Behind the numbers of the San Joaquin Valley’s growing water crisis — and a regional plan to address it.
If you farm in the San Joaquin Valley, you already feel it. Wells are deeper than they used to be. Water deliveries are less reliable. The cost of water in a dry year can break a season before it starts. The gap between what you need and what shows up is growing.
If you manage water infrastructure, you are watching canals lose capacity to the same sinking ground that your predecessors built those canals to fix. The gap between what these systems were designed to deliver and what they can actually carry today is measured in feet of lost elevation and billions of dollars in repairs.
If you lead a community here, you know that the people who can least afford another water crisis are the ones closest to it. The gap between a working well and a dry tap is the difference between a healthy community and one that hollows out.
Everyone living and working in this Valley is feeling the gap between the water we have and the water we need. It’s a big gap, and it’s going to get bigger.
How much bigger? That depends on us.
Every year, the Valley pumps between 1.2 and 1.8 million acre-feet more groundwater than nature and infrastructure put back. When you add in declining surface water imports, rising temperatures that increase crop water demand, and unmet obligations to wildlife refuges, the total future shortfall grows to 2.4 to 3.0 million acre-feet per year. That’s the deficit the Valley must close to keep its economy, communities, and landscapes intact.
What the Gap Looks Like on the Ground
This is not an abstraction. The Friant-Kern Canal is already operating at half its designed capacity through its Middle Reach. The Delta-Mendota Canal and California Aqueduct are losing conveyance capacity. These canals are all critically needed to supply water to our farms and communities. Water managers are already working hard to find solutions, but these solutions take time, and they take money.
Subsidence isn’t new to the Valley. Sinking land was one of the reasons the state and federal governments invested in the canal system in the first place, to bring surface water to fertile land and take pressure off the aquifer. That strategy worked for decades. But the communities, infrastructure, and permanent crops that grew up around those deliveries mean the stakes of a second round of subsidence are far higher than they were then. Today, every inch of sinking ground threatens homes, roads, bridges, and the very canals that were built to solve the problem the first time.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Seven of the top 10 agricultural-producing counties in the nation are in this Valley. If the region reaches groundwater sustainability primarily through fallowing, consumers across the country will feel the impact.
With a fallowing approach, up to one million acres could come out of production, an estimated $7.2 billion in annual farm revenue and 85,000 jobs across agriculture, transportation, food processing, and the service economy that depends on all of them. And those impacts don’t stop at the Valley’s edge. Less production from one of the most fertile regions on earth means less domestic food supply and higher prices at grocery stores across the country.
For county and city governments, the math is equally alarming. Agriculture and its related industries account for roughly 14 percent of the Valley’s GDP and 17 percent of its employment. Researchers project that the loss of economic activity from unmitigated fallowing would cost local governments an estimated $242 million per year in reduced tax revenue. That’s money that funds schools, fire departments, road maintenance, and the public services that hold rural communities together. Agricultural property and sales taxes are among the most flexible revenue sources counties have, and they are the ones most directly at risk.
More than 300 disadvantaged communities, home to roughly 200,000 of the Valley’s most vulnerable residents, rely almost exclusively on groundwater that is already declining in both quantity and quality. When wells go dry or water fails to meet drinking standards, those communities have the fewest resources to respond.
The Clock is Ticking
Meanwhile, the 2040 SGMA compliance deadline does not move. As Groundwater Sustainability Agencies throughout the Valley continue to work towards balancing local water supply, time grows short, and fallowing is increasingly normalized in state policy conversations.
The state recognizes the urgency. DWR’s recently released Vision for the San Joaquin Valley which lays out a framework for coordinated investment in conveyance, recharge, and subsidence remediation, and that framework is a welcome step. But infrastructure strategy alone doesn’t tell the full story. The Vision is largely silent on the projected impacts to the farmworkers, small communities, and local economies that will bear the weight of this transition.
What happens to the jobs tied to land that may come out of production, and to the more than 300 disadvantaged communities whose wells are already imperiled? We believe those communities and livelihoods are worth protecting, and that conviction helps shape everything in the plan being prepared by the Blueprint and CWI.
Why the Unified Water Plan Matters
The Unified Water Plan is the first effort to look across the entire San Joaquin Valley, all subbasins together, and quantify both the problem and the portfolio of solutions at a regional scale. It identifies recharge strategies ranging from on-farm spreading at approximately $37 per acre-foot to dedicated basin recharge, in-lieu delivery, and injection wells. It maps where flood flows can be captured and routed to replenish aquifers. It connects groundwater recovery to flood risk reduction and ecosystem restoration so that investments serve multiple purposes.
No single project closes a 2.4 – 3.0 million acre-foot gap. But the UWP demonstrates that a coordinated regional strategy, combining new storage, expanded conveyance, recharge at scale, and strategic demand management, can chart a path toward sustainability without devastating the Valley’s economy.
