lockdown.

It's partly the scarcity of labor, but it's also the regulations in California.

It's part of a larger narrative that what changes people politically is not just an ideology but sustainability.

So when you talk to Californians today, they'll say the following, "I can't afford to fill up my pickup 30 gallons "at 6.50 a gallon.

"I just can't do it."

I guess what I'm saying is that there's a sense in California that nothing works.

And so what we're seeing is that the left has institutional power in California.

By that I mean, they have political power, they have Hollywood, they have professional sports.

They have all the great universities.

Five of the biggest, most prestigious research universities of the top 30 in the world are in California.

Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, USC, UCLA.

And they have all of that power.

Corporate power, big tech.

It's the global center of big tech, but they don't have the people.

And the people are starting to catch up and saying, "You guys have an agenda that is based on the simple premise "that you're never subject to the consequences "of your own ideology.

"You want to zone us out of housing.

"You live in big mansions.

"You think walls don't work on the border.

"You got a huge wall around your house.

"You think 30 cents a kilowatt is affordable for a guy "living in Fresno when he has to go "to Walmart to keep cool?

"It's 75 degrees year round where you live.

"You think that we can't have charter schools?

"Your kids are all in Sacred Heart "or Castilleja or the Menlo School."

So you're starting to see the left unbridled.

And they have some very strange historical ideas, as they always do.

It's kind of like the proverbial Dr. Frankenstein.

And they created this monster, and now it's run amok.

And they can't stop it and they don't wanna stop it yet, but they're starting to think, "You know what?

"I can't insulate myself from my own creation."

(tense piano music) (somber music) - I'm a generalist in this realm.

I'm not an expert.

But when the Bureau of Reclamation was created and we had the Reclamation Act of 1902, and eventually about 30 years later the construction of what we call the Central Valley Project began in the 1930s and 1940s, the idea was to support family farms in the Eastern San Joaquin Valley, where the soil was good and water was more plentiful.

And of course, flood control was the primary thing, but secondarily, the support of agriculture.

What was the definition of a family farm in the early 20th century?

Well, the federal government said, "We'll subsidize water to you so long "as your farm doesn't exceed 160 acres."

So the idea was to promote family farming, not to promote large-scale, plantation-scale, industrial-scale farming like in the Western San Joaquin Valley.

Western San Joaquin Valley soils were never, ever suited for Eastern San Joaquin Valley-style agriculture.

Period, full stop.

But a few people in the 1940s and 1950s started to formulate this idea at the state level in California.

How can we, State of California, circumnavigate the 160-acre limit on subsidized water?

Well, we'll build our own water project.

How do we do that?

We pass a bond.

So in November of 1960, in that general election, when JFK was barely elected president, a fellow by the name of Edmund G. Brown Sr., Pat Brown as he was known, he was in his second year in his first term as governor, pushed and barely got passed the Water Bond in November of 1960.

That was the seed for financing the State Water Project.

And then in 1962, JFK came to Western Merced County in the coast ranges, and said, basically, "Thank you for inviting me here "so I can blow up the valley."

And they ignited the first dynamite charges to build the San Luis Reservoir, which was to be a holding tank essentially for water that would be transported there via the California aqueduct.

So that's all the State Water Project.

When the State Water Project was first designed, the scientists said, "First of all, "you probably shouldn't do this because the soils "in the Western San Joaquin Valley are not like the soils "in the Eastern San Joaquin Valley."

Firstly, it's an ancient marine environment.

There's selenium in the soils, and there's salts in those soils.

Secondly, there is a layer of almost impermeable clay, concrete, it's called Corcoran clay, underneath the soil, which then does not allow any water that you would use to irrigate your crops to actually percolate down into the aquifer.

And that Corcoran clay would then hold this tainted water, which was used to irrigate crops, which is full of pesticides and herbicides.

And it would just sit there.

So they had to design a mechanism to take that tainted water, drain it off and away from the field, and by gravity send it back to about Antioch in a canal that never got completed, called the San Luis Drain, where they would treat the water and dump it back into the delta system.

But that part of the system never got completed.

So the people in charge at the time back in the '60s and '70s said, "Well, let's just dump the water over here "in Western Merced County and create a wildlife reserve.

"How wonderful would that be?"

And so you had Kesterson.

In 1982, when state wildlife biologists were walking around that place, they didn't see any birds.

They didn't hear any croaking toads.

They looked at bird eggs and opened them up, and they had no eyes.

These birds that never would've hatched.

No beaks, deformed beaks, whatever it is because of the intense pesticide and herbicide use from all that tainted water that had nowhere to go.

You basically have a bathtub without a drain.

But during the 1970s and '80s, when the water was delivered to the West side via the California Aqueduct, and part of that deal, Edmund G. Brown, Sr. was a Northern Californian, but he had to do a deal with the devil, meaning the LADWP to put a carrot in there for them to get that bond passed in 1960.

We'll you give you guys on the other side of the Tehachapi some water too.

So that's how that thing got passed, but you now have a Superfund site with tainted soil that you had to deal with.

It took 'em almost a decade to haul that soil out of there.

So the Western San Joaquin Valley was never suited for Eastern San Joaquin Valley agriculture.

So the question you asked earlier, are there people that want farming to either completely go away and never happen?

Well, farming as we know it has to adapt.

There are gonna be parts of the Central and Western San Joaquin Valley, which probably will not be farmed anymore.

Not because of some tree-huggers putting regulations on farmers, but because the soil will become ultimately so tainted because of monoculture and continued irrigation, that you won't be able to grow anything in the soil anyway.

- [Interviewer] At what point does the environment start to be, in its use of its water through developed water systems, at what point does it get put under the scrutiny to say, "Well, you wanted all this water "to flush out the delta or save the smelt "or save the salmon smolts, how's that working out, guys?"

And if it's not working out, how much more water does ag really need from the flows in the Delta to sustain its growth?

- Yeah.

The problem is, on this water issue, that the environmentalists and a lot of the state university people, they have these agendas.

And it's kind of a 19th century agenda as if there is seven or 8 million people living in California, rather than 41.

Everybody would like a white water San Joaquin River, but that hasn't existed in decades if not half centuries.

So my point is that they want that, and they're not going to look at what you get from agriculture because they'll say, "Well, it's five or six or three or 10% of the economy.

"We've got big tech now."

Forget the fact that you can't eat Facebook or drink Twitter.

But the point I'm making is they don't wanna look at themselves in the mirror.

So there is research among dissident scientists that say, "Well, yes, the Delta smelt is the canary in the mine."

However, even before these radical droughts or cutbacks, we had a problem with the striped bass, and it was devouring these species, or we had a problem with, we never built the peripheral canal, so the pumps were eating them.

Or we had a problem with 30 municipal waste treatment plants in the Bay Area.

And they didn't quite achieve the levels of cleanliness that they promised.

And they counted on flushes to nullify their pollution.

So there were all these complexities that they didn't want to look at aside from the fact that when you talk to them, and I've talked to a lot of 'em, they didn't really understand what the West Side is 'cause that's what we're talking about.

We talk about cutoff water, we're not talking about here.

Because we have water from the Sierra Nevada, and we have droughts and it gets short, but the water table has gone on this farm from 50 to 90 feet.

It's not 1200.

So you can survive a drought.

The West Side was created in the 1960s through the California Water Project and the aqueduct.

And that percentage of farms that get that water has declined.

And those that do are paying astronomically to the point when you drive down I-5 you'll see almond orchards going out now because the water is more expensive than the crop will produce.

So my point is, so you get rid of all of that 5 million acres.

What do you have there?

Well, I can tell you what happens.

As a little boy, I used to go over there, and we would get alerts in our school.

"Be careful."

We'd get these dust storms, and there was a lot of valley fever and arid, dry windy places in the fall.

And there's sage-grouse and coyotes.

And there was nothing there.

It was a complete wasteland.

And whether you like agriculture or not, when I drive there once a week, I always take a different route.

I go through Fireball Road, Avenue 7.

I go through Manning Avenue.

I go through Mendota.

I even go down on 198, but it's always, it's verdant.

It's beautiful, it's planted, it's green.

And you're creating jobs for people.

And it's not monocrop.

There's a lot of different crops out there.

(somber violin music) (drill humming loudly) (solemn music) - Well, what I was told, I had a customer call me and told me that he heard on the radio that the governor had stopped issuing permits in a certain county for water wells.

I could see that happening, and if that does happen, what does that do to all the farmers in this valley, all the water, all the crops that are brought here?

This is San Joaquin Valley.

We are the food capital of the world.

We need our water to stay here, not to be sent down the road anywhere else.

But here first, and what's left we'll send down.

But we gotta take care of everything that's here or, houses aren't gonna feed us.

All these crops, I have pistachios behind me right now.

These pistachios here are stressed so hard, and they're alternate-bearing crop.

This year's his crop.

That pump in the background has not shut off.

Four months out of the last five years, that pump runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep this field alive.

That's not the water it needs to have a quality crop.

That's to keep it alive.

So if you start stopping permits or making more restrictions on 'em, what's that gonna do to us as a whole?

The people, the drillers, everybody?

It's gonna affect us.

It's gonna be a chain reaction going down is what's gonna happen.

It's gonna be nothing but problems.

So first off, we need to all get together.

We gotta get the dam built.

We need the water coming into this valley first.

I've seen it firsthand.

I've drilled hundreds of holes out here all over, and I could see the aquifer, the water table.

You ask any driller in this valley that's been here, and there's been guys drilling a lot longer than I have.

I've been on it every single day for eight years straight, nonstop.

Every whole I've drilled, I know the areas, the different aquifers.

I could see it depleting and depleting right in front of my eyes.

So we gotta do something.

One person's not gonna be able to do it.

We're gonna have to get together and all of us do it.

(solemn music) - So reservoirs still play an incredibly vital part in California's water supply and distribution system.

Short of building new ones, the existing ones provide essential services to us all.

They capture water during snow melt and rainfall.

They keep that water behind the reservoir for dry periods.

They also are used for flood management so that when large rain events occur or large heat spell brings in melting snow, we're not wiping out our communities and farms downstream.

The trick is to rethink the use of the reservoirs as part of the overall storage system, so that they can meter out that water.

Not necessarily just for irrigation and community needs, but to actually meter it out to put it back in the ground.

Right now, most reservoirs are kept as full as they can be kept into the summer.

And also at the end of the summer on a wet year, water's held in them to the last minute before a storm and then released.

We could reoperate our reservoirs in ways that release that water more slowly so that it could be picked up in the fall, such as the fields behind me here, where recharge could occur in the fall when it's not a flood control risk time of year.

And that water could be let out of the reservoirs lower down to capture the rainfall and snow melt of the following winter period.

So reservoirs are the temporary holding system.

Groundwater's the ultimate storage location because of its much larger capacity.

(solemn music continues) - So the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, I'll refer to it as Sigma, state legislation that was passed a couple of years ago with the goal of protecting our groundwater here in the State of California.

From someone on the coast, and we are in a coastal county here in San Luis Obispo, we've always depended on our groundwater.

We don't really have delivered water.

And I'll say that with one caveat.

We do have a pipe coming off of the state water line.

So we have, the county here, has access to the State Water Project, but we've used it very little.

We've had no issues really, not like we see in other places in California of water shortages.

We have our drought cycles just like everybody else, but we haven't outgrown the ability to ensure a safe water supply to our incorporated cities.

Otherwise, the agricultural industry kind of evolves around the water availability.

So if you were going to put in an irrigated crop, you would find a part of this county where the water was plentiful and available.

If you were dry farming, or if you owned property that the water wasn't available, you dry farmed.

And it was as simple as that, and it took care of itself.

In the last couple of decades, we've seen more pressure on our groundwater in places that were never irrigated before.

And as a matter of fact, the irrigated, especially with the grapes and the wine industry moving in, we have tens of thousands of irrigated acres that we didn't have here in this county 30 years ago, all depending on groundwater.

- As we face water restrictions, farmers are now starting to be part of the solution to securing their own water future, by capturing water when it's available on rivers and putting it back in the ground underneath their lands.

So essentially they're taking water storage into their own hands and storing it.

Rather than waiting for someone to manage or change or build new reservoirs or build a new canal, they're making use of that water today.

So on this farm here, what you see is a farmer who's willing to take water that's being released from the reservoirs on the Mokelumne River, in partnership with the North San Joaquin Water Conservation District, and moving that water onto his land onto really sandy soils, where it can percolate back down into the aquifer, so he can pump it in dry years.

So he's really basically using it like a bank account.

He's taking the income that's available this year, storing it in his savings account.

He can pump it back out when he needs it in the dry years.

As farmers have become more ingenious about how to conserve water, they've shift to drip irrigation systems, micro-irrigation systems, and essentially cut off the recharge that they were already doing.

So we're now returning farmers to a practice that they've always done.

And over irrigating the land purposefully now to store water in ways that exceed the amount that was being stored under former just irrigation management.

- I don't think anyone knows the magnitude of how prolific this region is.

And it's one thing to say a lot of commodities are grown in Central California, but to put it in context that it's the most prolific growing region in the world.

I don't think many people know that.

And then two, doing what we do, advising companies on mergers and acquisitions and raising capital, we've seen the data of a lot of different growing operations in the United States and really in the world.

So we have a good sense on yield and cost.

And it's such a unique region, but the disconnect at times is that it doesn't have a unified voice.

Salinas is not partnering with Bakersfield.

It's not partnering with Fresno.

It's not partnering with Modesto.

And it's such a small region that our hope was by writing this report, we would create a unified voice, put in context for people how prolific this region is, and actually hopefully get the attention of lawmakers, both at the state level and the federal level, that this is a treasure that needs to be preserved.

And somebody within California and some people in the federal government need to step up to make sure that it is.

Because you're right, what's gonna happen is you're gonna see a decrease in the number of commodities.

You can't outsource this production to anywhere else in the United States, so it has to become an import product.

And then we as a nation need to make a determination if we want our fruits and vegetables and nuts coming from other countries.

The number one ag-producing nation in the world is China.

Do we want to import our commodities from China?

What happens during the next pandemic?

If all the countries shut down, where are we gonna get our produce?

- [Interviewer] Or the next Cold War that may develop with China.

- That's right, or the next Cold War that happens with any of the countries that we don't get along with.

So as to how all this plays out, (clears throat) the family farmer has unbelievable headwinds right now.

We know many family farmers right now that are just selling parcels of land to pay their bill because they can't make money farming because of the regulatory cost, and they can't compete with the import market.

You're seeing issues in the supply chain as well, where a lot of the players in certain commodities are sending through price increases.

And you're starting to see that show up on shelf right now.

So the ripple effect of that really at the consumer level is middle income people or wealthier people will be able to afford it and continue eating healthier diets, but the lower income people will not.

So where all this shakes out is that at some point in time, there'll have to be a breaking point where the region, the 100 Mile Circle in Central California, steps in as a unified voice, and hopefully we can find someone to be that unified voice, and spend the time in Sacramento.

And also the federal government probably needs to get involved because this is not a hobby.

This is not some internet or social media thing that we could live without.

We're talking about the highest quality food supply of anywhere in the world.

(somber piano music) - It's human nature to not solve a problem until the problem gets to the point where-- - Till you have to.

- Until you have to, but wouldn't it be grand if people would listen to each other.

And unfortunately in the environment that we're in, really probably since the late 1980s, we now have a situation where I don't want to talk to you because you watch the purple golf ball channel and I watch the green golf ball channel.

And this is how it it's come.

It's most unfortunate.

And so there are small groups of people who have managed to design the biggest megaphones.

And it drowns out the grinding day-to-day work that people who are looking for solutions are actually working on now.

Should there be no farming in the San Joaquin Valley?

I certainly would not advocate that.

And I know that you've probably run into people who have that opinion, but that's just not practical.

This is a place that was made for farming, to some extent.

But we have to be smarter about how we do it.

And while many farmers are reluctant to talk about climate change as a factor because it may alienate them from their base.

They know in their heart, they know that climate change is a big player.

And they know that if they don't adapt in some way, that farming as we know it in some places may cease to exist the way we know it now.

- The Delta smelt, yeah, there are issues because you don't want it being...

It is an indicator species of the health of the Delta.

And I believe that's why they find it so important.

But there was all these reports of it being sucked up in the pumps, and yet they're really...

I never really got to look at that data directly.

That's just what we were told.

And so I took it at face value, but to me, I always wondered why are we not figuring out a better way than to take water out of the Delta?

And they're doing it now actually 20 years later.

If you look at what TID has done here in the valley up on the Tuolumne River.

Now, they're running pipes under the water, and it percolates down and they take it out that way.

And so the fish are never, the fish are never endangered because it's all taken out subsurface.

The science is what it is.

And really what it comes down is to people and what their motive is and what their goals are.

(sighs) It's difficult because you have the environmental end and then you have the agriculture end.

And we've always been pitted against each other.

And it's really unfortunate because actually we probably have some of the same goals.

A, we both want to survive.

And if it had been approached differently, and we had been working on it together.

Because farmers actually want solutions.

In fact, farmers are all about solutions.

But it came to be this thing wherein, on the environmental end, it was just always going to court.

And it seemed like all the money was being spent on lawyers and litigations and stopping something.

But no solutions were ever offered other than let's put more water down the river.

And I knew that was not gonna solve the problem because of what I had seen.

But let's come up with some real solutions.

Let's actually work together on this.

Okay, we can't go back to the way we were.

And I think you're disillusioned thinking that we can make things exactly the way they were before people were here.

People are here, and they're gonna stay here.

So we need to figure out and use all the tools that we have, whether that's technology or good science or thinking outside of the box, doing something different and going from there.

So that's where it needs to be.

Working together and thinking outside of the box, and really getting away from this idea that we need to return it to the way it was.

We are here.

We are humans, our very existence is an impact.

And so we should try to make it a good impact.

(chuckles) A true farmer would never want to degrade the land because that is their future.

(somber piano music) (engaging orchestral music) (solemn music) - [Narrator] Production funding for Tapped Out 2, a Valley PBS original documentary, provided by Harris Ranch Inn and Restaurant.

Escape to a place that's closer than you think with an experience that feels worlds away.

Harris Ranch Inn and Restaurant, where the West unwinds.

And by Sierra Valley Almonds.

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Sierra Valley Almonds is proud to support Valley Public Television and the stories of agriculture across California's San Joaquin Valley.