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Environment By Melinda Burns | Thu Jul 06, 2023 | 12:01am


A WATER WAR IS UNDERWAY IN SANTA BARBARA COUNTY’S CARROT COUNTRY

Cuyama Valley's Biggest Water-Guzzlers Forcing Everyone Else into Expensive
Battle over Groundwater Rights


A WATER WAR IS UNDERWAY
IN SANTA BARBARA COUNTY’S
CARROT COUNTRY


CUYAMA VALLEY’S BIGGEST WATER-GUZZLERS
FORCING EVERYONE ELSE INTO EXPENSIVE BATTLE
OVER GROUNDWATER RIGHTS

BY MELINDA BURNS | JULY 5, 2023


Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms, by far the largest water users in the Cuyama
Valley east of Santa Maria, have angered other landowners in the remote
agricultural region by suing them over water rights. | Credit: Carl Perry


The Cuyama Valley, the driest region in Santa Barbara County, is awash in
discontent. The world’s largest carrot producers, newly subject to restrictions
on over-pumping, are suing all other landowners over water rights, and legal
fees are mounting.

The Cuyama groundwater basin, which covers 380 square miles east of Santa Maria,
overlapping with Kern, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura counties, is on the list of
the state’s 21 basins in “critical overdraft.” Over time, more than twice as
much water has been pumped out by farmers as has been replenished, resulting in
ever-declining water levels underground. The valley gets an average 13 inches of
rain per year; 10 is the definition of a desert. Wells are the only water supply
here.

Jim Wegis, a fourth-generation farmer in Ventucopa, at the southeastern end of
the Cuyama Valley, is shown here in front of a booster station along Highway 33.
The station increases the water pressure for his irrigation system. Wegis
replaced most of his alfalfa fields years ago with pistachios and olives, less
water-intensive crops. | Credit: Carl Perry

During the second half of the 20th century, alfalfa, a water-intensive crop, was
largely responsible for the groundwater drawdown; today, carrots, a $69 million
annual crop, are dominant, spurred by the demand for baby carrots.

Last year, records show, Grimmway Farms, the largest carrot corporation in
world, and Bolthouse Farms, the second largest, pumped 28,500 acre-feet of water
from the Cuyama basin — equivalent to nearly a year’s supply for three cities
the size of Santa Barbara, population 87,000. The two companies, based in
Bakersfield, are by far the biggest water users in the valley; they alone
account for more than 40 percent of basin pumping.

“The thing that bothers me personally the most is that Bolthouse and Grimmway
have known for years that every year, they lower their pumps, and they haven’t
chosen to make any changes,” said Jim Wegis, a pistachio and olive grower who
owns Triangle E Farms in Ventucopa, at the southeastern end of the valley.
“They’re putting a real strain on everybody, trying to get that last little bit
of water out.”

Under the state Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, depleted
aquifers such as Cuyama’s must be back in balance by 2040. In May, the Cuyama
Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA), run by a group of county
officials and major landowners, including Bolthouse and Grimmway and their
supporters, announced the first-ever pumping restrictions here — a five percent
cutback from 2021 levels.

Beginning in 2025, under a GSA plan that was approved by the state Department of
Water Resources in May, the cutbacks are slated to increase to 6.5 percent
yearly.

For now, the restrictions apply only to the flat central portion of the basin
where the overdraft is most severe. Of about 32,000 acres here, Bolthouse and
Grimmway own or lease more than half the land.


Carrot fields stretch across the Cuyama valley toward the Caliente range.
Bolthouse and Grimmway own or lease more than half the land in the central basin
where the groundwater overdraft is most severe. | Credit: Carl Perry.



LAWYERS’ BONANZA



To comply with the state’s 2040 deadline, pumping reductions on the order of 50
to 67 percent may be required basin-wide to achieve sustainability, the GSA
says. That prospect is difficult enough.

But what’s really roiling the waters now is the lawsuit that was filed in Los
Angeles Superior Court in 2021 by Grimmway Enterprises Inc. and its farm
management companies; and Bolthouse Land Co. and Bolthouse Farms Inc. against
“all persons claiming a right to extract or store groundwater “ in the Cuyama
basin. The companies are asking a judge to assign specific water rights to each
valley pumper, a complex and lengthy process called an adjudication.

Bolthouse and Grimmway also asked the judge to halt the schedule of pumping
reductions until the case can be resolved — even though two of their past and
present executives sit on the GSA board.

“How much worse can it get?” asked Jake Furstenfeld, manager of the Walking U
Ranch and a member of the citizens’ advisory committee to the GSA. “They don’t
want to cut back. They just want to bypass the whole plan. They want a different
plan.”

Jake Furstenfeld, manager of the Walking U Ranch, believes that Bolthouse and
Grimmway filed their lawsuit in order to bypass the pumping cutbacks that are
scheduled to increase every year to 2040 in the Cuyama Valley. | Credit: Carl
Perry

Wegis said: “Right now, the main basin has to take all the cuts. Bolthouse and
Grimmway want to spread those cuts out to the entire basin. They’re trying to
get a better deal from the court.”

The first trial in the case will be held in August to consider the basin
boundaries. Court documents show that 90 landowners in the valley have hired 20
law firms to defend their water rights. They include pistachio, olive, apple,
vegetable, alfalfa and cannabis growers; vintners; dairy owners; cattle
ranchers; the Cuyama school district and two small water agencies. Santa Barbara
County and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife are on the list of
landowners, too.

By now, it’s likely that these defendants, including the water district
representing 700 New Cuyama residents, have collectively spent several hundreds
of thousands of dollars on lawyers’ fees — and the case could drag on for years.
Residents say some of their neighbors are selling their trucks to pay lawyers’
fees; others are taking second jobs or postponing their retirement. Some are
living on Social Security and have borrowed money from their children.

The places where most residents live — Cuyama, New Cuyama and Ventucopa — are
all on the state’s list of “disadvantaged unincorporated communities,” or
communities with low-income populations and unmet infrastructure needs.

“People are highly upset,” Furstenfeld said. “They know that Bolthouse and
Grimmway have all the money in the world to carry on, and we’re going to get
drug through a lawsuit we can’t afford. It’s very much a financial strain on a
lot of people. Do you pay for the lawyer or do you feed your family? This is the
modern-day David vs. Goliath, without a doubt.”




ROPING IN SMALL USERS



Furstenfeld said he pumps water for his family and 32 cows. The water is stored
in tanks to prevent losses from evaporation, he said, and he checks the lines
daily, looking for leaks that coyotes may have chewed into them. Walking U is at
the southwestern end of the valley; the ranch has not seen a drop in its well
water levels since the 1970s, Furstenfeld said.

An estimated 200 owners of valley properties such as the Walking U Ranch use
less than two acre-feet of water yearly, a tiny fraction of what the carrot
companies consume. In court filings, they are called “de minimus pumpers.” An
unknown number still have not been served with court papers, residents say.
Those who have been served have been advised that if they fail to file a
response in court, they risk losing their water rights altogether.

“Before the Court can determine what is de minimus water use in the Cuyama
Basin, we need to better understand the number of pumpers and the quantity of
water being pumped,” the Bolthouse and Grimmway lawsuit states.



Lawyers for Bolthouse and Grimmway declined to comment this month on the lawsuit
or the companies’ farming practices. A reporter’s emails to corporate
headquarters in Bakersfield requesting comment went unanswered. In court
filings, the companies argue that the Cuyama basin adjudication is “necessary to
protect the Basin’s limited water supply” and “ensure that the waters of the
Basin are put to maximal reasonable beneficial use.”

“Plaintiffs bring this action to protect the general welfare of the Basin,
protect Plaintiffs’ right to pump groundwater and to achieve sustainability of
the Basin,” they state.

Water rights adjudications must resolve competing claims between those
landowners who are using their well water on their own land and those who are
shipping around their water. Some owners may claim “prescriptive rights” to
water they’ve been drawing over time from another property, like a squatter’s
claim to land. Relying on historic use to apportion water rights is fraught
because some landowners have a history of conserving water and others don’t.



County Board of Supervisors Chair Das Williams, who represents the Cuyama Valley
and sits on the GSA board, says Bolthouse and Grimmway should drop their suit.
The GSA’s plan for ever-increasing pumping restrictions must be allowed to go
forward, he said, “so that the basin doesn’t get worse and worse and wells don’t
run dry.”

“I just hope they do some soul-searching and realize this adjudication is not
good for the valley,” Williams said. “Their neighbors are being hurt. My
constituents are all feeling nervous and insecure about the future of their
water supply. The reality is, the government doesn’t want their water: It seems
Bolthouse and Grimmway do.”




BABY CARROT BOOM


“We’re not begrudging them making money, but it’s not sustainable,” Lee
Harrington, a Ventucopa pistachio grower, said of Bolthouse and Grimmway.
Harrington and Wegis are part of a group of Ventucopa farmers who have spent
$150,000 on lawyers’ fees to date to protect their water rights. | Credit: Carl
Perry

Baby carrots launched the massive expansion of carrot fields in the Cuyama
Valley, starting in the 1990s. Bolthouse and Grimmway cut, peel and shave
two-inch pieces out of carrots to create the wildly popular mini-snacks.

Today, the fields of Bolthouse and Grimmway stretch along Highway 166 between
two mountain ranges as far as the eye can see. Their main crop is carrots, but
they farm other vegetables, too. From March through September, their overhead
sprinklers are running full blast, residents say, even when it’s hot and windy.
The water levels in some of the wells in the central basin have dropped to more
than 600 feet underground. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, some of the
water being pumped out here is “fossil water” more than 30,000 years old.

Wegis said he and 10 other Ventucopa property owners, including olive and
pistachio farmers Lee Harrington and his son, Jason, will argue in court that
they are drawing water from a sub-basin of the valley that is not in overdraft.
They believe that an earthquake fault blocks the underground flow of water from
Ventucopa into the main basin. Their group has spent $150,000 in lawyers’ fees
to date, Wegis said.

Wegis, a fourth-generation farmer in the valley, said he replaced most of his
former 500-acre alfalfa operation years ago. With a drip irrigation system in
place for his pistachio and olive trees, he says he’s cut his water use by
three-quarters. He pumped 234 acre-feet of water last year, or less than one
percent of what Bolthouse and Grimmway used.

“In this end of the valley, we’ve chosen to make changes,” Wegis said.

Of Bolthouse and Grimmway, Lee Harrington said, “We’re not begrudging them
making money, but it’s not sustainable. We’re going to fight ‘em.”




MOUNTING LEGAL FEES


Davie Lewis, a pistachio grower in the central southeastern valley, said he has
been hard hit by $5,000 in lawyers’ fees to date, just as his trees are coming
to fruit for the first time. | Credit: Carl Perry

Gene Zannon, whose family owns the Santa Barbara Pistachio Co. and 420 acres of
pistachios in the valley, is the fourth-largest pumper in the valley, after
Grimmway, Bolthouse, and Kern Ridge Growers, GSA records show. But the water use
at the Zannons’ farms, Tri-County Pistachios and Lucky Dog Ranch, was 2,220
acre-feet last year, or less than 8 percent of the total pumped by Bolthouse and
Grimmway. Kern Ridge, in third place, used 3,033 acre-feet of water, or 11
percent as much as Bolthouse and Grimmway. 

Zannon said he has spent $50,000 on lawyers’ fees so far to defend his family’s
water rights.

“It’s a legal food fest that is sucking huge amounts of money out of the
valley,” he said. “It has had a serious impact on the small landowners.”

Dave Lewis, who owns 40 acres of pistachios awaiting their first harvest in the
central eastern Cuyama basin, said the lawyers’ fees — more than $5,000 to date
for his property — are “eating me alive.” Lewis pumped 30 acre-feet of water in
2022, GSA records show.

“I was planning on retiring, but I don’t think I can, now,” Lewis said.

Alfonso Gamino, superintendent of the Cuyama Joint Unified School District, said
his small district spent $6,750 in lawyers’ fees in June alone, plus $5,000 for
a water meter. Most of the district’s 180 students come from low-income Latino
families. Under Gamino’s leadership, the district recently emerged from a period
in which it had been placed under a fiscal solvency plan by the county.

“Is it a burden? Sure it is,” Gamino said of the lawyers’ fees. “It takes away
from the education of the children. It would have been nice if they had excluded
the school district when this lawsuit was filed.”

Alfonso Gamino, superintendent of the Cuyama Joint Unified School District, says
the small district paid $6,700 this month in lawyers’ fees, plus $5,000 for a
new water meter. | Credit: Carl Perry

In New Cuyama, a community of retirees, commuters and Latino farmworker
families, the Cuyama Community Services District is paying off a loan for a
million-dollar treatment plant that was installed in 2014 to remove arsenic from
the water supply. Most of the plant was paid for in grant money, officials said,
but the district owes $171,000 on a $240,000 loan. Amid those obligations, they
said, the district has had to spend $41,000 this fiscal year on lawyers’ fees in
the water rights lawsuit, or about 8 percent of its total budget.

Laura Price, co-owner of The Old Cuyama Store on Highway 166 and secretary of
the Cuyama Mutual Water Co., representing 14 homes and businesses just east of
New Cuyama, said the company has paid $4,000 in lawyers’ fees to date, “trying
to protect the rights of our residents.”

“We’ve got a little bit in the bank, but that’s our contingency money if the
well goes down,” Price said. “There’s going to come a point where we’re just not
going to be able to keep paying out money for an attorney. I think it’s sad when
large companies like that can go after so many people who have no means of
protecting themselves.”




‘A BAD FEELING’


A mural on the back wall of the Cuyama Valley Family Resource Center in New
Cuyama illustrates the water cycle in this land of little rain. The Cuyama
River, which runs through 55 miles of the valley, is usually dry. | Credit: Carl
Perry


The Cuyama water rights adjudication lawsuit is one of six filed in California
since the Legislature passed the Sustainable Groundwater Basin Management Act in
2014. A “friendly” lawsuit to adjudicate the declining basin underlying Borrego
Springs in San Diego County was resolved after 15 months of negotiations, with
the Borrego water district, resort owners and grapefruit growers agreeing to
slash their water use by 74 percent by 2040.

But friendly negotiations are not the norm. After five years of squabbling, a
court judgment was entered in June in a water rights adjudication case in the
Las Posas Valley of Ventura County.

The Bolthouse and Grimmway lawsuit “has a bad feeling to it,” said Eric
Hvolboll, who co-owns two ranches in the Cuyama Valley, one at the western end
and the other in Salisbury Canyon. “It seems we have these out-of-town people
who are avaricious and are lawfully taking advantage of an archaic law to the
economic detriment of their neighbors.”

Bolthouse and Grimmway are subject to pumping reductions of 5 percent this year,
compared to 2021 levels. The sprinklers on carrots typically run day and night.
| Credit: Carl Perry

A bill now making its way through the state Legislature, AB779, would encourage
the court to “consider the water use of small farmers and disadvantaged
communities … before entering a judgment” in a groundwater rights adjudication.

It’s not clear how the court ruling in the case will affect the GSA’s plan for
cutbacks, but state law will require some compatibility between the two. Under
the law, an adjudication cannot “substantially impair” the ability of a GSA or
the state “to achieve sustainable groundwater management.”

Anthony Leggio of Bakersfield is president of Bolthouse Properties; manager of
Bolthouse Land Co.; and a director of Tejon Ranch, the largest expanse of
private land in California. Jeffrey Dunn is CEO of Bolthouse Farms. Jeff Huckaby
of Arvin is president and CEO of Grimmway Farms and CEO of Grimmway Enterprises.
Other plaintiffs in the water rights lawsuit include Grimmway’s farm management
companies: Diamond Farming, Lapis Land, and Ruby Land. 

Matt Vickery, the director of land and water resources at Grimmway; and Derek
Yurosek, the former vice president of real estate at Bolthouse Properties and
vice president of agricultural operations at Bolthouse Farms and the current
managing director of Arable Capital Partners, a Bakersfield agribusiness
investment firm, have both occupied leadership roles on the GSA board. They did
not respond to recent requests for comment on the lawsuit or the GSA’s plan for
pumping cutbacks.

Vickery is presently vice chair of the GSA board. Yurosek, whose grandfather,
Mike Yurosek, invented baby carrots, was voted out as chairman on May 3. The
minutes of the meeting show that a narrow majority of board members backed Cory
Bantilan for the post: he is chief of staff for Santa Barbara County Supervisor
Steve Lavagnino, who represents Santa Maria. Board members who voted for
Bantilan spoke in favor of a “neutral” and “objective” chairperson, noting also
that the water rights lawsuit was costing landowners “a significant amount of
money in legal fees.”

Asked by one board member whether the lawsuit disqualified Yurosek from serving
as chairman, the board’s attorney said it did not. “All landowners are in the
same position” in such lawsuits, he said. Yurosek remains a GSA board member.

Melinda Burns is an investigative journalist with 40 years of experience
covering immigration, water, science, and the environment. As a community
service, she offers her reports to multiple publications in Santa Barbara
County, at the same time, for free.


Over-pumping for agriculture in the Cuyama Valley has resulted in chronically
declining water levels underground. To comply with state law governing
groundwater basin sustainability, pumping in the valley may be reduced by at
least half and as much as two-thirds by 2040. | Credit: Carl Perry



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