An emerald-green oasis surrounded by bone-dry desert halfway between Santa Barbara and Bakersfield the Cuyama Valley is ground zero in a statewide legal battle over California's most precious resource: water. For the past 12 years, this remote agricultural community has been caught in a high-stakes conflict between corporate agriculture giants and a coalition of small farmers and residents fighting for their survival.
For the past decade, Casey Walsh, an anthropology professor at UC Santa Barbara, has been researching the politics of groundwater in Cuyama, hoping to understand what this very local struggle to establish equitable access to a dwindling resource reveals about the future of groundwater politics in California as a whole.
“This is one of the most critically overdraft basins in California,” said Walsh. “In California, groundwater is invisible for a reason. For too long, powerful interests have benefited from its unregulated use and asserted over and over again in courts and elsewhere that it shall be invisible private property.”
Cuyama Valley's groundwater provides an oasis of green amid a desert landscape.
Among the small farmers and residents, Walsh discovered a spirit of equity regarding their use of groundwater that had united unlikely allies, from "die-hard Trumpers" to liberal-leaning organic farmers. This alliance, he found, was "brought together by an ethic of neighborliness, a ‘Jeffersonian’ small farmer-oriented spirit of equity."
To be sustainable, Walsh said, Cuyama’s farmers need to collectively impose a 65 percent reduction in their water use by 2040. That’s the deadline imposed by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, which was signed into law in 2014 by then-Governor Jerry Brown. Pronounced “Sigma,” the law obliges local communities to form groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) and create plans for reducing water use to sustainable levels within 20 years. Of the 515 groundwater basins in California affected by the law, 21 of them including Cuyama’s are at high risk of depletion.
Under the law, local communities like Cuyama can work out their own plans for reaching their groundwater conservation goals. Ideally, everyone using the water could agree to use a sliding scale of cutbacks depending on how much water each farmer uses each year. But this requires good faith negotiation. And as Walsh found in his research, this is exactly what isn’t happening in Cuyama, which is a scary realization when it comes to California’s water future.
For decades, two of the world’s largest carrot corporations, Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms, have pumped staggering amounts of Cuyama’s underground water. During one unusually dry year, according to an article in the Santa Barbara Independent, they watered their crops with enough water to serve a city of 88,000 people for two years.
Carrots growing in Cuyama.
Meanwhile, another major player in Cuyama’s water wars has emerged: the Harvard University endowment. Through a subsidiary company called Brodiaea Inc., Harvard's endowment purchased thousands of acres in the Cuyama Valley in 2012 and has established a water-intensive vineyard requiring the drilling of multiple groundwater wells. Describing the company’s subsequent effort to build reservoirs on the property as a "water grab,” well-organized opponents ranging from local small farmers to Harvard students and professors led to the county nixing the plan.
Four years ago, Bolthouse and Grimmway derailed the water conservation negotiations that Walsh was following and filed an adjudication lawsuit against every other landowner in the valley. The lawsuit forced small farmers to hire lawyers to respond to the litigation—an expense that inherently benefits deep-pocketed corporations over small landowners.
“SGMA scares people who have a ton of water use in the past because it's more democratic,” Walsh explained. “The alternative is to go to the courts, which are going to use a more conservative way of allocating water based on historical use.”
State law, the plaintiffs have argued, entitles them to continue using the same ratio of water they’ve always used. “They felt it was a lot safer to have the court decide their water rights rather than having it be decided via negotiation based on the concept of equity. “They didn't want allocation decisions being local political decisions. They wanted them being lawyer decisions or judge decisions."
The adjudication has placed an enormous financial and emotional burden on the Cuyama community, said Robbie Jaffe, co-owner of Condor’s Hope Ranch, a five-acre vineyard, and another small farmer Walsh has both studied and advised during his research
"The public does not have access to the adjudication process," said Jaffe. "Our lawyers have access to it, but we don’t have any way to have our voice heard in the court the way we do in the SGMA process. It’s unsettling, it’s expensive and the plaintiffs have their bottom-line interests in mind, and not the community.”
Groundwater pumping in Cuyama.
One of Cuyama’s small farmers Walsh has come to know well during his research is Brenton Kelly, watershed advocate and land stewardship director at Quail Springs Permaculture. Kelly isn’t happy about the refusal of Cuyama’s large farmers to negotiate water cutbacks in an equitable manner, instead relying on California’s arcane water rights laws, which despite the state’s historic drought, still tend to reward the state’s largest consumers of water.
“Under the legal cover of California water rights law, two of the biggest Carrot Growers in the nation have spent the last 30 years pumping as much water as they could extract, knowing that the aquifer was over-drafted and groundwater elevations were declining by hundreds of feet,” Kelly said. “Now they claim, under the same legal doctrine, that precisely because they extracted so much more water than anyone else in the basin that they should have the vast majority of whatever is still left down there.”
California’s outdated water laws, Kelly argues, unfairly reward the biggest culprits of Cuyama’s historic over-pumping. “There is a threshold below which you can't survive, but if you are a large carrot business you can still operate with some of it fallow,” he added. “So, after sustainability has been achieved in 2040, and the required 65% reductions are evenly applied to all pumpers in the basin, they will be the only ones with viable water rights.”
In 2018, Walsh led a comprehensive study of Cuyama, gathering basic information about demographics, water politics and culture. Nearly half of the town’s 1183 people were Latino, one in five of whom lived in poverty. Among those earning less than $20,000 per year, he found, spent seven percent of their income on bottled water on top of the high cost they paid for non-potable municipal water.
Walsh's involvement in the Cuyama conflict goes beyond academic study. He has adopted what he calls a "participatory research approach," working alongside residents like Jaffe and Kelly and advocating for their interests.
“The role he has played has been so significant,” Jaffe said. “He is accompanying us in the process and that creates a reiterative way to get ongoing feedback from a research perspective. He is part of the process and really understands what is going on for us and has that capacity to bring it back to this bigger picture. It’s applied research that has been amazing and extremely helpful to us.”
Despite the tough struggle ahead, Cuyama’s small farmers remain hopeful they can put a spotlight on the water grab taking place there, and they credit Walsh with providing critical assistance in that effort. “Casey has helped to uplift the human element of the Groundwater condition in Cuyama,” said Kelly. “Casey helps us all to remember that 'water is life' and that there is a human right to safe and affordable access to it.”
Professor Walsh (in top photo, w/Jaffe and Kelly) plans to spend 2026 on a yearlong sabbatical at Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, in Freiburg University, Germany. He’ll be using that time to write a book on the war over Cuyama’s water and its implications for California’s water crisis.