Episode 09: Small Farms and Water in California
“If there was a way to incentivize recharge on small farms, I think we could really contribute to groundwater management. It is not just about how we protect small farmers but also about how we involve them and have something that works for everyone’s benefit.”
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
A conversation with Dr. Ruth Dahlquist-Willard about crops, irrigation, drought, groundwater management, and water policy on diverse small farms in the CA Central Valley. Recorded June 16, 2020.
guests on the show
Dr. Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Dr. Ruth Dahlquist-Willard is a University of California Cooperative Extension Small Farms and Specialty Crops Advisor for Fresno and Tulare counties. She conducts research and extension to serve small-scale family farms, beginning farmers, immigrant and refugee farmers, and works with specialty crops outside of traditional extension programs and commodity boards. Specialty crops in Fresno and Tulare Counties include Asian specialty vegetables and herbs, jujubes, moringa, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and any other crops grown for small-scale production. Dr. Dahlquist-Willard is an expert in irrigation and groundwater access for these unique farm systems. Learn more here and follow her on Twitter @valleyruth.
TRANSCRIPT
Mallika Nocco
Welcome to Water Talk from the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. I'm Dr. Mallika Nocco, a cooperative extension specialist in soil plant water relations and irrigation management.
Sam Sandoval
Hi, I'm Sam Sandoval. I'm a faculty and extension specialist in water resources.
Faith Kearns
And I'm Faith Kearns, the academic coordinator for the California Institute for Water Resources.
Mallika Nocco
In today's episode, we're going to be talking about small farms in California and our guest is Dr. Ruth Dahlquist-Willard. Dr. Dahlquist-Willard was trained as an entomologist and is the University of California Cooperative Extension small farms advisor in Fresno and Tulare counties. We've been having these ongoing discussions in Cooperative Extension and thinking about all of the different communities that our work serves. And Ruth's work in particular is just an incredible example of serving diverse communities. And we're really excited to talk with her more about that today.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, as Mallika mentioned, you have this interesting position really at the heart of California's heartland, Fresno, Tulare. So can you tell us a little bit more about your job and who you work with? Do we have any definition of small farms?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Sure. And thank you so much for having me on your podcast today. I'm really happy to be here. The definition of a small farm according to the USDA is a farm that has gross annual sales of $350,000 or less. So it's actually defined by the USDA by income. And you might have, it’s not so much by acre as you can imagine, a high value crop that would make a lot of money on small acreage and a lower value crop that you would need more acreage to survive economically. So it's not so much about small acreage as about income. And also from the perspective of the UC Cooperative Extension small farms advisors, we also think about small farms as having a different marketing strategy than a larger farm. It's not just the income and I don't ever ask anybody for their annual sales data, obviously.
Smaller farms often have a different marketing strategy, where the way that they can survive economically is to find a niche market where you can sell your products, either your produce or value added products that you make from your own farm, for a higher price than the wholesale market, based on maybe better flavor, better quality, the fact that it's local, or whatever is unique about your farm that customers might be interested in. A lot of the farms I work with have crops that are outside of the mainstream commodities that are grown on smaller acres, and they're often more diversified, both in terms of the crops that they produce, as well as being more economically diversified. And I think it's really important to understand, you know, we often hear about the large farms in San Joaquin Valley in places like Fresno County and Tulare County, but there actually are a large number of small to medium sized family operated farms that have a much greater diversity of crops than the mainstream commodities that we usually hear about.
Mallika Nocco
So what are some of these crops when we think of greater diversity of crops? I'm just very curious as to what are some of the different crops that small farmers are growing. And then building off of what you had just mentioned about the niche markets? What are some of these specific markets that they find?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Well, there's a large variety. So one of the categories I could talk about is berry crops. Fresno actually used to be a really big strawberry producing region and now the big strawberry production is on the coast. But there are small urban and peri-urban family farms growing strawberries seasonally. So every year, we’re just kind of finishing up right now, strawberry season in Fresno. It usually starts at the end of March, early April and goes through June. And those are strawberries that are not available year round.
I actually grew up in this area so I remember strawberry season as a child before there were strawberries available year round on a large scale, and the customers in Fresno really love to get fresh local strawberries. They are sweeter than what you find in the store and they're also more perishable. So they don't ship as well or pack very well. But if you're willing to drive to a local farm stand and pick them up, you can enjoy really fresh, very flavorful, sweet strawberries that you don't get the rest of the year. So there are about 16 strawberry stands that are mostly operated by Southeast Asian farmers that are Hmong or Mien, so our programs provide support to them.
There's also farmers that grow blueberries and cranberries, usually blackberries, and I should say also the blueberries were started by my predecessors Richard Molnar and Manuel Jimenez, who had historic, very large and effective extension programs here with Richard in Fresno and Manuel in Tulare County. So they really helped blueberry production get started in the San Joaquin Valley and now there are, I would say, medium to large blueberry farms, there's a blueberry export industry. There's also smaller and medium family farms that grow blueberries for local grocery stores. And I'm always really excited about blueberries. I went blueberry picking last month actually on the Kearney Ag Center, was social distancing with my team, and I have a freezer full of blueberries that I've been baking with. So I think blueberries are a great crop for family farms in the in the San Joaquin Valley.
There's also a very substantial industry of specialty Asian vegetables. One thing I was going to say in response your previous question was a part of my grower clientele is a large demographic of Southeast Asian farmers that settled in Fresno County when they were coming as refugees from Laos after the Vietnam War. They have really driven the development of the specialty Asian vegetable industry and the value is basically 17 and a half million dollars annually, which is probably underreported because not everybody fills out that survey that goes to the commissioner on exactly what they harvested. So that's a really big part of my extension program and a really important industry for Fresno County. It's also really important for food security, because a lot of that produce goes to immigrant communities that want traditional produce. So it goes to a variety of places. One is back to the community. Then it also gets sold at farmer's markets throughout the state and also to a national wholesale market in a statewide wholesale market where it ends up at restaurants and specialty ethnic grocery stores.
Sam Sandoval
So it seems that we have a variety of crops that you're working with and how those crops were affected by the last drought that we have? And anything that you program did to help them out. Could you talk about that?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
I can talk a lot about the drought because it was right when I started my job with UC Cooperative Extension. It was right in the middle of the drought. So I started in July 2014. Right after I started, I was pulled into emergency meetings with the USDA, because right at that point in that summer of 2014, many of the small farms, especially those operated by Southeast Asian farmers, were having their wells dry up due to the dropping groundwater tables. There were actually some farmers that had called suicide prevention hotlines. And it was a pretty substantial crisis in that community. So that kind of defined my extension program because I started in the middle of that crisis.
I think Mallika mentioned I'm actually an entomologist. But I've been working on water because that's the biggest, I feel like that and maybe marketing are the biggest issues that affect my small farm clientele. Well, I'll add to that regulatory programs. But most of the small farms and also the medium sized family operated farms are east of Fresno. So if you think about the 99 freeway, east of the 99 is where more of the small farms are versus the west side. So that area does have normally a higher water table because it gets the snow melt from the mountains. The irrigation districts there have water rights to the Kings River. In the past it's been possible to farm there without drilling a very deep well. But during the drought, a lot of the shallower wells that were older were starting to dry up. And particularly the Southeast Asian refugee farmers, many of them farm on land that used to be either an orchard or vineyard. And it has the irrigation system that land had maybe in the 60s, 70s, 80s. There may be leaks, underground concrete pipes, or the pump is probably not very new. And those farmers don't have a lot of capital to upgrade those irrigation systems and many of them are also renting land.
We did a survey that found that 80% of the Hmong farmers we interviewed were renting land instead of owning their land. So they're in a much more vulnerable position because they have older, shallower wells. They have less up to date irrigation systems, they don't have a lot of capital to fix things up. And then they're on rented land so when their wells started to go dry they were very challenged to try to respond to that. I should say also, one of the things I wanted to mention is they mostly are pumping groundwater, they do not get surface water and most of them are not connected to the irrigation districts. So surface water works great for irrigating permanent crops. For vegetable crops it's really not optimal because it brings a lot of weeds. And it's not available all the time. So you can't rely on it. You know, you can't grow vegetable crops with water delivery that you would get every three weeks, you need to irrigate every two or three days, really. So that's why many of them rely on groundwater and maybe they'll use surface water once in a while. So normally, there's enough recharge.
Mallika Nocco
Quick interruption, I just had a clarification question. Are most of these growers using like flood irrigation or drip irrigation? Or how are they actually applying the water?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
I would say about half are using drip irrigation and about half are using flooded furrow irrigation where they would let the water go all the way to the end of the row in between their vegetable crops. That was actually an issue during the drought because one of the things that happened to them was the flow of water was decreased. So, you know, normally there's recharge from the snow melt, there was no snow melt, so you're not getting the recharge. Even if you're not taking water from the canal, your neighbors are and then the canals flowing by your farm. So you get recharged with the groundwater that allows you to still pump, but then no snow melt, no recharge, and then everybody's pumping more.
So the groundwater was dropping, and a lot of farmers had, maybe their well didn't entirely go dry, but the flow of water was a lot less, the flow rate was much reduced. So if you are flooding in your furrow and the water has to get all the way to the end of the row, you have to leave the pump on a lot longer for all of your crops to get enough water, versus normally if you had a good enough flow rate, the water would get pushed to the end of the row in less time. So a lot of farmers told us that they had to leave their pump on a lot longer and then that got into their PG&E off peak and non peak times for their rates. So they were getting these huge electric bills, both because the on peak, off peak was messed up if they had that rate plan. And then because they had to leave the pump on longer, and some of them actually were leaving it on for 24 hours to get enough water to the end of the road. So their energy bills went up.
One of the things that we worked with them on was switching to a different rate plan. So one of our Hmong speaking staff is a farmer himself, and researched the rate plans and was able to help a lot of farmers switch to a different plan that wasn't the peak hour related plan. And it was a flat rate that worked out a lot better for them, once they're pumping practices had changed and they were operating the pump differently than they did before. For the farmers that lost their wells, it’s very difficult because if they don't have capital to drill a new well, and it's hard to get a loan because maybe they don't have collateral or there's the paperwork that’s a barrier or they need a relationship with the bank, that those things are more difficult for them. Some of those farmers might have stopped farming for a while until the water table came back up. Some of them might have found a new piece of land to rent that had better water. There were, I think, a few that did drill new wells, maybe with pooling family resources, or being able to come up with the cash somehow, although it was challenging, because I'm sure everyone remembers, there's a waiting list to drill any well. And it was a very long waiting list and prices were very, very high, much higher than usual to drill a well. So it was is not a good time to try to drill.
There was one farmer that we were able to connect him to a nonprofit agency called Feed the Hunger Foundation, and they were able to set him up with a loan on terms that would work for him and they'd walk him through the whole process. So we were really happy to work with them on that. I believe he was also able to negotiate for a longer lease because of the improvements that he was making to the farmland. The other thing that we basically tried to work on during this time was looking for programs that could assist farmers. There are a number of programs like loans or grants or subsidies or rebates that were available to farmers during that time. But for this population of farmers, it was very difficult for them to access those. And I won't talk about all the ones that they couldn't access. I will say that one of the ones that did work was the SWEEP program, the State Eater Efficiency Enhancement Program through CDFA, one of their climate smart agriculture programs, that actually is a program that those farmers are able to access if they have technical assistance with the application and management of their project. And so, during the drought, we started helping farmers apply for that program.
It's been a very good experience, those farmers have really benefited from the improvements that they've been able to make their irrigation systems and they certainly will be more receptive during the next drought, and also, I think under implementation of SGMA. So some of the things they've done are pump repairs for better pump efficiency, and also matching the operating condition of the pump to their irrigation output. And then switching from flood to drip irrigation, also putting in flow meters, and there's this great device called the variable frequency drive that increases the efficiency of the pump as well that's really great for a small farm with a diverse assortment of crops because you don't need the same amount of water all the time and the variable frequency drive will adjust the speed of the motor to the amount of water that you need in that particular irrigation event. I'll stop there if have any more questions about the drought.
Mallika Nocco
No, that was really interesting. I mean, it makes me feel happy and a little bit hopeful because I guess a question that kind of came up in my mind as you were talking was how well are they going to be prepared for the next drought? But it sounds like you think that a lot of these improvements are going to help the next time we see a drought.
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
I think they will, for the farmers that have received SWEEP funding, which is obviously not everybody, but you know, for those that have received that they're not gonna have to worry about flooding to the end of the row and the drip irrigation will not need as much of a flow rate to operate as the flood irrigation would. And then you know, the pump efficiency will help with their electric bills, and so will the very variable frequency drive. And then because they've all put in flow meters, if they ever are required to do that for SGMA, they already have a flow meter, so they don't have to pay $2,000 to buy a flow meter and have it installed.
Mallika Nocco
Right. And that actually leads us to the next question that we have, which is in relation to SGMA or the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. For Water Talk listeners who are just tuning in and listening to small farms, we did do an episode a few weeks ago about water law, and we spent a lot of time thinking about SGMA specifically if you want a primer on that. But we are curious in this case, talking with Ruth, about how SGMA is going to affect small farmers specifically like what might be some unique challenges that they're having, and how have they been able to participate in the process?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
So I would say currently, the major issue that small farms are facing with SGMA is there are some increased charges because of the formation of groundwater sustainability agencies or GSAs and that are having to cover their administrative costs to get their agency going. So every groundwater basin across the state has to form a GSA and that GSA will then implement SGMA on a local level. So in the Fresno area, some of those agencies have begun charging a fee or an assessment to fund their administrative costs.
Small farms are more likely to be out of the loop on the formation of the GSA and what it's going to charge and how that was determined. Some of the farmers I know have gotten kind of a surprise bill in the mail from their GSA that they had never heard of before, and they weren't sure what it was for. And so there have been efforts, obviously, to communicate that stuff. But if they don't reach everybody, and it's particularly hard to reach the farmers that are not connected to the Irrigation District as much, or that have cultural or language barriers, and I should mention to you that in Fresno, I have a partner organization, a nonprofit called the Asian Business Institute and Resource Center or ABIRC, who has been involved with outreach for SGMA to the community. So I'm very grateful to have that partnership. They've got a lot of workshops to inform that community about SGMA.
It's still difficult to reach everybody and to inform everybody on what's going to happen next. There are also GSAs that I think are doing it in a much better way, where the fees are being charged through the ongoing property tax assessment that appears on the property tax bill from the Irrigation District. So there's one fee if you're using surface water, there's another fee if you're just using groundwater. And that's just going up a little bit. And I really am grateful for those kinds of processes. Because there's no form to fill out. There is no online application, there's no check to send in the mail. There's no paperwork. So although it's a little bit of extra charge, it's not so burdensome in terms of the paperwork and the reporting and the membership. And the things that would be onerous for a smaller farm to comply with. So, I hope that as many GSAs as possible can adopt those kinds of methods for charging people because it's just so much easier and farmers already have a lot of regulatory and compliance paperwork and costs to deal with. So the easier and simpler it can be I think the better it is, especially for small farms.
Sam Sandoval
This is actually a good segue to think, as you're kind of seeing these now into the future. So, in this case, what do you think is going to be the future of a small farms? How are you seeing this? Also, I do want to recognize that you’ve been an entomologist, now a full water expert in California. That's, quite impressive. So anyway, how are you seeing the future of small farms in California and what Mallika was saying, are we prepared for not only in the future in five years, but for the next drought?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Well, you know, it's really gonna depend on local management of groundwater by the GSAs in each area. I think, one thing I think is really important is to do as much groundwater recharge as possible. In at least the Fresno area, I would say the more recharge happens, the better situation the small farms are in because then the water table is at a level where they don't have to worry as much about whether their wells are deep enough or whether their flow rate is high enough. I also think there are a couple of management actions that might happen under SGMA that I'm concerned about for small farms.
One is groundwater markets. Those have been promoted as a way to decrease the economic impacts of SGMA. But I think if there's any way to build in, however possible, protections for smaller farms, and particularly for farmers who are leasing land. One of my kind of worst case scenarios that I worry about a little bit is in a groundwater market. What happens to a farmer who is leasing land and then the landowner might need, it might make more sense economically for landowner to fallow that leased land and use whatever water allocation goes with that leased land on permanent crops that have higher value. So if you're a small scale vegetable farmer renting 20 acres, and you're renting that from a larger landowner that needs that water in a drought. And you know, this is not to place any judgment on anybody, but that economically that landowner might decide that it's more profitable to fallow that land if there's groundwater allocations associated with it, or maybe to sell it to somebody that would pay more than they're getting from the lease.
So that's one thing I'm concerned with since with Southeast Asian farmers, 80% of them are leasing their land, how would a groundwater market affect them? And I would like to see not only protections built in, but also incentives where they could maybe get paid for using their farms for groundwater recharge in the winter, or something like that, where there could be those financial benefits built in from those environmental services. Basically, there's been a lot of research that I'm sure you are all very familiar with on flooding farms in the winter for groundwater recharge. And that's mostly been on permanent crops. But I really think it's also good to look at annual crops, specialty crops that have an offseason and a lot of flexibility where they could flood their farms in the winter or even in the early spring, they could delay their planting. But they would have to have a financial benefit built in somehow, because that would be a little bit disruptive to their current practices, they'd have more weeds.
If there's a way to figure out how to incentivize groundwater recharge on small farms, I think that could actually really contribute to groundwater recharge and groundwater management. So I don’t want to present it as it's just you know, how do we protect them? It's also how can we involve them and have something that works for everyone's benefit. The other thing I'm concerned about is limitations on drilling new wells. So, smaller farms are less likely to do that ahead of a drought. They are more likely to be in a difficult situation during a drought. So, if there's a moratorium on drilling new wells, and it's in the middle of a drought, I can only imagine the situation I faced when I started my job in 2014, when nobody was allowed to drill a new well. I don't know that that'll happen necessarily. But that's one of the potential management actions that could happen under SGMA as a moratorium on drilling. And so, maybe there could be something like moratorium on well drilling unless you're well is shallower than a certain depth or something like that. I mean, I think there's ways to build those things in and make things more equitable and fair. But each GSA has to basically work through how to set those policies.
Mallika Nocco
What would you like all of our listeners to know about what you do and how can we all support your work?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Well, you can always express support for Cooperative Extension and UC ANR in general. We always appreciate support and I don't know how much I can talk about this but our statewide budget...you can also donate directly to my program. There's a button on my website, which is smallfarmsfresno.ucanr.edu. And, you know, I think also, just to be aware of some of the issues facing small farms and in conversations that you have with policymakers or regulators, or, you know, whoever you're talking to, to basically have had that awareness of the diversity of crops, the diversity of types of farmers that we have, especially in Central Valley, and how they might be affected differently by different policies.
Faith Kearns
Thanks, Ruth. A lot of your work sounds very highly localized in a lot of ways, but I also know you've been involved in some more policy-oriented levels at the state level. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your work on that side of things?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Sure, yeah. So a lot of that work has been with the Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program, which is a different water related program from SGMA. So, you know, thinking about water quality instead of quantity of groundwater. So that is a program that has been put in place to monitor fertilizer applications, and growers are required to report fertilizer that they've applied, as well as their yield and some other variables that allow calculation of how much nitrogen is being applied and how much is being removed from their farms yearly. And those, the forms and the processes to report that information, are more geared towards larger farms that usually have only one crop.
It turned out to be very difficult for the farms that we support to complete that paperwork, partly because, you know, they have such a large diversity of crops. They could have up to 100 different crops and varieties that they rotate through several seasons during the year. And so it was very hard for them to answer questions like what is the yield of your farm? So you have 20 acres with 100 crops, do you fill out 100 forms? One for each crop? Or do you take an average of everything which you probably don't have the information to do? And what does that number mean? So, so we were issues like that, that Michael Yang and I and some other partners as well brought to the attention of the State Water Resources Control Board.
I should mention also just talking about my program, that Michael Yang has been an absolutely essential part of outreach to the Southeast Asian community, being bilingual speaking Hmong and also Lao and having 26 years of relationships with that community, is a tremendous asset to understanding the reality on their farms, conducting cross cultural outreach and training, and none of the work that I do with the Southeast Asian community could be done without his support. So, he was also involved in this effort to basically try to communicate to policymakers that there was a need for some kind of alternate reporting on this program.
Also, another partner was my small farms advisor counterpart in Santa Clara County, who works with a similar population of Chinese growers who grow Asian specialty vegetables, we basically presented some of those issues and suggested alternate reporting requirements, which were approved and those are still being worked on at local levels by individual water quality coalitions and regional water quality control boards. But that definitely will make it possible for a more simplified Reporting Template that more suited to the reality on the small scale, diversified farms and easier for the farmers to use. And so we are hoping that that alleviates some of the paperwork and reporting burdens for them. And it also makes our job easier since we do basically the outreach and education to help them fill out the forms.
Mallika Nocco
Ruth, I think that this came out in bits throughout our conversation, but I want to ask about it specifically, what is joyous and what do you love about working with small farmers in California?
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
Well, I like getting to know a variety of different kinds of people and I one of the things I really love about the crops in the Fresno area is they're so diverse and especially tropical and subtropical crops that you wouldn't think that you would find here. So I actually grew up near Fresno, and then I spent some time in Central America, and I got to know a lot of tropical crops and then I came back and when I started working at Cooperative Extension in Fresno County and visiting these farms, I would see all these tropical crops from other places, and I was just amazed that they grew here because this is not the tropics, you know, we have winter here, we have really hot, dry summers.
Especially the Southeast Asian farmers are able to grow things like guava, sugarcane, lemongrass, taro, papaya, a lot of crops that they would have grown in Laos where they came from as refugees. But they've been very creative in adapting their production practices to be able to grow those things in Fresno, whether it's cover it with plastic in the winter or knowing exactly when the planting and harvesting dates are so that it can be grown in a temperate area. So that's one of the things I really enjoy is seeing such a great diversity of crops and then getting to know the people that grow them.
Mallika Nocco
Well, that was a lovely answer. That's awesome. I never realized that there was guava could be grown here, either. That's pretty wild, that’s pretty cool.
Sam Sandoval
Me neither with papaya, it was like, oh my god, bring me some!
Ruth Dahlquist-Willard
It’s never gonna be a major acreage crop here, but it's definitely around. So another great crop is jujube, a really interesting tree, it’s drought tolerant, it has very few pest problems. And I really like it cooked. So you can eat it fresh and it tastes kind of like a dried apple, but it's not going to replace apples as a snacking fruit. But if you put it into anything you could cook apples in like pies or breads, or when for Thanksgiving, I made stuffing with it, releases this whole other flavor complex. It's like sort of a fig-date. You know, when it caramelizes and whatever those other processes are that happen when you cook things, it releases different flavors and it tastes amazing. And so that's one thing that’s kind of undeveloped right now, is there could be some kind of jujube industry in the Central Valley for processing maybe.
Sam Sandoval
I do want to thank to congratulate Ruth. I mean, she's done a tremendous job and excellent work. And anyway, glad to have you as a colleague.
Mallika Nocco
Thanks for listening and join us next time on Water Talk.