The Weight of Water

CUYAMA VALLEY, Calif. — Last fall a slurry of early snow slammed into Southern California, laying a thick blanket of pearlescent white powder over its mountains. The storm closed the grapevine, the stretch of Interstate 5 that climbs over Tejon Pass and separates Los Angeles from California’s Central Valley. Also victim to the deluge were Highway 33 through Lockwood Valley to the west and Highway 58 through Tehachapi to the east, common detours when the main thoroughfare is closed because of inclement weather.

The only road left connecting the central valley and the population centers in Southern California was Highway 166, which runs through the Cuyama Valley and the small town of New Cuyama. Travelers that day who took that detour had most likely eaten a carrot grown in one of the fields that spread out across the valley floor. If they managed to shake their reverie—the hypnosis of an endless, straight rural road—and look to the south while passing through town, they caught what was likely their first, and last, glimpse of that sleepy cluster of mid-century homes.

But if they paid attention, they could have caught in that glimpse a town perfectly emblematic of rural California, and the looming conflicts over water in the small towns that dot the state’s vast agricultural heartland.

New Cuyama is a town that was built by the Atlantic Richfield Company, but few of the people who live there still work the dwindling number of oil wells that dot the South Cuyama and Russell Ranch Oil Fields. Rows of carrots, pistachios, wine grapes, olives, and lettuce now constitute the bulk of the valley’s economy, but the people who cultivate them are all drinking deep from the same waning supply of groundwater and pumping most of the economic benefits away from the community they surround.

For those who live in the valley itself, there is little money and even less water to go around.

“This is a community that’s already lacking resources,” said Em Johnson, head of the Blue Sky Center, a local non-profit established in 2012 to strengthen rural towns in the valley. “Communities like this are at risk because they’re isolated and tied to a central economic driver.”

Around 80 percent of households living in the valley are classified as “low income” and the median income of those households is around $41,000, according to a 2019 survey conducted by the non-profit.

California is the United States’ largest economy, and if taken alone, the fifth largest in the world. At the heart of the economic juggernaut is what some have dubbed the ‘nation’s salad bowl,’ the Central Valley. Agriculture is industrial here.

At the heart of that industry, scattered among the fields of carrots, nuts, and citrus, are the small communities on which it rests. New Cuyama, an oil town no longer, may at first seem remote and disconnected from the outside world, but there are larger forces at play than the population of 600 would suggest, and much of it is out of their control. Even though Cuyama is somewhat removed from the larger, central valley, there’s money to be had here—$121 million a year in agriculture products are grown in the arid soil of its high desert climate.

The valley, extending from east of Santa Maria to south of Bakersfield, is also home to two smaller, flyspeck towns—Cuyama and Ventucopa—and some small farmers and pasture land, but the bulk of this land is owned by large corporate farms, including the world’s two largest carrot producers, Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms, that produce an annual carrot crop worth $69 million.

The central community of the oft-overlooked valley is New Cuyama. It’s an unincorporated community, something it shares with many farm towns and communities across the state. Unincorporated communities were often groups of homes originally set up by companies, in this case to work on the oil fields, to house workers. Many, like New Cuyama, are left to fend for themselves without local services or infrastructure when the corporate interests pack up and leave.

One piece of infrastructure that New Cuyama does have is the local Cuyama Community Service District, which was set up in 1977 to provide water and wastewater management to the town. The district provides the town’s access to the valley’s lifeblood: groundwater.

But that lifeblood is tainted. The groundwater basin is sinking, the wells drying up and the water quality suffering. When water is pumped from deeper in the ground, it often means higher levels of arsenic, and other carcinogens. The organization meant to address this problem, the Cuyama Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency (or GSA), is rife with opaque politics and light on local representation. Critics say its’ attempt to apply California’s first groundwater law is being controlled by the same big agricultural players that created the problem.

“We’re trying to ensure that the Latino communities and the low-income communities have a voice,” said Lynn Carlisle, the executive director of the Cuyama Valley Family Resource Center, a non-profit that supports the local community in New Cuyama.

“It's really hard to do when you’re dealing with two of the largest growers in the state,” she added. “Not to mention the Harvard endowment.”

Carlisle is referring to more than 7,500 acres of land that was purchased by a company owned by the Harvard Management Company, which controls the investment of the university’s endowment. The company planted 1,200 acres of water-intensive vineyards on the parched landscape, and have refused to participate in the GSA, inciting outrage from members of the community.

“It’s unbelievable that anybody, the county, anybody would let them plant in an aquifer that’s so depleted,” Carlisle said. “It’s rangeland, land that has not been planted, ever.”

It’s the latest example of why residents feel treated as less important than people from outside the valley have more money to throw around. Other worries are more immediate. Namely, water quality.

“People refuse to drink the water,” Johnson said. “I don’t drink the water.”

According to samples taken by the US Geological Survey in 2015, the amount of total dissolved solids in Cuyama’s wells is, on average, more than three times the number recommended for drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the wells sampled also had unacceptable amounts of arsenic and nitrates, harmful chemicals common in runoff from agriculture.

Water quality and availability rank as the most important issues residents think they face over the next five years, according to Blue Sky’s survey.

Water, or the lack thereof, has plagued farms, towns, and cities across California for decades. All signs point to the conclusion that the land cannot support the amount of water agriculture is draining from it. The San Joaquin Valley, California’s largest and most-famous agricultural area, has sunk 28 feet on average in the past century because of dwindling groundwater. The land itself is breaking.

It’s the same story in Cuyama—water and the valley are inseparable. The amount of rain that falls on the Cuyama Valley is a little higher than on par with the Sahara Desert. But when it comes, it comes seasonally in vast deluge and leaves parched dry spells, two realities which trade places on the whim of winter storms. Those rains and the snowmelt from surrounding mountains feed a groundwater basin deep beneath the valley’s earth, without which the wealth of agriculture could not exist.

The water that runs through the Cuyama River is integral to the valley’s landscape. It flows from its source San Emigdio mountains, fed by the snowmelt of higher elevations, before it washes west through the valley. Most of the year it lies dry, waiting for winter storms to drive brief torrents that can flood some of the valley’s floor.

Water is ingrained even in the name of the place. The source of the name “Cuyama” has been attributed to either the name of a Chumash village or tribe, which in turn came from the Chumash word kuyam, or “clam,” for the small freshwater mollusks that can be found in the river’s wash. In those times, an oak grove spanned the valley’s western edge, wet marshlands flanked the river as it ran through the easterly valley floor and supported nineteen or more Chumash villages that flourished in a complex interwoven society.

The Spanish missions marked the end of that reality. Missionaries spread across California with the zeal of conquistadores. Most of the Chumash were forced to convert to Christianity and work on the mission’s ranches. When Spanish California became Mexican California, the Mexican government split the valley into two ranchos divided along the river.

Slowly, homesteaders trickled to the valley’s foothills while the valley floor’s lack of accessible water meant it was used mostly as ranchland. The valley stayed mostly pastures through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the land’s use unchanged even as its ownership passed from Mexican hands to those of the United States.

The nineteen-forties brought with them change—electricity and irrigation set the industry of the valley on a path toward agriculture. The acreage of planted crops grew quickly over the following years. A government report shows that in 1939, the year the first wells were drawn and pumped for agriculture, 400 acres of potatoes constituted the valley’s whole crop. By 1946, that number had grown to more than 5,000 acres and more crops and been sown like grain, watermelon, spinach and beans.

As the decade drew to a close, oil was found in the Russell Ranch and South Cuyama Oil Fields. Then the Richfield Oil Company, now part of the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company, ARCO, built the town of New Cuyama to house workers and infrastructure to support them. The town flourished—at one point it was the fourth-most productive oil region in California.

The black liquid wealth being pumped from the earth distracted from the other liquid—clear and seemingly bountiful—that wells continued to pull up out of the ground. Deterioration in the groundwater basin was detected as early as the 1950s, according to the USGS. By the time the boom went bust and the oil money left in the latter half of the twentieth century, irrigated fields spread wide and far across the valley floor, all fed by water drawn up from below the soil.

Versions of this played out across the breadth of California and the liquid tapped from below California’s soil became a source of enormous wealth and sustenance. Soon, however, the consequences showed their face, and were exacerbated by the driest period in the state’s recorded history.

With the land literally sinking beneath our feet, the consequences were too severe to ignore. California was forced to act, and in 2014 lawmakers passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the state’s first-ever attempt to regulate the use of groundwater. The Cuyama Basin was one of 21 groundwater basins found to be in ‘critical overdraft,’ the most dire classification. The pace of agriculture-driven pumping outpaced the rate at which snow from the mountains could replenish it.

It still took three years—until 2017—for the required Cuyama Basin GSA to be established. There was disagreement in the valley about its structure, between the corporate agricultural interests, who established their own water district to ensure they had a strong voice on the board, and the Cuyama Community Service District, which represented the needs of the towns, state, and county.

The Cuyama Basin Water District—Big Ag—ended up with five members of the board who split three votes between them, while public officials from the counties and Paul Chounet, the head of the Community Service District, make up the other six.

Last year, the agency finally released their official Groundwater Sustainability Plan, which is now in a public comment period. The plan has in-depth analysis and chock full more than four hundred pages of maps, data, and recommendations for possible management actions, including the possibility of cloud seeding and a reduction in growing.

It found that growers in the Cuyama Valley are draining the basin at a rate of 26,000 acre-feet per year on average. Just one acre-foot is enough to sustain two Los Angeles households for a year. To bring the basin into sustainability, the agency estimates pumping will have to be reduced by two-thirds before the deadline in 2040, which could slash annual agricultural revenues by up to $76 million.

Jim Beck, the Agency’s executive director, cautions that those numbers are preliminary.

“We used the best available data to develop the initial hydrogeologic model that is used to assess the magnitude of the overdraft in the basin,” Beck said, “but that was a very rough estimate.”

“After achieving a better understanding of the nature of the overdraft,” he said, “We’ll then begin to implement management actions.”

But fixing the aquifer will take years, and the agency has already run into controversy. Although the structure of the board was specifically designed to make sure corporate interests couldn’t have an absolute majority, some complain that they still exert enough influence to get what they want.

Just one of the members on the 11-person board actually lives in the Cuyama Valley, and none of the voting members is Latino, despite the face that roughly half of the valley’s population are. The only Latino representation comes from the GSA’s Advisory Committee, none of whom can vote on the agency’s decisions.

“All affected users of groundwater are supposed to have a voice in this plan, and that has not been done,” Carlisle said.

Even the appointment of Beck himself was a controversial move by the board. Beck has a long history working in water politics, but at the moment is employed by the Hallmark Group, a Bakersfield area consulting group that provides services to one of the most powerful growers—Grimmway Farms.

The controversies over water are just a short string of examples in a small community that’s almost been accustomed to weathering them. One resident, Rachel Leyland, the local elementary school’s principal, says the string of issues has weighed on the community.

“It wasn’t fully resolved,” Leyland said of a lingering school district embezzlement scandal that came to light in 2018. “We weren’t able to determine who did it, um, you know and it’s hard. It’s hard in a small school, cause everyone’s like family.”

But she thinks the small size of the community has helped them get through the spate of problems it’s faced. Be it controversy in the school system, the ongoing fights about water, or the sudden, more imminent threat of COVID-19.

“People, in a way like having the rural isolation in these times,” Leyland said. “We’re kind of fortunate to have the space.”

“It's a very close knit community so in the past when there's been things that have happened—so for example there was a family whose home burned down—what everyone does is they gather things to help that family, and there's that same spirit now, where we just come together.”

In a town that’s been through—and is still going through—so much, the mood is surprisingly uplifting. The morning I visited, just before the lockdown hit, the town woke to another surprise dusting of snow. Families—kids out of school because of the virus—took the afternoon to go out together and play in the snow, grateful for the stark beauty of the valley blanketed in white.

Blue Sky and the Cuyama Buckhorn, the single hotel and restaurant in town, partnered to create a COVID-19 Relief Fund to pay for lunches kids would usually get through a school program. So far, it's been enough to get by.

“There’s a bit of a silver lining in this,” she said. “This is the best coordination and collaboration we’ve seen so far. As bad as [the situation] is, this might actually be a stabilizing factor in the community.”

Alfonso Gamino, the superintendent of the school district, said he’d already seen the new crisis bring the community together. “We’re trying to bring a little bit of normalcy to the situation, and our teachers have done a great job getting work materials for kids.”

“It’s, ‘What do we need to do to get through and help each other out?’” Leyland said. “That’s the spirit of Cuyama, most definitely.”

Yet, even in a time when it’s hard to think about anything other than the virus, the concern over water is still ever present. Among the string of posts about distance learning, where to get take out, and reactions to a sudden flurry of snow on the town’s Facebook group “Cuyama Strong,” there’s another post from a member of the GSA’s advisory committee:

“LAST CHANCE FOR PUBLIC COMMENT ON WATER MANAGEMENT PLAN.”

During these uncertain times, in the Cuyama Valley, one thing is clear—the talk about water is in no danger of running dry.