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Hassle-free 24/7 service and agronomic support complete control over that,” Dahlke said.

Dahlke hasn’t done any research with pistachios yet but said they could be a good candidate. “I’ve heard from some of our farm advisors who have seen everything from extreme drought to flooded conditions that pistachios are apparently pretty resilient in general.”

Growers with fallow fields could put berms around them for groundwater recharge. “This is really something that we should be doing more before we get into the winter period,” Dahlke said, adding rather than preparing beds in the fall, instead put berms around that field for groundwater recharge in the winter and prepare the beds in the spring.

“These are ideal sites to capture more water,” Dahlke said.

“With all the rain we’ve gotten, all the soils are very saturated, so if you have an orchard sitting on heavy soil, like a clay soil, they can take 30 to 40 days to drain. And that can definitely become a problem for those trees,” Dahlke said, adding that could be especially true in areas of the Sacramento Valley where there are almond orchards on clay soils.

Dahlke said growers with orchards in heavy soils should consider planting a cover crop as they increase water infiltration.

“That can definitely help with drying out the orchard a lot quicker than if we were to wait for the soil to drain naturally,” Dahlke said.

“We’ve just completed an experiment last winter, and my student is still analyzing the data, but we did test cover crops in the winter recharge experi- ment. We flooded those cover crops fairly late in the season,” Dahlke said, adding they were definitely reaching anoxic conditions, but the cover crop just survived and wasn’t killed by the standing water.

LandFlex

LandFlex is a voluntary contract program through the Department of Water Resources (DWR), and it accomplishes two things: 1) It was originally conceived as a drought mitigation well protection program for rural and underrepresented communities; and 2) it’s a kickstart for the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to create a tool for growers and Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to accurately quantify and jumpstart retirement of overdraft pumping.

LandFlex is not a fallowing program; it’s a water program that calculates based on the evapotranspiration rates and the measured pumping credit allotted within the GSA, according to Aubrey Bettencourt, CEO of the Almond Alliance. “GSAs that have an established sustainable yield are the only ones who will be eligible to administer the program,” said Bettencourt.

A grower will be able to apply 25% of their operation, or 40 acres for smaller growers, to the program. Then the applicant is scored based on their physical proximity to a rural water system or a domestic well that’s been marked or tagged, Bettencourt said.

Once a grower enrolls acreage, there are three components to the application.

“Tier one is that immediate what we call, ‘Stop the bleed, protect wells.’ That component for well protection is $450 an acre-foot of your pumping allotment. So, for that year, you’re not going to pump your groundwater,” Bettencourt said. “Tier two is whatever overdraft credit you have, you do have to sell a portion of that to the state and retire it, and that’s $750 per acre-foot per acre.

“Then there is a what we call a transition cost,” she said, where growers are paid per acre for trees and permanent crops, dairy feeds for replacement feed and row crops.

“Now a caveat: Everything I just said on the pricing structure, they are still responding to comments right now. So, some of that might be in flux, but that’s the original design of the program.

“This program doesn’t say you can’t farm; it says you can’t pump groundwater for the duration of the contract,” Bettencourt said, adding it’s a year-toyear contract.

There has been great interest from growers, Bettencourt continued. “I had one grower tell me he can make payroll and keep his farm because before what he was looking at was economic uncertainty,” she said, adding now he has the multi-benefit land repurposing program, which has many benefits.

Originally the program did not compensate the grower or create any form of economic stability, Bettencourt said. “We were looking for a program that provided stability for our rural communities and economic certainty to give a new tool in the toolkit for our GSAs and for our growers,” Bettencourt said.

“There will be some permanent land retirement. There’s also going to be flexibility in land rotation. And it’s really based on that premise of rotational fallowing and measurable water savings. And that’s really why we keep coming back to this ‘Isn’t a fallowing program, it’s a water program,’” Bettencourt said, adding Almond Alliance hopes to begin signing up growers in February 2023.

“The goal isn’t to condemn and take away property rights; it’s really to kind of bearhug SGMA and say, ‘If we can solve this, then we can bring healing to the communities, and to our aquifers, and keep our growers farming,’” Bettencourt said.