Short Wave - A solution for California's water woes

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

For years, farmers in California have been pumping huge amounts of water from their wells to irrigate their crops. The state’s Central Valley is the nation’s single biggest source for many different foods. But all that water use is making aquifers shrink, wells go dry and, in some places, the ground sink. Science reporter Dan Charles has been looking into the issue and is on the show today to talk about what happens when water gets scarce. What is it like for farmers? And for the people enforcing new water restrictions? If you liked this episode, check out some of our other recent water stories – including why the world’s freshwater is getting saltier, what’s happening to our groundwater supply, and what happens when a city runs out of water.Interested in more stories about water, farming and food production? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with NPR alum, now independent science writer, Dan Charles. Hi, Emily. Hi. So I hear you just got back from the front lines of the California water wars. One battle in those wars, what I call the Great California groundwater grab. Yeah, we talked about this on the show years ago, how farmers in California have been pumping huge amounts of water from their wells. to irrigate their crops.

They have been pumping so much water. The aquifer has been shrinking. An aquifer, of course, is just the underground water table. It's what you tap into when you dig a well. Yeah. And in fact, people's home wells have been going dry because farmers were using up all that water. In some places, the ground itself's been sinking.

That's not good. Not good, Dan. But things are changing, Emily. Local officials are telling farmers in some areas you cannot pump so much water from your wells anymore. How big of a change is this for farmers? It is huge. You know, some farmers never really believe this could happen. I got a sense of that talking to one farmer named Locke Brar.

He grows almonds and lots of other crops near the town of Madeira. And we never thought that somehow the government would have control of the water beneath our feet. That was not even a thought. Up till now, that water beneath his feet was just free for the taking, like breathing the air. And now it is something else entirely. Yeah, this is a paradigm shift in how people think about water. Yeah. Now people are watching how much you use.

If you use too much, you're going to get fined. So today on the show, what happens when water gets scarce, what it's like for farmers and for the people enforcing those new rules? One of them says it's a little bit like being a hospital chaplain. I'm Emily Kwong. I'm Dan Charles. And you're listening to Shortwave, Science Podcast from NPR. Let's talk about California.

They come by their water use, honestly, because that's where a lot of food is grown. Oh, yeah. The Central Valley in California is the country's single biggest source of all kinds of food. You know, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, peaches, lots of vegetables. You name it. They grow it. Shout out to Californians. But I also know a lot of friends of mine there, they have to be really careful about their water usage.

And I imagine that's true for farmers, too. Yeah, because, I mean, basic fact, during the summer when all these crops are growing, It basically doesn't rain in California. Really? You have probably seen photos of these huge dams they built in the mountains to capture water and store it and the canals that carry that water to farms. But there is also the other big reservoir that you don't see. That's the water that's sitting underground, the aquifer. Sometimes we call it groundwater.

That is what we're talking about today. Right. Okay. And when they need the groundwater, they use wells, right, to pull that up? Right. And irrigation wells are huge. You've got pipes maybe a foot in diameter going down hundreds of feet, powerful pumps. Some farmers are pumping so much water from their wells over the course of the summer.

It would cover their orchards or their fields with water two or three feet deep. That's a lot. So they're tapping water in the aquifer because they can't get enough from the rivers and the reservoirs and all those other systems you mentioned earlier? Yeah. And some farms depend entirely on water from their wells. The impression I get is everybody always knew you couldn't just keep doing this. But it was one of those problems that was easier to ignore or just live with, at least for a while. So what has changed the chessboard of these water wars and created this rule kind of where you can't use certain amounts?

Well, one interesting thing that happened that really got people's attention was pumping all that water caused the earth itself to sink in some places, which among other things, meant that water couldn't flow properly down some of these massive canals that carry irrigation water from the reservoirs. That's not good. So the farmers pumping groundwater were messing up the water supply for other farmers? Yeah. So at that point, pretty much everybody agreed something had to be done. And in 2014, California passed a law. It's called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which basically said the aquifer is like a bank account and it has to stay balanced.

You cannot overdraft that underground account. It also gave farmers a long time to adapt to this. They don't have to reach that balanced state until 2040. 2040, that is a long time. Yeah, and there are a couple of reasons for this. They had to figure out all kinds of things, like how much could farmers in all these different parts of the Central Valley actually pump out without depleting the aquifer?

A lot of math. Yeah, and they also didn't want to move too fast because it's such a huge and disruptive change. It'll force farmers to do. change crops, abandoned land where they've been farming. One person who I've talked to a lot over the years about California water is a woman named Sarah Wolf. She's a farmer herself, also a consultant on water issues for a bunch of other farmers. And I asked her, you know, would there have been a way for farmers to solve this problem

themselves? You know, just agree to pump less water. And she just shook her head. Oh, I think for sure the state had to pass a law. I don't think there was a way for us to self-regulate this. It is, I mean, it is your lifeline, this groundwater supply. And if you are without any surface water, for whatever reason, a drought, and you have trees, you know, would you not feed your child if you, you know, you might go steal some groceries to feed your child if you had to. You're going to do everything in your power to make sure that that crop stays alive. Wow, yes. These crops, they are her children. They're her livelihood. And it's a really tricky situation. So how does a community transition and get farms that depend on groundwater to use less? This is the thing I was really curious about, because the people in charge of enforcing this law are a bunch of local officials. They are the ones who are in charge of setting tighter and tighter limits on pumping and finding the people who violate these rules. That sounds like a tough job.

to be living in a place and telling your neighbors like, hey, you can't use this much water. Exactly. And one of the people I talked to who has maybe one of the toughest jobs of all is Stephanie and Nagneson. She's director of water and natural resources from Madeira County. And she is in charge of a part of the county where farms rely entirely on these wells. They have no other source of water. This is truly their livelihood. Wow.

Okay. Yeah. It's interesting. Stephanie studied geology and theology, specifically. I have a master's degree in theological studies specializing in environmental ethics. Is this an environmental ethics question? I think this is more of a math problem. So the math problem here is basic accounting.

They have to bring this underwater account into balance. And right now they just take way more out than naturally comes back in. So to solve this, year by year, going into the future, farms in her area will be allowed to pump less and less groundwater to bring that account into balance. By 2040, they'll only be allowed to use maybe half as much, maybe just a quarter as much as they once did. That is a major change. So what will that mean for farmers if they have to pump that much less water?

So it really depends on their situation. You have water halves and have nots, even within Madeira County. You have some farmers, for instance, with land that gets an allotment of water from a dam on the San Joaquin River, they will basically be fine. But then not too far away, you have farmers who only have access to water from their wells. And with these new limits on pumping from those wells, they'll eventually, a lot of them, have to stop growing crops on most of their land. So their land is now only worth half what it once was, which in turn means, you know,

these farmers having really tough conversations with their bankers. They'll have problems getting the loans they need every year. That's painful. So how does Stephanie talk farmers through this? You know, she says some of these conversations take her back to a job she had many years ago when she was a chaplain in a rehab hospital sitting with people who suffered heart attacks and strokes. Where they wonder, why is this happening to me? Will I ever be back to normal again?

And that is the same sort of thing we have to do with farmers. I talked to another guy who's having similar conversations. His name is Aaron Fukuda. He's in charge of enforcing this groundwater law in another part of the Central Valley, to Larry County. My whole entire last couple of years has been two and a half hour phone calls, one by one by one. First hour is listening. Second hour is talking about where we're headed, what we're going to do, what they're going to have to do.

I asked him what people usually tell him, you know, on these calls. I'm scared. I'm worried. This is not going to work out. I don't know what my future is. I've got a family here. I've put everything into this. I love this, but I can't provide this. You know, people talk all the time about adapting to climate change, and this is it to me. You know, it's this, like, we're supporting each other through the changing realities of our environment and what that will mean for our lives. And it takes time. It's not always like a big natural disaster. Sometimes it looks like this. So what is going to happen in these counties over the next, I don't know, 15 years? Well, I would say over that period of time, the amount of

land where crops are grown in the Central Valley will shrink. In some places, it'll shrink by a lot. Some farmers won't survive. Some farmers, a lot of farmers, are looking for other ways to use their land that don't require water, like putting solar on it. Oh, tell me about that. Well, there's one big plan on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley where they actually have come up with a plan to cover 200 square miles with solar panels. If it got built, this installation, would generate enough electricity to power millions of homes, entire cities. Oh, so that could be a source of revenue for farmers selling energy instead of crops. Oh, yeah. They can earn as much from solar as from growing regular crops. And harvesting the sun

is honestly a lot more predictable and stable. The sun's not going anywhere for a while. Yeah. At the same time, you know, people are desperately looking for ways to keep farming alive, too. There is a big push, for instance, to replenish the aquifers, to make. make deposits in that underground water account, you might say, which they could then draw on later. Stephanie took me out to a place not too far from Madeira to see what this actually looks like. So this is a place where we could get almost unlimited flood flows. We get to this spot. It looks like a dry riverbed with levees on either side.

It's called the Chowchilla Bypass. This thing was built to take extra water from the San Joaquin River when the river's about to Oh, so this is sort of an artificial river channel that carries that floodwater overflow. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was full of water in 2023, the last big flood. But now it is also a construction site. They're building ways to send that floodwater underground. Met an engineer named Antonio Bejaroano. He showed me around.

He works for an engineering firm called Provost and Pritchard. We're standing on the Chochila bypass. We're standing on the floodplain of it. So in 2023, would we be underwater? Yes. We'll be under at least five to six feet of water from here. And right here, Beharano shows me this giant new concrete cube. It's sort of a trap door for water.

So when the next flood comes, water is going to flow through this 14-foot wide screen. They built to keep the fish out. Go into this concrete structure, into this huge pipe, and out to a giant basin in the middle of farmland, where it's going to soak into the ground and go all the way back down to the aquifer. That is so cool. This project, I mean, it's very clever as a way of using the limited resource that is water. But will there be enough flooding to go through this system and replenish the aquifer fully?

So there probably won't be enough to just like make everything back to where they used to be, where they could just pump as much as they want it. But every little bit helps, right? Yeah. If they add any water to that groundwater reservoir, they'll be allowed to pump more out later. Yeah, earlier you compared it to a bank account. You make those deposits so you can withdraw later.

Right. And there is one more really important reason to capture this floodwater, Emily. With the climate warming up, the winter storms in California are delivering less snow in the Sierra Mountains. And that snowpack was always really important as a reservoir, that water stays up there in the mountains and then it melts in the spring when people need it. But now, more of that precipitation is coming as rain, not snow. So the rivers are more full in wintertime when crops aren't growing and can't use the water. Right. So under

climate change of the land and the rivers will be even drier in summertime and we need to prepare for that. Yeah, people really need to find better ways to capture those winter rains. And one way to do it is to flood fields and orchards and store it in the ground. I mean, that aquifer is more important than ever. Dan Charles, thank you so much for explaining the complicated world of our underground water bank accounts. So great to be on the show. Thank you. You can only hear this kind of reporting on Shorewave folks, so please share it with a friend because it really helps our show. And check out our whole series about water if you just want more. We will link those episodes in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez.

Tyler Jones checked the facts. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.