Farmers and water managers in the Kaweah subbasin are charging headlong into recharge as a key strategy to both keep the state’s hands off its pumping and position growers to better withstand drought years.
Fifteen recharge projects have been completed, are in progress or are in the design phase in the East Kaweah Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) alone. And some farmers have begun building sinking ponds on their own land as well.
The goal is to catch as much wet-year water as possible to stock up for dry years that are only as far away as the next water year.
East Kaweah has spent $17.5 million on a variety of projects, of which $3.6 million came from grants through the Department of Water Resources, according to the GSAs webpage. It anticipates the combined storage capacity of those projects is 18,700 acre feet.
The agency is well positioned to grab excess water off the Friant-Kern Canal and Kaweah River, which many of its water districts have contracts for, or rights to. And it’s playing to the area’s natural strengths, as well, enhancing streambed channels and dry wells to sink water.
The GSA recently launched an interactive webpage showing the locations and other details of each of its recharge projects that the public can access through its home page at https://ekgsa.org.
“We are working diligently to maintain local control and accomplish sustainability for our neighbors, friends and communities,” said Chris Hunter, who wears two hats as the GSA’s projects manager and assistant manager of Lindmore Irrigation District. Keeping groundwater levels flush is a huge benefit to drinking water wells, which tend to be drilled to much shallower depths than ag wells.
Growers are getting in on the recharge action as well.
Farmer Michael Brownfield, who represents Lindmore Irrigation District on the Friant Water Authority board, has built ten ponding basins on his land since the spring of 2023, with more in the works.
“Recent history has shown us that even though we go through dry years, there are years when water above our irrigation demand had been available early and late in the season and we just lacked the infrastructure to take advantage of it,” he said.
East Kaweah’s geography has been a bit tricky, as Brownfield has learned.
“Every one of our recharge reservoirs acts a little differently and the further west we move, the better the water percolates,” he said.
That’s because East Kaweah, which bumps up against the Sierra Nevada foothills, has very little alluvium between the ground surface and bedrock. Groundwater flows east to west, meaning much of what East Kaweah puts in the ground can be pumped out by farmers in GSAs further west including the Mid- and Greater Kaweah GSAs. So, East Kaweah farmers and water managers have been very keen to see the other GSAs adopt stricter pumping allocations for their farmers.
Grower and East Kaweah board member Craig Hornung challenged landowners to maintain a long-term perspective about water use.
“The biggest problem is that growers are not thinking down that line,” he said. “But you’ve got to be thinking about recharge because that’s what is going to help you 10 to 15 years down the road.”
The Kaweah subbasin, which covers the northern half of Tulare County’s valley portion, is scheduled to go before the Water Resources Control Board on Jan. 7, 2025 for a probationary hearing.
Probation is the first step toward a possible state pumping take over. Growers in probationary subbasins must meter and register their wells at $300 each, report extractions to the state and pay $20 per acre foot pumped – on top of existing water district and groundwater sustainability agency fees.
It’s something most water managers have worked hard to avoid since the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was passed in 2014.
But the three groundwater agencies that make up the Kaweah subbasin twice failed to create a groundwater management plan that met SGMA’s requirements to bring aquifers into balance by 2040. So, Water Board staff recommended it be put into probation and the hearing was scheduled.
Subbasin water managers recently submitted a third, brand new plan, to the Water Board in hopes it will pass muster under SGMA’s guidelines.
