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California water officials have spent the month moving three major planning efforts forward, with agriculture at the center of each one.
At California State University, Fresno, the San Joaquin Valley Water Resilience Summit focused on how to turn years of reports into a unified strategy for the valley, where the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, subsidence, unreliable surface supplies and land repurposing are already reshaping farming. The Department of Water Resources sponsored the summit to create a forum for aligning work on storage, conveyance, recharge, land use and community resilience.
In Sacramento, DWR launched the inaugural advisory committee for the 2028 update to the California Water Plan, the state’s effort to implement last year’s Senate Bill 72 and identify 9 million acre-feet of additional water supply, conservation or storage capacity by 2040. The committee includes leaders from the California Farm Bureau, Western United Dairies, irrigation districts and farms, along with urban agencies, environmental groups, tribes and business interests.
At their annual strategy meeting, state and regional water board officials focused on a different piece of the same puzzle: How water quality regulation will evolve as California pushes for more recharge and greater drought resilience.
Valley leaders push for a unified ask
The Fresno summit opened with Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., urging valley water leaders to keep pressing for a broad set of supply tools.
Costa said the valley needs better management strategies for both drought and “extreme water conditions when we have more water than we can manage in a given year.” He tied that work directly to the valley’s ability to produce “food and fiber like no other part of the world,” telling participants their recommendations would be “key to an effective strategy.”
Laura Ramos, director of Fresno State’s California Water Institute, billed the summit as an effort to move “from reports to results and from results to actions.” She said surface water, groundwater, flood management, conveyance, land use, infrastructure, ecosystems and community resilience “can no longer be treated as separate conversations.”
Bill Swanson, vice president at the engineering and environmental consulting firm Stantec, presented the latest efforts in developing the Unified Water Plan, which will provide a framework for regional collaboration, financing and implementation. The plan draws from groundwater sustainability plans, state and federal studies and the Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley. Swanson explained that the valley faces a 2.5 million acre-foot annual gap from groundwater overdraft, regulatory demands and climate change.
Laura Ramos (California Water Institute photo)But his broader point was not simply that the valley needs more water. It was that individual projects will not add up to a solution unless they are organized into a portfolio that can be financed, permitted and defended politically.
Jason Phillips, former Friant Water Authority CEO and a key figure in the Water Blueprint, sharpened that point on the second day.
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Phillips warned against asking the state for small regulatory fixes that sound useful but do little to close the valley’s overall water deficit. He said minor changes might produce 20,000 acre-feet a year of additional groundwater recharge, but that would not match the scale of the problem.
Phillips said “local control is code for ‘you're screwed,’” arguing the valley was built around imported water and cannot balance solely on local supplies without a massive agricultural contraction. He said the Blueprint was created because valley interests were going to Sacramento and Washington with fragmented asks, rather than a unified message.
“If nothing else — if we get asked the question of what does the valley need — can we at least have one answer?” said Phillips.
He cautioned against selling any one project as the valley’s fix, saying Sites Reservoir, the Delta tunnel or new local storage may help but cannot by themselves close a 2 million to 4 million acre-foot gap.
The summit featured a workshop to engage the audience around solutions but reflected many of the same frustrations. Some of the participants said the valley needs action after too many conversations, along with more education to connect city residents to farms so shoppers understand “the value of a tomato” instead of only hearing criticism of agriculture. Others said leaders need to stop dancing around “uncomfortable truths and hard realities.”
Water boards eye fertilizer limits and nexus waters
While infrastructure hurdles persist, the water board meeting showed how water quality rules could shape the next phase of farm water policy.
The water officials are closely watching the next steps for the Second Statewide Agricultural Expert Panel, which is reviewing how nitrogen fertilizer applications should be handled under the Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program.
The first expert panel in 2014 recommended using nitrogen applied, nitrogen removed and the ratio between them as the primary metrics to track potential nitrogen loading to groundwater. It also recommended irrigation and nutrient management plans and said targets should be used for education and benchmarking, not regulatory limits, because the data and science were insufficient at the time.
The new panel is revisiting those questions after the Eastern San Joaquin order and Ag Order 4.0 led to new mandates on growers. The Central Coast order initially included enforceable nitrogen discharge limits and fertilizer application limits, before the state board later remanded portions of the order. The second panel released a draft report in March and is now moving through public comments and next steps.
The regulators acknowledged the difficult math behind the effort, noting the lack of a silver bullet for reducing nitrate discharges from irrigated agriculture and with no current way to maintain many of the region’s crops while fully meeting nitrate water quality standards. The agriculture expert panel’s work, officials said, validated how hard that problem is and how long it may take to solve.
The board also flagged SB 601, a bill that stalled in the Legislature last year after strong agricultural opposition but could return this year. It would add a category of nexus waters to cover oversight gaps between state and federal agencies that had been protected before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sackett decision narrowed federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction.
Bill Swanson (Stantec photo)California Water Plan puts ag in a statewide competition
DWR also recently hosted the first meeting for the California Water Plan advisory committee, which placed many of the same farm issues inside a statewide framework.
DWR Director Karla Nemeth told committee members the agency is trying to make the water plan more meaningful and more inclusive. The plan will help define the state’s 9 million acre-foot target and eventually build toward watershed-level targets.
DWR staff emphasized it is not a precise statewide water supply gap, nor a guarantee of new water. They instead framed it as a statewide planning approximation meant to define the possible scale of future shortages and organize the next phase of analysis. The department plans to refine that number through future updates, with 2033 watershed targets based on more detailed modeling of agricultural, urban, environmental, tribal and recreational uses.
DWR staff made clear that groundwater recharge will be central, especially as snowpack becomes less reliable. David Guy, president of the Northern California Water Association, said SGMA has helped bring water users together to think more seriously about how surface water and groundwater interact. But he said the state still needs to move faster to scale up recharge, while protecting downstream water rights, state and federal project operations, and environmental needs.
The advisory committee’s ag representatives will be part of that debate, but they will be one set of voices among many. The projects most likely to compete in the next water plan will be those that also help with recharge, flood protection, drinking water, SGMA compliance and regional resilience.
The three meetings left agriculture with a clear assignment to draft a unified set of projects and policies that can stand up to water supply math, water quality regulations and a statewide competition for funding.
