In the fields at Terranova Ranch, it was as if a disaster had arrived.
Don Cameron, clad in dark green waders, sloshed through the pond that had formed in his orchards and vineyards. More of his crops were underwater than at any time since he began farming in California’s San Joaquin Valley—a quarter of the almonds, a third of the grapes, half the pistachios, and all of the walnuts and olives. Most of his neighbors would have been racing to pump out their fields; accepted agricultural wisdom holds that too much water will suffocate the roots. About an hour’s drive southeast, farmers were so desperate to hold the flood back that they dropped sandbags from rented helicopters. At Terranova, Cameron took an entirely different tack. He measured the depth of the drink and inspected the new growth on his vines and trees. Then he ordered more water to come.
It was early 2017, and after five years of drought the valley was in the midst of its second-wettest year on record. A total of 53 gargantuan storms, known as atmospheric rivers, soaked the West Coast. There were landslides and blackouts. Dams crested, century-old giant sequoia trees toppled, and a stretch of the Central Coast was cut off from the rest of the state. Tens of thousands of people fled their homes, and at least five died. In the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the snowpack reached its highest level in years.
The flooding was unpredictable, but it was not unexpected. California’s weather lurches between wet and dry. To calculate the state’s average annual precipitation is to do a rather meaningless bit of arithmetic. This particular flood took a while to reach Cameron. From the mountains, it poured into the upper portion of the Kings River, then into Pine Flat Lake, a dammed reservoir 100 miles upstream of Terranova. By late February, the dam operators were releasing more than 400 acre-feet per hour into the lower river—enough water to flood 400 acres of grapes or almonds shin-deep. As the weather warmed, snowmelt brought a second flood. Water heaved down the Sierra slopes and roared through the canyons, pushing Pine Flat beyond capacity. At peak outflow, the reservoir was releasing nearly 1,200 acre-feet per hour.
Cameron had been dreaming of a deluge like this since 1983 and building for it since 2010, but he wasn’t ready when it came. His project was years behind schedule: The pumps weren’t installed; the canals weren’t fully dug. The best he had been able to do was rely on rented diesel pumps and an old pipeline to pull water out of the Kings as fast as he could. From winter through spring, he managed to keep the crops wet, siphoning more than 3,000 acre-feet off the river, lamenting that he couldn’t take more. One vineyard of robust Italian Barbera wine grapes that needed 2 acre-feet of water in a year got 13 acre-feet in a season. Ducks moved in as the branches flowered. Come summer harvest, the grapes were as sweet as ever.
The real success story, though, lay in the ground beneath Terranova. In a typical year, that’s where most of the farm’s water comes from. Cameron and his neighbors do not hold rights to any nearby river, or to the supplies piped in through government projects; they either buy from people who do or, more often, pump what they need out of the aquifers. A system of natural subterranean reservoirs stretches beneath the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, which together form the Central Valley. The region is pincushioned with more than 100,000 wells. People and businesses have pumped out so much water that whole towns sink into the hollows.
While Terranova stood firm, its aquifer was in trouble. Cameron and his neighbors had taxed the ground so heavily over the years that there was a 230-foot-deep dry zone, or “cone of depression,” in the water table beneath the ranch. But after the 2017 flood, after the last of the rain and snowmelt had trickled down into the aquifer, the water level rose 40 feet. Cameron swore that when the next flood came, he would be ready to gulp down even more.
Cameron didn’t come up with the idea of using floodwater to refill aquifers, but he did earn a reputation as the godfather of the practice. In a valley dotted with ponds and basins built for the sole purpose of holding extra water as it percolates down into the ground, he was the first farmer foolhardy enough to experiment on his own harvest. His work earned him state and county prizes for innovation. In 2018 he was appointed president of California’s agriculture board. He thought—hoped—that on-farm recharge might become one piece of the future-proofing necessary to save the country’s most productive agricultural region from near-certain death.
The stakes are high: California grows more than a third of the vegetables and two-thirds of the fruits and nuts eaten in the United States, dominating production of artichokes, avocados, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, celery, dates, grapes, garlic, olives, plums, peaches, walnuts, pistachios, lemons, sweet rice, and lettuce. The Central Valley is America’s agricultural heartland, crucially important to the state’s economy and the groceries of the nation. More wine grapes are grown there than in California’s wine country, more almonds than anywhere else on earth. There are more than a quarter of a million acres devoted to tomatoes, which when plucked, weighed, canned, and shipped add up to around a third of all the processed tomato stuff eaten worldwide. And that’s not to mention all the region’s livestock—chickens, pigs, cows.
Ever since the first crops were planted, though, people have used more water than nature could replace. In the past eight decades, more than 120 million acre-feet have been siphoned out of the aquifers. The deficit grows by an average of 1.8 million acre-feet each year. Meanwhile, climate change is poised to amp California’s mercurial weather cycles to new extremes. The droughts will be drier and longer, the floods higher and faster. Unless farming and water-management practices change, the region is facing an existential crisis. A report from the Public Policy Institute of California included a stark projection: To balance the water budget and protect the groundwater on which most Californians depend, as many as 780,000 acres of farmland would need to be fallowed.
Cameron’s project suggested the possibility of another path: What if you could capture one disaster and use it to mitigate the other? What if you could do what California’s climate couldn’t and average out the floods and droughts? The depleted aquifers beneath the Central Valley could hold an estimated 140 million acre-feet—three times more water than all the state’s reservoirs combined—and they could do it for a small fraction of the price of surface storage. Water kept underground isn’t lost to evaporation, which will only speed up with a hotter, drier climate. Best of all, from a farmer’s perspective, Cameron’s techniques wouldn’t necessarily require fallowing land before flooding it.
There would be risks, sure. But for Cameron, there is no viable alternative. “I have growers tell me that there’s no way in hell they’re going to flood their almonds,” he says. “They say, ‘If I get a wind, my trees are gonna blow down.’ And I say, ‘Well, that’s fine, you can worry about that or you can not do anything and you’ll only be farming half of those trees anyway.’”
So yes, outside the Kings River Basin, Cameron is a revered farmer and business leader, hailed as a visionary at the vanguard of climate adaptation. Inside the basin, though, things aren’t so simple. Here, according to his ally Matt Hurley, who runs the organization that oversees aquifer use in and around Terranova, Cameron is “probably one of the most hated people.”
The problem is the flood, the excess acre-footage that Cameron needs to make his plan work. It doesn’t belong to him. It might not belong to anyone. Because that water only flows every few years, it was always treated as a periodic inconvenience, if not a disaster. The flood “was something everybody wanted to get rid of,” Cameron says. Then, right as he “went crazy” drowning his acres at Terranova, it became something everybody wanted. A land developer with dealings all over the state and an outside water district made a claim on it, arguing that the Kings River surge was going to waste and should instead belong to them. The river’s existing rights holders were incensed; local residents were worried. Caught in the middle, Cameron’s
paradigm-shifting recharge project was at risk of running dry.
The outcome of the Kings River conflict will ramify throughout the Central Valley and the state. It is an early skirmish in the slow-building water war that may consume this region as the climate crisis wrings it dry. At its heart is a savage question: When drought is coming for everyone, who owns the flood?
The worst California deluge on record came early in the Golden State’s life. Between December 1861 and January 1862, there were weeks of continuous rain and snow. Governor-elect Leland Stanford took a rowboat to his inauguration. Thousands of cattle drowned; whole towns were swept away. The flood pooled in the low, fertile valleys where farms would one day grow their riches. The capital was temporarily moved to San Francisco while Sacramento dried out. The state went bankrupt. And then everyone forgot.
In the wake of that catastrophe, settlers in the Central Valley began building their agrarian paradise. Over time, they terraformed the land, changing it beyond recognition, ruthless in their management of water. Where there was too much, they dammed it dry. Where there was not enough, they brought it in. And when it didn’t come during growing season, they tapped it from below. By the turn of the last century, they had drained Tulare Lake, formerly the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. They spent the next decades corralling its tributaries. The largest of these was the Kings River.
The land along the westernmost section of the river was forever marshy. The groundwater here flows from the Sierra foothills in the northeast; if the mountains are at the shallow end of a big subterranean swimming pool, this is the deep end. Unable to farm this vibrant aquatic habitat, people drilled it full of wells. When the wetlands dried up, the land became arable. This was how, after decades, a riparian swamp became Terranova Ranch.
The land that Cameron farms is just outside the town of Helm, which boasts a post office, a gas station, an elementary school, and fewer than 10 paltry inches of rain per year. It is in the McMullin Area, the only groundwater district in the Kings subbasin not served by the actual river. The end of the North Fork of the Kings runs nearby, and it still floods every few years. Most of the time, though, it is desiccated and weed-filled, an expanse of beige and ocher interrupted by scrubby bursts of pale green and gray.
This is the case in the fall of 2021, when Cameron and I drive out to the edge of the ranch. “It looks like a desert,” he says. “It doesn’t look like a river. But when the water comes”—he pauses in wonderment—“everything comes alive.”
Standing in the dust, Cameron, 69, cuts a slim but sturdy figure. He has a medium build and a long gait, his face creased by sun and time. With his hands in his pockets and mud on his boots, he stands a few inches shy of 6 feet, the height of the four intake pipes that carry water from the river to Terranova. In a crisp long-sleeved oxford shirt and faded Levi’s, he is the only blue in the landscape.
Where so many of his peers define themselves by their lineage, Cameron is a first-generation farmer. He studied biology at the state college in Fresno, planning to work in wildlife management so he could spend his days in nature. When the local service wasn’t hiring, Cameron turned to the region’s dominant industry instead. Farming was work, and it was outside. Close enough. “And then it kind of got under my skin,” he says. “I love the challenge.”
Cameron began working at Terranova in 1981, and it has been nothing if not a challenge. The farm’s two dozen or so crops (conventional and organic, so many he can’t list them all off the top of his head—almonds, pistachios, bell peppers, carrots, onions, garlic, olives for oil, tomatoes for canning, grapes for wine) rely on some 55 wells. Since his first season, Cameron has seen the water table drop by a foot or more each year. But he has also seen the Kings roar with potential.
The winter of 1982–83 was the wettest ever recorded on the river. On his commute between the ranch and his home at the time in Fresno, Cameron watched with apprehension as overflow from the nearby San Joaquin River inundated a vineyard at the low point of the floodplain. But he was amazed to find that the plants weren’t smothered. Every day that spring and into the summer, the vines stretched, the leaves unfurled, and the grapes grew unharmed above the flood.
Those two years, he used more than 9,000 acre-feet of spare Kings floodwater. He did the same in subsequent wet years: 1984, 1986, 1987, 1995, 1996. In 1997, the Kings River Water Association, which manages rights and records inflows and outflows, agreed to allow Terranova to sip the extra flood-water for $2 per acre-foot. Otherwise it would at best flow out to the San Francisco Bay, at worst flood someone downstream.
Still, each year the water below Terranova’s fields receded deeper, further out of Cameron’s reach. By 2009, he had instituted every irrigation efficiency he could think of. He set his sights on something bigger, a flood-and-recharge project that would skim the peaks off the river and send them back underground—in other words, pay down the aquifer debt. A few hours’ drive to the north, in Yolo County, a lanky engineer named Philip Bachand was looking to try something similar. The two men teamed up, the match made by a mutual contact at the US Department of Agriculture, and by the end of 2010 they had a $75,000 grant from the agency. That was only enough for a shoestring budget, but how complicated could it be? “At the most basic level, it’s just throwing water on land, right?” Bachand tells me.
The night that “kicked this whole thing off,” Cameron recalls, was a cold evening in December 2010. He and Bachand were touring Terranova, looking for the best 1,100 acres to flood as the light was fading in the valley fog. They decided the lands that would grow the farm’s carrots, peppers, and tomatoes later in the year were top contenders. Bachand would make them look like rice fields, terraced and waterlogged. But the deluge offered more water than those acres could hold. Cameron thought of 1983 and the accidentally flooded fields along the San Joaquin. He pointed at a vineyard of Barbera. “We can blitz-flood all our grapes,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Bachand was surprised, but Cameron insisted. He figured that the ad hoc hydroponic environment would hold enough oxygen that the grapes could still thrive. The team pumped in enough water to submerge the roots; when the soil absorbed it, they pumped in more. Cameron checked on the vines daily, looking for any sign of stress. When the new spring leaves began to develop a yellow tinge, he sent the flood somewhere else, and they darkened to cool viridian again.
By August, Bachand and Cameron had sent more than 1,000 acre-feet of water back into the aquifer. They had used twice that much just to water other crops on the ranch, preventing the groundwater debt from accruing further. By Bachand’s reckoning, the water cost about a third of what Terranova would have spent pulling the same amount from underground. Having proved their concept, they secured $5 million from the California Department of Water Resources to engineer the permanent infrastructure they’d need to move floodwater across all of Terranova’s 5,500 acres. They built and built for that next flood—and while they did, the state descended into another drought.
Agribusiness loves the message of on-farm recharge. After years as water villains, growers get to be part of the solution. The Almond Board of California, whose embattled nut swallows 13 percent of all agricultural water in the state, is an especially ardent booster. But Cameron’s technique is not a miracle that will deliver the San Joaquin Valley from all of its demons. Cash crops aren’t alone in relying on the groundwater here. Many thousands of people do too, and they have reason to be skeptical of solutions that privilege agricultural needs.
In times of drought, farmers effectively compete with neighboring communities for water. In the race to the bottom of the valley aquifers, growers can pump so much that thousands of residential wells sputter and die. While the almond trees stay green, families wash their dishes with bottled water. Efforts to recharge more and pump less are welcome—any drop in this beleaguered bucket—but some in the valley would rather see farmers fallow the fields along riverbanks, pull back the levees, and restore the old floodplain wetlands. Fish and other wildlife would likely agree. Before the rivers were contained for society’s purported benefit, flooding was a natural part of the riparian life cycle.
In the short term, groundwater recharge could worsen another of the valley’s woes. The entire region is polluted with fertilizer compounds, which leach into the soil, then into the aquifers, then into the drinking water, where they can be especially harmful to infants and small children. Residential areas across the San Joaquin Valley are also hot spots for the pesticide additive 1,2,3-Trichloropropane, which likely contributes to cancer. Throwing water on the land would flush these contaminants into the aquifers much faster than otherwise. In the longer term, though, the legacy contamination would be diluted with pristine Sierra snowmelt. Cameron works with Helen Dahlke, a hydrologist at UC Davis, to measure nutrients and chemicals in Terranova’s soil and water using sensors in the ground. Recent soil samples turned up residue from a handful of pesticides; more testing is needed to determine what’s ending up in the water. “I’d rather know,” Cameron says.
But even if on-farm recharge is proven safe, beneficial, and arguably necessary for the fish, the crops, the land, and the residents—even if all of that happens, the Terranova project could still wither on the vine. Cameron’s biggest hurdle has always been politics. In 2014, mid-drought, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The law charged locals with crafting and imposing their own groundwater sustainability plans. This involved self-organizing dozens of new agencies across 21 “critically overdrafted” basins, many of them in the San Joaquin Valley. These agencies, dominated by agricultural users, were left with two options: consume less water, or figure out where to get more.
Until that point, California law had been largely silent on the question of groundwater ownership. If the land was yours, you could drill as deep as you liked. Surface water, on the other hand, had been regulated since the Gold Rush. The rules said that if you were the first to claim the water—even if it wasn’t on your land—then you had a right to it. You kept that right as long as you didn’t let the water go to waste. In other words: Finders keepers, and use it or lose it. On the Kings River, the first rights permit dates back to 1916, and the water was declared “fully appropriated” in 1989. But the river still flooded, and some of the flood never made it onto the books. Was it truly all appropriated, or could there be something left over? The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act put every unaccounted-for drop in play.
Seemingly no one understood the opportunity this presented better than the land developer John Vidovich. The 66-year-old grew up on the peninsula south of San Francisco as the region was changing identity, transitioning from the fruit-farming “Valley of Heart’s Delight” to Silicon Valley. His father, one of the first to get wise, took the 20 acres of apricots and cherries the family farmed and turned them into a shopping center. The elder Vidovich built a regional real estate powerhouse, which the younger Vidovich grew into a statewide empire. His investment firm, Sandridge Partners, has amassed more than 100,000 acres of agricultural land in the San Joaquin Valley. Some of it is planted with almonds, but most of it Vidovich uses for its associated water rights, allocations, and access. That’s where the real money lies.
Some of Vidovich’s state-spanning water deals are more infamous than others. In one case, he sold a water agency near Los Angeles the rights to surface water tied to a piece of farmland, then pumped up groundwater from the same plot and sent at least some of it via clandestine pipeline to the juggernaut Wonderful Company, a major grower of mandarins, pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds.
In 2016, Vidovich signed another valley-spanning deal, this one even bigger: the Tulare Lake Storage and Floodwater Protection Project. It would route the Kings River floodwater not north toward Terranova but south, to a new reservoir that would be built on Sandridge land. Vidovich would sell the rights to use the land and build the reservoir to Semitropic, a water storage district on the southern side of the dry Tulare lake bed. Semitropic already ran a groundwater bank, a kind of underground reservoir that could stockpile as much as 1.65 million acre-feet for its account holders. It planned to pay for the new $600 million project with state funds.
Whether the idea was originally Vidovich’s brainstorm or Semitropic’s isn’t clear; neither party responded to multiple requests for comment. Nor is it clear when they thought it up—although in mid-2014, Semitropic began pouring money into lobbying the state legislature on water storage issues. Certainly it was a good deal for Vidovich. Semitropic would pay the water mogul $40 million for the easement on the land. He would also get priority rights to floodwater—not just from the Kings but also any other tributaries-—and access to the California Aqueduct, which carries water from the northern part of the state to the south. He would be able to transport groundwater across his growing empire or, some feared, sell it to someone even thirstier. (Vidovich told an interviewer in 2017, “Even if I were to move water and sell it, it would be to farming operations.”)
Where the rights holders were riled by the Semitropic proposal—“sharpening our knives” for the “pirates at the door,” one told a local reporter—Steve Haugen didn’t flinch. Haugen bears the weighty title of “watermaster” for the Kings River Water Association, which protects the interests of the 28 member units of the river’s watered gentry, both upstream and downstream from Terranova. His nerves are cool after 30 years working on one of the largest rivers in the Sierra. “The history books are riddled with hundreds of unimplemented projects on the Kings alone,” he tells me. “So yeah, hydrauli-cally the concept works. Politically, financially, it’s hard to believe that would work.”
Middle-aged, with graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Haugen folds and refolds his hands and looks down as he speaks, measuring his statements with the same consideration he has shown in decades of measuring the river’s flow. The low-ceilinged conference room next-door to his office, where the members meet, is lined with black-and-white photos of Sierra peaks covered in a thick layer of snowpack. They’re lit with the reverence shown to gilded portraits of saints.
For all Haugen’s calm talk, Semitropic argues that it was his agency that left the door open to a challenge. It held two water licenses from the state that covered the flood on the Kings—but didn’t consistently report water use on either of them. On paper, the water went to waste, which meant that it could now be up for grabs. (See the second sacred tenet of California water law: Use it or lose it.) Semitropic had staked $40 million on what appeared to be a record-keeping gaffe.
In response, the Kings River Water Association claimed that it was all a misunderstanding. The accounting was correct; the organization had just put the numbers in the wrong places. A “simplified reporting method,” the attorneys called it. Sure, the river flooded sometimes, but those were rare events, outside of their control. And anyway, now member units and local groundwater agencies had their own ambitious recharge plans.
Haugen says that he and other Kings River representatives tried to negotiate with the would-be attackers. They met around half a dozen times between late 2016 and early 2017. Haugen says they could’ve given a little–they had, after all, been selling that floodwater in deals like the one with Terranova for decades. But, he says, Semitropic wanted a permanent right to the extra water, which the association wasn’t willing to give up for any price.
They ended up on the proverbial courthouse steps, in a battle over whether to crack open the book on the Kings for the first time in decades. In May 2017, three of the Kings River districts filed claims to a million acre-feet of water that they said they already owned—an amount equivalent to more than half the average annual run of the Kings. Sixteen days later, Semitropic filed a petition claiming that the river’s “fully appropriated” status should be revoked or revised, along with an application for rights to 1.6 million acre-feet.
This all sounded to me like very bad news for Don Cameron and his big empty pipes out by Helm—which would very likely stay empty if Semitropic were to win. But he and the rest of the board at the McMullin groundwater agency couldn’t join the coalition condemning Semitropic’s “water grab.” It would have required endorsing the claim that the river had no water to spare. And if that were true, Cameron wouldn’t be the Department of Water Resources’ golden godfather of recharge.
The river users were not happy that McMullin had failed to take their side. They responded with icy hostility. Haugen, the Kings’ watermaster, remains unimpressed by Cameron’s project. “We’ve been doing groundwater recharge in the service area for a century now,” he tells me. “I’ve got plans that can fully put that water to use.” If Terranova wants to help with flood control now and again, that’s fine, he says. “But there are no assurances that there’s ever water for a flood control project,” he continues, offering a grim smile. “Folks want to see our local area sustainable. And there are ways to do it cooperatively.”
But not, apparently, on the Kings. In 2020, Haugen’s association canceled all the river’s floodwater agreements, including the one it had maintained with Terranova for nearly 25 years. Cameron would have to find another way.
On the first floor of a small office building, in the middle of Kerman, California—population about 16,000, one Walmart, one Starbucks—Matt Hurley is drowning in paperwork. He is the general manager of the McMullin Area Ground-water Sustainability Agency and its only full-time staff member. His reception area is cluttered with stacks of large paper maps and plans, and cardboard boxes in various stages of unpack. “I got a few demerits when I was young, and I still need to get a few brownie points to offset those, because I still may be taking the wrong elevator if I’m not careful,” he says. “Hopefully, I can do good on my time left on this planet before I check out.”
At 68 years old, Hurley is the personification of a strong handshake, tall and booming in a dark blue polo shirt, jeans, and black cowboy boots, with silvery white side-parted hair and a mustache that curls down around the corners. He talks fast and peppers his speech with the folksy self-deprecation of a local agriculturalist (“You’ll figure out I’m wacky as a wooden watch”), which he is not.
Hurley came to McMullin from a water district further south, where John Vidovich owns the majority of property. A 2017 article in The Bakersfield Californian reported that some considered him Vidovich’s “henchman,” obliged to do Sandridge’s bidding. Hurley denied that the relationship was anything more than water district manager and water-wealthy ag king. Now he says that Vidovich is a longtime close family friend and his daughter’s godfather, that Vidovich asked and he provided legal advice on the sale of the $40 million easement to Semitropic, and that, following other asks for other favors, they haven’t spoken since April 6, 2018. Vidovich wanted him to do things that were “gray at best,” Hurley tells me. “He just doesn’t quite get what the whole picture looks like anymore. He’s so driven by making Sandridge bigger and better.”
By the time Hurley got to McMullin, he knew there was extra floodwater on the Kings—and he knew the area’s depleted aquifer could in fact be a huge asset. Unlike other parts of the valley, the McMullin Area hasn’t sunk into the emptied space of its exploited aquifer, making it a natural subterranean water bank. It could store nearly 2 million-acre feet underground, roughly as much as two Pine Flat Lakes.
Hurley pitched himself to Cameron and the other district board members before the job even existed. During his interviews for the position, members expressed concern about his unsavory associations, his Vidovich baggage. But in a region with such apparently grim prospects, Cameron says, they needed “a bulldog.” McMullin is the only district in the basin whose landowners don’t have rights to surface water; being so aquifer-dependent, it is held responsible by its neighboring agencies for three-quarters of the area’s annual groundwater deficit. Without any new sources of water, or exceptional leaps in efficiency, that would mean fallowing around half the acreage in the district. And the McMullin Area farmers, some of them helming fourth-generation operations, were not content to dry up and blow away.
In his Kerman office, Hurley has a map of the McMullin Area pinned to the wall. He smiles and runs a finger around its borders. “I call this my little dragon,” he says. The San Joaquin River forms the top of its head, and its chest runs along the North Fork of the Kings, at Terranova. Its snout kisses the Mendota Pool, where the two waterways meet and mix. This is the future home of the Aquaterra Water Bank—a system of both recharge and underground storage, with the canals and pipelines necessary to bring water in and deliver it out to partners potentially hundreds of miles away. “It’s a complete flowering of that seed” that Cameron planted at Terranova a decade ago, Hurley tells me. Every water agency in California has to keep its stock somewhere, and using a preexisting natural vault is far cheaper than building a new reservoir.
To get Aquaterra running, McMullin would require funding from partner agencies around the state with rights to water but nowhere to store it. As part of their payment, these agencies would leave behind a portion of the water they bring in. Hurley tells me that he approached the rest of the Kings Basin first, naturally, but so far no one has signed on. He is working with a water agency that serves much of Silicon Valley (and currently banks some of its water with Semitropic) in hopes that it will be a founding partner. If that deal works out, water could begin flowing into the bank as early as late 2023.
Hurley points at a spot on the map marked in yellow, one of McMullin’s best recharge zones. “If you drive out there, you’d think you’re at the beach,” he says. “There’s a huge sand dune. We can get a foot and a half, two feet of infiltration a day”—several times more than the ground at Terranova.
The sandy wetland soils may allow for a fast drip, but it is far more expensive for McMullin to engineer this flood-catching project from scratch than it would be for the irrigation districts upstream, with their existing canals, to spread the water around the eastern part of the basin. Aquifer recharge in those areas would also immediately serve the nearby disadvantaged communities, which have seen their wells go dry drought after drought. Still, they wouldn’t be able to keep the recharged water from slowly flowing downhill to McMullin. Hurley axiom: “You can continue to put the hose in the shallow end of the swimming pool all you want, but the deep end will fill up before the shallow does.”
In 2019, when the McMullin district declined to side with the rest of the basin over the Semitropic plan, “you’d have thought we had killed somebody,” Hurley tells me, shaking his head. The upper river users, with their old claims, did not appreciate what the western end of the basin was working on, he says: “It was the good old boys not liking some upstart [agency] telling them what to do with their water. I believe if you put them under sodium pentothal, some of those guys would say that they own that water until it was out by the Farallones.”
By the time the conflict finally got its first official hearing before the state water board in 2021, there was a whole new office to handle disagreements about water rights. After mountains of paperwork and years of anticipation, the proceedings were held remotely last June and streamed daily on YouTube. Seven engineers and other consultants presented evidence for what water was available in the river and where it had all gone. The Kings River Water Association admitted and corrected its earlier reporting mistakes—but the accounting still showed a surplus in wet years. Attorneys for the association and its member units argued that the floods were outliers, essentially so extreme as to not be considered when calculating water availability, but also vital to the basin’s ability to survive onerous new sustainability regulations.
The presiding hearing officer wouldn’t allow potentially inflammatory evidence about John Vidovich’s water-dealing and how he stood to benefit from the Semitropic project, nor would she consider the recharge projects that the upper river districts hope to build or the communities with precarious wells. What might happen to the water in the future wasn’t yet material. All that mattered in these hearings was whether it existed and where it had gone.
When it came time for Cameron and Bachand to present the Terranova project, they told the story from the beginning, acre-foot by acre-foot and dollar by dollar, accounting for all the water they had taken in the past and their plans for the future, all the public and private investment poured into the project. They were clearly nervous. Bachand swiveled back and forth in his chair; Cameron spoke deliberately, glancing away from the camera. Attorneys for Semitropic did not object to their testimony, but attorneys for the Kings River Water Association and its member districts suddenly and passionately did, just as Bachand finished the presentation. They moved for all of it to be struck from the record. They protested to the hearing officer—how was this relevant? But they’d waited too long. “We’re doing this,” she told them.
On cross-examination, the attorneys seemed to turn their frustration on Cameron. Hadn’t his agreement to use the water been canceled? And wasn’t the overdraft all Terranova’s fault anyway? When one attorney sarcastically referred to him as the “godfather of groundwater recharge,” the other, unmuted, laughed loud enough for Zoom to push his screen to the front.
The idea of investing more and more of Terranova’s resources into a water project without water rights had made Cameron nervous from the start. But even after the Kings River Water Association canceled its agreement, he and the rest of the McMullin leadership held their course. With the Terranova phase completed in 2021, they aim to grow the recharge enterprise up to 30 times the size of the pilot, covering land on neighboring farms and installing the infrastructure necessary to take in as much as 1,000 acre-feet of water a day. A $10 million grant from the state will pay for it as a flood project, money from the USDA will pay for it as a recharge project, and Cameron has augmented public and private grant funds with the ranch’s own $8 million. When the ditches are dug and the four gleaming white 450-horsepower pumps at Terranova are running at full capacity—assuming the necessary water rights are in place—it will be able to scoop 20 percent of historic flood totals off the river. Last fall, the McMullin Area filed its first application to the state water board for those rights. In March, it was officially added as a party to the case, an equal alongside the Kings River Water Association and Semitropic.
When I ask Cameron about the conflict—wouldn’t Semitropic’s claim get in the way of Terranova’s project?—he leans back on the railing above the big pipes at the start of his main canal, the one Hurley calls the “concrete monolith,” crosses his arms, and smiles. “We’re hopeful that we’ll get a little piece of the pie,” he says. “Or more.”
Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicts the virtual demise of the Sierra snowpack in the next half century. Historically, it held nearly a third of California’s water (average: 16 million acre-feet). Daniel Swain, a climatologist at UCLA, forecasts that droughts on par with California’s worst will come around twice as often, and extreme wet years like 2017 will come two and a half times as often. “Severe” floods like those in 1862, meanwhile, will be five times as frequent by 2100. Swain calls this climate whiplash. Average annual precipitation will remain relatively unchanged, but more of it will fall as warmer rain and in disastrous bursts. The fast-subsiding San Joaquin Valley towns are at even greater risk of a deluge the further they sink. Still, given the repeating disastrous droughts, most Californians “pray for rain.”
Cameron used to shy away from talking about climate change. In his cohort, he told me, it would get him “laughed out of the room.” Now it’s hard to talk about anything else. Every year Terranova plants its tomatoes earlier and earlier, racing against the heat. The beating sun roasts the bell peppers right on the vine. When the wildfires rage in the Sierra, the smoke flows down to the valley and blots out the sky. “It looks like the middle of winter with a fog layer,” Cameron says. “The sunlight barely makes it through.” The plants grow lankier, reaching for light they’ll never find. Recently, two of the farm’s wells ran dry. “It’s been probably more stress on the system than I’ve ever seen,” he says.
Cameron says farmers are pulling back on almonds, replacing them with less water-intensive pistachios. His friends are taking a cue from Vidovich and buying more farmland, not to grow more crops but to claim more water. McMullin is beginning to install pump meters to track and trace every cubic foot coming out of the aquifer.
Last December, ample rainfall reduced the region’s drought from “exceptional” to “extreme.” In some places, it even reached the relatively benign “severe.” Cameron was briefly hopeful—maybe they’d see a flood this year. Then, whiplash: one of the driest Januarys on California’s books. In February, the state launched a program to buy and fallow farmland, the end of the line for some of the valley’s small family legacies. Cameron is under no illusions about his own lineage in agriculture: His son went into water law.
Sixteen years ago, Cameron and his wife, Elisa, moved from Fresno to the ranch. Their house is raised to protect it from flooding, and the backyard looks like a little slip of the wetlands that once covered this entire region, a lush pond dotted with aquatic plants and a rotating cast of migratory wildlife otherwise rare to this part of the valley—geese, ducks, black-crowned herons, and great blue herons.
We drive past the sandy berms along the new canals, miles of which have been planted with new elderberry, sage, milkweed, and other native plants designed to draw pollinators and strengthen the levees with their roots. This is the most excited I’ve seen Cameron. “We’ve got hummingbirds in here all year round. It’s loaded with bees,” he says. “It changed the whole field from strictly farm to something nicer.”
Like most climate adaptation, the McMullin project is a smart, innovative, desperate thing to do. It alone won’t reverse more than a century of environmental transformation. It alone won’t prevent catastrophic damage from the kind of mega-flood that could fill the valley bowl like in 1862, submerging the land where millions more people live and work today.
The Department of Water Resources says there may be half a million acre-feet of extra flood and storm water available to recharge those aquifers each year, on average; the Public Policy Institute of California says it may be closer to a million. Yet even a thousand McMullin projects gulping the peaks off all the rivers would clear only about half the valley’s annual deficit. There is a fundamental mismatch between where the water falls (north) and where it could be stored (south). White papers on the potential for recharge posit that the floodwater at the top of those winter peaks should be transported across the state, a proposition that could launch a thousand (or more) state water board complaints.
The good news for California is that climate change is making it more like California, which has the tools to plan for floods and droughts, and the natural underground storage to hold the water it requires to survive. The bad news for California is that climate change is making it more like California, where the water problems have always been man-made. More resources are still dedicated to building gray infrastructure than green. Meanwhile, water attorneys quietly tell me that they think every basin in the state could be adjudicated in the coming decades—a long and painful process that would account for every drop above and below and create yet more opportunities for building water wealth. No fleeting stream would flow unclaimed. Where pumping and recharge are metered and tracked, groundwater won’t just be owned; it will be traded on new markets. McMullin is planning one.
Hurley says he has told farmers in McMullin that he’ll do everything he can to see that they don’t have to retire any acreage—though he hopes some will. “There’s some land out there that’s better used as a parking lot than what they’re attempting to grow on it,” he says. It’s a decision that more and more growers are already being forced to make. Taken together, the impact of all those empty fields will ripple across the region and the nation, shrinking the local economy and raising food prices for everyone.
The Kings River conflict could trickle two or 20 years into the future—no one really knows yet. Nearly 10 months after the first hearings, there has been no ruling. In the meantime, Bachand is running more field-flooding experiments with farmers across California, who don’t fear the flood like they did just a few years ago. Scientists have developed a tool to help them determine when and where to recharge the most water without contributing to a decline in quality. Taken far beyond the fields of Terranova, on-farm recharge could help perform a function rivers supplied before we bent them to our will, in a way that also works for 21st-century California. Along with it, piecemeal floodplain and wetland restoration could create habitat and recreational greenspace in one of the country’s most polluted regions.
Even if none of it were to go his way—if the Kings River management won’t renew Terranova’s floodwater agreement, if the state water board doesn’t approve McMullin’s permit or grants Semitropic every drop, if the big round pumps and motors stay silent and the pipes and canals stay dry and empty—Don Cameron’s innovation would still have flooded across California.
This article appears in the May 2022 issue. Subscribe now.
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