Landowners in the Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin have been fighting major agriculture producers, Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms, for their water rights.
Everyone in the basin was on track to cut water usage until the carrot growers filed an adjudication in court against every landowner in the basin, including the school district, temporarily halting the cutback, and essentially leaving the courts with the decision on who gets water rights in the basin.
The Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin was designated as one of 21 basins or subbasins in California that are in a state of critical overdraft. Local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSA), agencies under the California Department of Water Resources, are responsible for creating a Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP) to outline how basins throughout the state will become sustainable by 2040. Those plans then get updated every five years.
In 2017, the Cuyama Basin GSA Board of Directors, that included a representative from both Grimmway and Bolthouse, approved a plan to cut water usage by about 5% per year, but the corporations filed the adjudication, a move that many in the basin are calling a stalling tactic to allow the carrot producers to continue pumping as much water as they want.
The Cuyama Basin has lost a massive amount of water in the last 25 years due to the pumping of water for various reasons; nearly 700,000 acre-feet worth, the equivalent of about 228 billion gallons of water that hasn’t been replenished, that’s according to a Cuyama Basin annual groundwater report. Residents are worried their water rights could be stripped away from them and given to the carrot producers. If that happens, the people of Cuyama believe their water could eventually run out, their property could become worthless and their land could become unlivable.
“You can imagine how scary that is. I mean, where there’s no water, there’s no life,” said Jacob Furstenfeld, a Cuyama resident of about three decades and ranch foreman for Walking U Ranch.
If you look across the countryside of the Cuyama Valley, dry and arid conditions turn the hillsides brown for the majority of the year. But right off Highway 166, luscious, green fields are loaded with crops, while water pumps during the hottest days of the summer. Two of the largest carrot producers in the world, Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms, have been pumping a majority of water in the basin and farming the land for decades, according to the Cuyama Community Services District Board Director, Deborah Williams.
“It's in the 80% range,” she said.
Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms both have wells more than 1,000 feet deep. A report from the U.S. Geological Survey from 2013 found that the water being pumped from that depth was roughly 11,000- to 31,000-years-old, meaning it would likely take thousands of years to replenish.
Bolthouse responded to KSBY regarding the adjudication via statement saying that the company is committed to adhering to a 5% per year interim reduction in water usage in 2023 and 2024 as contemplated in the GSP.
The statement went on to say: “California law requires that all landowners in a basin that is being adjudicated be included in the comprehensive adjudication action. This statutory requirement cannot be waived and is necessary for a court determination of all water users’ water rights. A water user in the basin risks losing their water rights if they do not participate in the adjudication.”
In order to participate in the adjudication and have any say in how water rights are distributed, landowners must either represent themselves, which is unlikely to happen in most cases, or obtain legal representation, which has been extremely costly to many already, including the school district.
“I'm not a water expert, that's why we hired an attorney to help us with that,” said Alfonso Gamino, superintendent/principal of Cuyama Joint Unified School District. “It's about 25 or 26 grand. How much more after that? I don’t know.”
The Cuyama Community Services District (CCSD) is also part of the adjudication, meaning they needed representation in court.
“Our lawyer fees aren't quite as high as it could be, but we're estimating $45,000 to $50,000 for the next budget year,” said Williams. “We're figuring that they're costing the people who get water from the district an extra $22 to $23 a month just to support the legal fees.”
It’s been an expensive venture for some landowners.
“Some have paid $150,000 to this date, since they were sued, on lawyer fees, to $10,000 a month,” said Furstenfeld.
Furstenfeld says if the corporations get a favorable outcome in the courts, this could ruin the people of the basin’s livelihood.
Nearly 100% of water usage in the Cuyama Basin comes from groundwater, meaning there are no reservoirs and little water imported for usage. Once the water is gone, it’s gone.
Because of the adjudication between the corporation and landowners of the Cuyama Basin, residents are boycotting carrots made by those producers. Click here to find out more.
Grimmway Farms did not respond to requests for comment.
Here is a list of carrot products produced by Grimmway Farms:
Cal-Organic
Bunny-Luv
Bunny-Luv Organic
