Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture

Good morning and welcome to this joint informational hearing of the Senate and the Assembly committees on agriculture on the topic of the state of agricultural production in California. I think it's a apropos that we're having this hearing on a day that it's supposed to hit a 105 in Sacramento. And so we appreciate you all being here and participating in this really important discussion.

I wanna thank my colleagues on both of the committees, to our panelists and to our stakeholders, and to the members of the public who have joined us here today. As Chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, and as someone who represents the heart of California's agricultural region, understand that agriculture is more than just an industry.

It is the foundation of our rural communities, a cornerstone of our state's economy, an essential part of California's identity. And I'm really pleased, to welcome here in the Senate Hearing Room, my good friend Assemblymember Soria, who chairs the Assembly Committee on Agriculture, and she'll have a few minutes, to speak as well, as well as my very good friend, from Winters. And I was gonna say Woodland, and I knew that wasn't right. Winters, who has been a real champion of agriculture as, as well.

And, ask her to say a few words as well.

California agriculture leads the nation. Our growers produce the fruits, the vegetables, the nuts, dairy, and hundreds of other commodities that feed our state. I believe at the last count, it was over 400. It they feed our state, our country, and markets around the world. But our producers are working in an increasingly difficult environment.

They face an unreliable water supply, a shrinking labor force, rising production costs, volatile markets, pesticide restrictions despite voracious pests, state regulations, and more frequent extreme weather. And at the same time, our farmers innovate, invest in sustainability, and compete globally, all while meeting the highest environmental standards in the country. This hearing gives all of us, legislators and stakeholders alike, the chance to step back and assess where California agriculture stands.

And why this is really critically important is that, the last session or last year, we passed, our climate change infrastructure and made some decisions about where our greenhouse gas reduction funds are gonna go, and none of the funds were allocated to agriculture. And that that is is greatly concerning because we have some important goals we wanna meet, and we wanna make sure that agriculture has the resources necessary to be able to necessary to be able to, actually make it happen.

So we're today, we're gonna hear from directly from producers, researchers, state agencies, and industry leaders, and the the challenges they face, the opportunities they see ahead, and the policies that will keep agriculture thriving for generations to come. We're here not only to understand the current state of agriculture, but also to identify practical solutions that strengthen our food system, support our farmers and ranchers, protect our natural resources, and sustain the rural communities that depend on them.

Thank you to our panelists in advance for sharing your expertise and your perspective, and I look forward to a thoughtful discussion, one that helps this legislature determine the best steps forward to protect agriculture in cal California. So now I wanna invite my co Chair for this hearing, Assemblymember Soria, to say a few words.

Thank you. Can you hear me? Yeah. Thank you, Senator, and good morning to all of you. Thank you for being here.

To those are to those of you in the room, to those that will be panelists, and then to those that are hearing us also, you know, remotely. Again, I want to thank Senator Caballero for her leadership and when we had initial conversations about doing a joint hearing with the Senate about the state of agriculture, she immediately said, yes, recognizing as as she mentioned in her opening remarks, the importance of the state legislature doing more.

I don't know I don't think you guys, I think that you guys know that I haven't been shy about expressing also, my disappointment in last year's legislative session and the fact that we missed the mark when it came to certain investments, towards ag, when it came to both, the greenhouse gas reduction funding, but also Prop four.

And so, I hope that today, as we, open up this discussion and learn about the state of agriculture, that, you know, those points, hopefully, will get raised and where there's opportunities. Obviously, I think we we are familiar to some of the data and some of the challenges, and we'll hear more in-depth from the certain panelists, what those are today.

But I think that it's also going to be important not just to, you know, highlight the challenges, but also highlight the opportunities, because that's what I'm interested in hearing as well from all, you know, state agency partners and, industry folks, is how are we going to ensure that California agriculture can continue to be, an engine of economic opportunity for people throughout the state.

As someone that represents Assembly District 27, which predominantly is an agriculture community, we cannot afford to not support agriculture, its stakeholders because of the livelihoods that it provides for thousands of families in my district. And not only jobs, but I I believe that it is a critical industry. You know, we can't live without. We need food to live, and so agriculture is essential.

And what best than having California agriculture? As you guys know, we we grow, with the highest standards, and, in terms of both environmentally and labor wise. And so, we should be wanting to see agriculture prosper here in our own community. And so, I know that, this is a busy time for everyone in the state legislature, but I do appreciate folks being here today.

I also look forward to hearing how our farmers are facing are faring in the face of tariffs, sustained input markets, the higher energy costs that are also impacting, and this, scarce water markets.

As we all know, that's always a continual, you know, issue that we that we see. And, also, with, you know, some of these really wet years like we had in 2023, I hope to hear what did we learn from, you know, those atmospheric rivers and

how we responded to that, and are we ready for El Nino, which is

what we're hearing, will happen? How are we gonna ensure that our current policy, the policy frameworks that exist, will help us mitigate any future flooding that will impact communities like it did, in my district, like the community of Planada in the South Valley, which is also has a special place in my heart because I grew up in Tulare County. The Tulare, you know, lake that, we had not seen for many decades and then came to be.

And so I think that it'll, we have a great opportunity today to, see, you know, what are some of the things that we've learned and where can we go, this this year? And then, even as we, you know, look to next legislative session, what can we come out of today so that we ensure that California agriculture is not just surviving and thriving?

And when I think of agriculture, I just want to mention, I think about the small farmers. The thousands of small farmers that sustain the Mendotas, the Firebaugh, those that live in Dos Palos, they are sustaining our local cities. These cities would not exist but for local farmers, that are invested, that care, that live in those same communities.

I you know, when I think about small farmers, I think about, you know, the the farmers I met in El Nido that retired educators and went back to their roots to farm, but they're struggling today to stay afloat and to keep their farm from being in the red.

And so I wanna make sure that today is productive and that, you know, not only we highlight the the challenges, but more importantly, we focus on the opportunities that exist so that we can be proud of, we can continue to be proud of agriculture here in the state of California.

Thank you again, for everyone, who will participate.

Assemblymember Aguiar-Curry.

Good morning, everyone.

It's so nice to see some of those friendly faces I've seen for, I don't know, ten years as I sat on the AG Committee. I want to thank the Chair of the members, for this committee and and coming together for this very important discussion. California Farmers are we, we've already heard are facing challenges from every direction, water, rising cost, labor shortages, and hearings like this one really helps us understand where the state can be a better partner. As you know, in my district.

And in dozens of countries in our counties in our state.

We're trying to respond to an outbreak of glassy, weaned sharpshooter which spreads Pierce's disease. This disease kills wine grapes, citrus, nuts, and other crops that are vital to our local economy. Every day we wait gives this pest more opportunity to spread, making it harder and more expensive to contain. Once an infant. Infestation becomes established the cost to our growers.

And the state increases dramatically. So taking action early is critical. It's It saves crops and money. We have an opportunity to get ahead of this problem when we had that three months ago when I brought this to the surface. But before it before it became much more difficult to manage.

By giving CDFA the tools to respond now, we can prevent much bigger problems down the road. Delaying action today could mean greater economic losses for rural for growers, our rural communities, and California's aquaculturalcom community excuse me, economy tomorrow. I feel that our farmers are doing their part. We need to make sure that the state is doing its part as well. I anxiously await a proposal from CDFA and the administration.

So that the legislature and governor can collaborate. On an immediate response to this crisis. And I mean, immediate. Solving problems through understanding is what is what this hearing is about today. Making sure we give California Farmers the support they need to keep our agriculture economy.

Strong. Every day. We wait. It costs the farmer. It costs our constituents.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for for highlighting that particular issue. Now, we're ready to move on to our presentations. Before we begin, I want a couple of housekeeping items. We have three panels today with eight panelists. So we're asking them to, keep their presentation to five minutes so that we can then ask questions.

And we'd like you to come up to the table and then stay there afterwards so we can ask you questions. We'll take public comment after all three panels conclude. And we ask the public commenters to limit their comments to one minute or so. We wanna make sure everybody gets a chance to have a say, and we have a hard stop at quarter to twelve, so we could spend all day talking about this. I know.

We've printed out copies of the agenda for the public. And if we run out, you can find the agenda on the Senate Committee on Agriculture Website, which is sagri.senate.ca.gov. And finally, if we don't get to your question today, please email the committee at that that, site and and that we'll make sure we get the answers for you as well. We'll add it to to our comments. So with that, we're gonna begin our first panel.

And I'd like to invite undersecretary Christine Birdsong from the California Department of Food and Agriculture to please come forward. And also Thomas Gibson, the director of the Department of Water Resources. Welcome. And we're gonna put you on the spot because you're you're both relatively new to the departments and you know everything by now. Right?

Sure. We're ready. We're ready for anything. How about that? Sounds great.

You're neither one of you are new to the topic, so that that gives us great great confidence. So under secretary, welcome. We're glad you're here today, and give our best to the secretary Ross.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Secretary secretary Ross sends her best, Says hello to everybody. Thank you for your opening statements. They were very helpful.

A lot of what I'm gonna talk about, you already know. And I wanna particularly thank you, Assemblymember Aguiar-Curry, for bringing up glassy winged sharpshooter. You are right. It is something that we need to be on top of yesterday. We are on top of it.

In lieu of a formal proposal, I'll just put a plug out there. It will cost $18,500,000 every year for detection, monitoring, eradication. Hope that helps. It would be an excellent investment. Thank you.

I'm gonna jump in then. Thank you for holding this hearing on the state of the California ag economy. Thank you for inviting CDFA to present. Wanna start by sharing some statistics with you because it helps set the stage. Also, I never pass up an opportunity to brag about California agriculture.

It is something that every Californian should know about. Right? And every Californian should be proud of. So I think as you said Senator, California is the number 1 ag state by value. We are a $61,200,000,000 industry.

When we say that California feeds the world, that is not hyperbole. It's the truth. And we do that with a degree of precision and productivity that is truly remarkable. Only 4% of the farms, 4% of all farms in The US are in California and yet we are the fifth largest supplier of food, fiber and other agricultural commodities in the world. We've got 4% of the farms and we are the fifth largest provider of food in the world.

We are not competing against other states. We compete against other nations. Domestic consumption, we produce about nearly half of the country's vegetables, three quarters of its fruits and nuts. We are the nation's leading dairy state. We produce a little more than 18% of dairy and dairy products that are then consumed throughout The US.

Like you said, we grow more than 400 different commodities. We lead the nation in the production of almost 80 of those commodities from milk to alfalfa seeds. There are 19 commodities in The US that are only grown in California. Things like pomegranates, artichokes, sweet rice, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, figs, plums, garlic, just to name a few. The scale and the scope of healthy, safe, and affordable food that our growers produce is simply unmatched.

And our farmers do this against a backdrop of some serious, I would say, historic challenges. If we go back to that number 61,200,000,000 that is an increase of 3.6% in cash receipts for agriculture. That's good news. Right? We always like to see increases.

The other thing that we lead in though that gives a little more information to what's going on is in bankruptcies. California leads the nation in farm bankruptcies. Last year, out of 216 farm bankruptcies nationwide, California had 17 of those. This does not even take into account the sales of farms, consolidation, or fields that have been abandoned. So the question is why is California agriculture under such stress?

Well, the e b easy and obvious thing to start with, everybody knows, it it is climate change. It is an undeniable stressor on agriculture worldwide worldwide. We are feeling it acutely in California. Things like extreme heat, drought, floods, unpredictable weather patterns, weather patterns that enable invasive plants, and pests and diseases to spread. We are also dealing with the high cost of land, the high cost of labor.

Right now, our minimum wage, as you know, is $16.90, slated to increase to $17.40. We have very high cost of inputs, things like fuel, fertilizer, equipment, pest control. We have very high interest rates. Makes it hard to capitalize, hard to reinvest into an operation. All of this is not balanced very well by low commodity prices.

I mentioned that we export about a third of what we grow, so trade issues, tariff issues make our commodities less competitive on a global scale. Global conditions like war, devastating to the people who live in those countries first and foremost, but we see it here in California agriculture causing supply chain and trade route disruptions. Water scarcity, and not just from drought, but from our own state policies as well.

We always talk about sigma and how we can expect to see 500,000 to a million acres go out of production. That's not just acres though, that's farms.

Those aren't just farms, those are families. Those are people. Those are jobs. Those are communities that depend on agriculture as their economic driver. And then there's regulatory compliance costs.

I know you all have heard so much about this. Food safety, labor, environmental rules, these all serve a very important purpose for the public good. But it comes at a cost that farmers simply cannot pass on to consumers. There was the Cal Poly study last year, looked at regulatory costs for commercial lettuce in Salinas. They saw that there was an increase of 1366% from o six to 2024.

So that was a $109 an acre in 2006 to $1,600 an acre in 2024. One other way to look at this, it's also rather shocking, is that since 2017, regulatory costs increased 63.7% for lettuce. Did we see the cost of lettuce go up 63% at the grocery stores? We did not. It only increased point 37%.

So as an example of these impacts of the impacts of these challenges, I will just note that last year was particularly difficult for wine grape growers and almonds. We saw about 40,000 acres of Vineyards pulled in the past year alone. That's about 7% of our state's total. We had 49,000 acres of almond trees that were pulled. I'm sure we have other panels coming up that maybe have a more updated number and will give you more information, I'm sure.

But I wanna say that these crops were pulled because those farmers were always already experiencing a sustained and very deep economic loss from marketing, international trade, cost of inputs. But in addition to that loss, they also had to absorb absorb the loss of pulling those orchards and Vineyards. And then on top of that loss, they have to absorb the cost of what are you gonna do to dispose of all of that ag waste and that biomass?

Undersecretary, I I apologize, but I need you to wrap up.

Oh, okay. Well, I was gonna go through all of the fabulous programs we have that help. Things like California grown marketing program helps educate consumers on where their food is grown and why you wanna choose Californian. We have climate smart ag programs at CDFA. These help farmers and ranchers reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Also helps their bottom line operate more efficiently. There are farm there are programs under other our sister agencies like Farmer and the alternative ag burner burning programs under CARB, the food production investment program under the California elect the energy commission. I'd like to call your attention to the regulatory alignment study looked at food safety, water quality, ways to more efficiently, to help farmers more efficiently comply with regulations, and then Ag Technology, also a very important place to look.

We just released the California Ag Tech California Ag Research and Innovation Roadmap, which looks long term, hazards to agriculture, what are the opportunities to help out? The ag economy is certainly under stress that impacts not only farmers and ranchers, but our rural communities.

Thank you for this hearing. It is important, and it is timely, and it is a great opportunity to take stock, acknowledge those challenges and also acknowledge the ways that we can help. Thank you for your service and for everything you do to help agriculture and we look forward to being your partner. Thanks.

Thank you so much. I like I said, I think we could spend the whole day talking about some of the programs and some of the connections between them. We really appreciate the, information that you sent as well and look forward to a discussion. And the floor is yours, sir.

Thank you. Chair Caballero, Chair sorry or Chair Soria, Members Gonzalez, and Aguiar-Carry. Thank you for inviting me here today. It's an honor to be here as the new director of the Department of Water Resources. I'd also like to recognize Senator Caballero for her leadership in authoring Senate Bill 72.

That legislation requires the Department of Water Resources to modernize our water plan to better prepare California for its the water challenges of the coming decades. That effort is now underway and I believe it provides a framework for today's discussion. So I'd like to share some observations that shape our understanding of California's agricultural water use today and into the future. Hydrologic variability has always defined California water. Climate change is not creating that variability but it is going to make it more extreme and more intense.

Longer dry

Director, is your mic on?

Is it

That's better.

Pull it closer.

Perfect. Yes.

Right. Longer dry periods, more intense storms, and greater uncertainty. The overall amount of water that falls on California is not expected to change. The challenge is gonna be to manage the

increasing variability and compensate for the hotter dryer conditions that are

going to consume an increasing share California. About 70% of our precipitation falls North Of The Delta, while about 70% of that demand is from farms and communities South Of The Delta. That's why generations before us built one of the largest networks of reservoirs and aqueducts anywhere in the world. But those systems are aging and in need of repair and modernization. Just at the time we need them to accommodate our climate driven extremes.

California agriculture as we know it today exists because previous generations invested in reservoirs, aqueducts, pumping plants, flood protection, forecasting, science and partnerships. Those investments harness an extremely variable climate to provide reliable irrigation for what you all know has become a $60,000,000,000 a year farm and agriculture economy. Agriculture represents the largest managed use of water in California approximately 31 to 34,000,000 acre feet of water a year.

With that water, the industry produces hundreds of crops, feeds millions in The United States and the world as we've heard, supports communities and contributes enormously to rural and regional economies from Siskiyou in the North to Imperial County in the South. And I wanna highlight some of the key challenges for California's agricultural water supplies.

First, with regard to a diminishing snowpack and then secondly, with regard to Sigma and bringing our groundwater basins into sustainability. Our snowpack varies widely from year to year but on average, the snowpack contains about as much water as our two largest reservoir Shasta and Oroville combined. It's about 15,000,000 acre feet of water. As global temperatures warm, precipitation will increasingly fall as rain, not snow and the timing of the melt shifts so that runoff comes earlier.

Peak flows will be larger and then the summertime runoff will decline.

That will force changes into how people operate reservoirs, manage high flow events, Recharge Groundwater, and deliver water supplies. This is one of the defining water map management challenges California must prepare for over the coming decades. The other is bringing groundwater basins into sustainable conditions. 40% of the water people use in California on average comes from groundwater. In dry years that amount goes up to 60%.

So it's in those dry years when we lean especially hard on our groundwater aquifers. In parts of the San Joaquin Valley, groundwater extraction has exceeded the amount recharged into the aquifers over the last one hundred years. The result has been as we all know subsidence where the surface of the land sinks as the aquifers below are drained. By the time DWR built the state water project in the nineteen sixties, some portions of the San Joaquin Valley had already dropped between twenty and thirty feet.

In some places that subsidence irreversibly damages the aquifers and eliminates or limits the ability of those aquifers to contain recharge water in the future.

Subsidence has reduced the ability of local, state, and federal canals to move water. It damages roads and bridges. It affects pipelines and other infrastructure. It increase it also increases the cost of delivering water including to the 8,000,000 Californians living in disadvantaged communities in Southern California who are dependent on our state water project supplies. Ensuring the groundwater basins come into sustainability between now and 2040 as required by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is vital to protecting water infrastructure and the future of our agricultural industry.

We are focused at DWR on providing the best science, the best data, planning tools, and technical assistance to help local agencies succeed in SGMA implementation. The economic disruptions will be hard. But in the long term successful implementation of SGMA will help bring water security to future generations of California farmers and ranchers. And I just want to quickly note a few things DWR is doing to help safeguard water supply security in the face of these and other challenges.

One way to support groundwater sustainability is to expand groundwater recharge and floodwaters are the most is the water most easily available for that purpose.

Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations or Firo takes advantage of scientific improvements in forecasting atmospheric rivers. It allows water managers to better anticipate and manage those large storms that come in off the Pacific while maximizing opportunities for recharge and to increase water supply. Firo in combination with recharge can help turn potential floods into recharge opportunities. Last year DWR released detailed studies that we refer to as our watershed studies that examine how climate change informs water management across five different watersheds in the San Joaquin River Basin.

The studies show that combining Firo with groundwater recharge using floodwaters offers multiple benefits and can help reduce the amount of farmland growers will have to stop irrigating as they work to bring the groundwater basins into sustainable conditions.

These watershed scale studies should give local water managers abundant information about likely future conditions. Hopefully it will give them a technical basis for new conversations and partnerships across their watershed. Eventually, this technical framework will support the regional water supply targets that DWR is developing as part of its updates to the water plan. Thanks again to Senator Caballero's Senate bill 72.

There are other ways DWR supports California farm water management including our network of automated weather systems that give growers real time information on things like humidity, wind speed and direction, and evapotranspiration rates that help give them data to inform weather and how much they need to irrigate.

And it's just one more example for over a decade DWR has partnered with NASA to support the Airborne Snow Observatory which gives uses techno technology deployed from aircraft to inventory the snowpack which again gives water managers and reservoir operators better information to manage their water supply and create recharge opportunities. So in closing, providing irrigation water to farmers is an important part of DWR's mission to sustainably manage the water resources of California. We understand how important agriculture is to the well-being of our state.

We want to see as many acres growing food as can be sustainably irrigated. We also want many of our long standing productive partnerships with California growers and farms to continue to flourish.

And I look forward to partnering with the legislature as well. Thank you and I'm happy to try to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that and appreciate the shout out on SB 72. Also working on a atmospheric river bill to spend the resources necessary to be able to do predictive analysis. It I'm told it now exists. Predictive modeling, so that we can see ahead of time when those rivers are likely to hit and how much wider they're likely to drop, so we can be prepared.

I really appreciate your comment on both the repurposing of the dams as well as, atmospheric rivers because with dwindling snow melt, we've got to get ahead ahead of the game. So thank you.

And I and I do want to also, call out the department for all the work you've done in the small communities under, I believe it's a SAFER program, the SAFER Act, which provides resources from the greenhouse gas reduction fund to be able to remediate some of the contaminated wells or infrastructure that's aging for some of the small communities that have really poor water quality. It's been really important.

I believe that might be the water board, but our department of water boards do work closely together on these.

You're right. You're right. Put them both together. My apologies. So, we'll move on to the questions and, really, really thank both of you for your, your comments.

Aye, I think the, my biggest concern right now is, is, and Aye, you know, we're we're finishing up our legislative session. So I'm not supposing that we can do something that's legislative right now. But, what do you what are the issues that you think require the legislature's most immediate attention as it relates to agriculture? For the next session, you heard from Assemblymember Agui Arcuri. She's concerned about the sharpshooter.

And so there are a number of issues I could think of. But what do you think from your perspective is is something that would require the legislature's attention?

Thank you so much for that question. I would kind of build on the the glassy winged sharpshooter issue and pest control in general at CDFA. All of the activities we do from the border stations to our labs are all absolutely key to trying to prevent pests from entering in the first place, dealing with them quickly while they're here. Research into pesticide alternatives, also very important. That would include biologicals for sure.

That's kind of the top of my mind. Oh, my boss is gonna kill me that I don't have a laundry list of things for you.

Well, and and that brings up the other issue. One of the, challenges with how the legislature has organized our work, flow is that interestingly enough, agriculture the agriculture committee does not have any review of pesticide legislation, nor do we have any oversight of water legislation, nor do we have any oversight of land use legislation. So it's it's it's it's frustrating to me because the the things that most affect rural communities are usually authored by individuals from the big cities that have no connection.

And so I I appreciate pest control is always a huge issue. And every time we have a a ban on a pesticide, rather than understanding that there are different ways of utilizing it, applying it, and maybe there are better ways to apply it that can that can mitigate a ban, might might be important.

And so I appreciate the the the challenges we have with pest control. I think it's gonna continue to be as we become more and more global. We have more and more. It's not just pest. It's also other animals that come in that are pesky as well. So

Maybe it's looking at regulations then because those are across multiple committees in the legislature. Yes. That might be fodder for another joint hearing. Yes. It's kind of getting a perspective on all the different regulations that impact agriculture.

That would be, great. I think that's very wise.

That would be, great. I think that's very wise.

Thank you very much. Director, same question.

Yes. I think two things come to mind. One is in with reference to the bill you mentioned about atmospheric rivers. We do pride ourselves on science based decision making and the better equipped we are with scientific tools to get ever more sophisticated in how we manage our water supplies. So anything to that end will be really helpful so that we can predict the weather and better better and better manage our water resources.

The other thing may be too broad to really be helpful but I I would feel like I would be remiss to not mention just broadly affordability. That does seem to be the number 1 thing I hear when I'm meeting with growers throughout the state. It's a fairly large topic and obviously no immediate solution jumps out but that is definitely something I hear every time I'm out speaking with people. So

In part of the affordability I feel is related to the the lack of infrastructure that we have in place, the the infrastructure that was created for rural communities from the probably in the fifties or sixties. Are there, and I'm not talking about the Delta Tunnels here, but are there, I I I I'm when I when I meet with the different irrigation districts, there's some strategies that they talk about in term in terms of interconnectedness that might help.

The solar panels on the on the On the the infrastructure is really a a great use of land that's not agricultural land, but that also can reduce evaporation. And I'm wondering if there are those kinds of strategies that with new technologies that if the state made investments might might also help.

I think those types of solutions and that sort of creative thinking is exactly what we need and we're certainly doing that at the department and with our sister agencies. So we will continue to do that and it may be that there are legislative needs associated with that. But we're we are continuing to work on that ourselves and looking at different ways we can do things that will reduce the cost and keep things as affordable as possible because we That's great. We're very aware of that challenge.

That's great. Well, they it it it occurs to me that that may be something that the water plan can look at as well in terms of of looking for the most cost effective solution to a problem. I was trying to figure out a strategy I had a bill to to expedite to take the governor's executive order to expedite flood mar solutions when these atmospheric rivers come through.

And unfortunately, at the end, like, at the very, very end, one half of the county, the irrigation district liked the language and the other the state contractors didn't like the language and it was always in my my same district. And so I just blew it up and said, okay, never mind.

We don't want them fighting each other. And that's where we switched over to the atmospheric river identification. Because then you can do these these permits very quickly. The idea is to not have places like, Planada Flood and to be able to move that water somewhere where it can be stored underground. And, if we can come up with a mechanism to do that, that's not real bureaucratic, then everybody can benefit from that.

So

Appreciate. I'll let the technical assistance I've gotten from the department as well.

Absolutely.

Great. And I appreciate the comment about the water plan. I will take that back to the team that's working on it. It may be ambitious for the '28 plan, but we'll definitely try to get that included in future plan.

That would be great.

In terms of cost considerations and feasibility.

That would be great. I I ultimately would like to see California reduce the amount of water that needs to be moved from one place to another as much as possible and still have a drought proof state. It's a goal for the future. I'm gonna stop my questions right there and and turn it over to my, my co Chair.

Thank you again for, the information you all provided. Just to kind of piggyback on, some of the questions that the Senator already raised, one of the things that I'm really interested in, especially given the fact that we're hearing that El Nino is happening and so forth, Maybe can you expand on what we learned from 2023? I know obviously the Senator had a proposal that ended up changing. I've had a piece of legislation.

We all are we were all grateful that the current administration moved swiftly in trying to do an executive order to, you know, streamline some of the processes, which were helpful at the time.

I'm concerned that there's no existing framework that is codified and that we're gonna operate, you know, every time that we have an urgent matter under, you know, we're gonna be at the mercy of executive orders, and I don't know if that's the best way of governing. So all to say is what is our plan? What what did we learn? What is our plan? Are we ready?

You know, I know we're not gonna be able to solve anything or be or do anything policy wise today or this session, but I'm looking towards the future. Also, I'm thinking about infrastructure, existing programs like Fledmar, and while maybe we won't be able to do anything policy wise, There's a short window of opportunity. There are discussions happening around GGRF funding. There are discussions happening around Prop four.

So I think that today is very important that you guys are upfront with us and tell us, you know, where the opportunities exist.

That's what I'm interested in because I wanna make sure that we do not miss the mark again for the third year, where we don't look at these opportunities and ensure that those fundies are put forth so that we can start the work, and make sure that whatever plans we have ahead that we're, you know, somewhat more prepared than what we were last time because it was devastation. It's now 2026. There are still families not living in their homes as a result of that flood.

There are still families living in motels, living in temporary housing that are still traumatized and haven't recovered. And so I would hate to see another tragedy like what we saw in 2023.

So I'm really interested in in in that. And then also on the again, there's a window of opportunity then these next four weeks. What are you guys advocating for? What can we advocate to ensure that these investments start to happen now and not wait another year?

So I can answer briefly. I feel like one, I couldn't do all of that real justice without longer and without bringing in a few colleagues. And I do have a colleague, our deputy director Gosselin here who focuses on sustainable water management and who is leading our prop four efforts at the moment if the committee is interested. I guess speaking broadly though in terms of what we learned from 2023, we are we are always learning in terms of our emergency response.

We are very much focused on tracking what this seems to be shaping up to be this very strong El Nino.

And we're planning meetings with our sister agencies at the Office of Emergency Services and otherwise to get ready for what may come. Our state climatologist, Doctor. Mike Anderson is in a series of meetings this week. Next week, we're gonna follow-up in part assessing where we are in terms of those developing conditions because El Nino can end up meaning a lot of things that We all sort of picture what happened in 2023, but it can play out very differently.

So we're tracking in terms of the strength, the possible locations that will arrive very focused on coastal impacts, for example, but beyond that is hard to say what we're really confronting.

So they are tracking that in real time and we're communicating that among the emergency responders at the state to be as ready as we can. We'd be happy to provide more information on that to your office at at

your convenience. That would be great. That would be great. Yeah.

That would be great. And before he goes to kind of the prop four, just to do a follow-up. If you can speak to how much waterfalls annually in California and then how much do we actually capture on average?

So on average and again, we all know that California doesn't really work in averages. But on averages, it's about 200,000,000 acre feet of precipitation lands on California in a given year. That ranges from about a 100 to about 340. So it is a substantial I think the humans end up managing about 40% of that water. There's something close to 60% gets taken up by the atmosphere, by the soil, by plants.

There's about 10% that's reserved to North Coast Rivers in the sort of Del Norte County area, Siskiyou area, Humboldt area. And then the 40% that remains is what's managed by people in the rest of the state. And I my math isn't great, but I think that ends up being about 90,000,000 acre feet.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Paul Gosselin. I'm deputy director at the Department of Water Resources for Sustainable Water Management. I wanna begin by talking about what happened in 2023. That was a profound change for the department with the I mean, going into it, we were prepared for the fourth year of a historic drought and that was gonna be pretty challenging.

The governor came out with a hotter dryer strategy and then this the atmospheric rivers came in. What happened was is we started to align internally with groundwater management, water management, and flood management probably for the first time on a large basis. And this led to the governor's order that led to the legislation about allowing flood diversions for recharge. And this is linked up flood managers and water managers since then.

And we've been partnering with our division of flood management and our division of planning and sustainable groundwater management.

Going out, talking to the water managers and flood managers in preparation so they can coordinate having to better manage these flood flows that might impact a community downstream and be able to divert them off to lands that maybe could take and and improve our recharge. So this is getting into this whole realignment of how we've been managing and managing our water just because of the the climate extremes. Now leading into Prop four, this has led to where we're going.

We're gonna be coming out with guidance, draft grant guidance in the next couple weeks. One on watershed resiliency and that's going to build off of pilots that we did two years ago but the larger pieces, groundwater and some other pieces that are related.

So a main component that we're going to propose for guidance is doing a Faramar pilot project as well as a lot of groundwater recharge and groundwater banking. We've been supplementing this work with technical assistance out to local agencies with our characterization of basins. We started this thanks to the legislature three years ago, appropriated money for basin characterization. This allows us to map out the basin so they know where to put the water. So all of these things are coming together to better utilize the prop $4.

They're not gonna be sufficient for the need, but we can do what we can to make sure they're gonna have the biggest bang and best output for for everybody. The other piece is conveyance that there is some funding in there, to to tie some conveyance together.

And this would allow for some exchanges in some areas that will offset areas that might have a little, surplus in areas that are really deficit and really get into a lot of more cooperation and partnership locally and we're also working through that with some facilitation work. In the end, we still need to address subsidence because if we don't, that's gonna kill 87% of state water project delivery by 2040.

So again, that's gonna be another component as part of the granting is having these agencies start to address subsidence.

So all of these are are really starting to come together and changing what was built in the sixties and how we thought water was going to operate with snowpack to the reality, that we have coming, into this year. So we've been preparing for the Super El Nino not knowing whether it's going to be wet, dry or in the middle, but doing some pre planning upfront for either consideration whether we are facing a drought dry year or we have high flows.

Again, that coordination with flood managers and water managers. So I hope that helps.

That's very helpful. And I'm really glad to hear about all the different elements, because in the valley, that's what's needed. And, some of the conveyance and exchanges has already been happening. But but it's it's not as robust as it could be. And the whole idea is there's just not the infrastructure to be able to get it exactly to where it needs to go.

So I'm really glad to hear that we've taken a proactive future approach.

Yeah. No. Thank thank you for that. And then just to add to that, in in our region, even Merced County doesn't even have a flood control district. And so that's something that we're trying to figure out so that locally we are much better prepared, to respond and to be able to manage, much more effectively, you know, flood waters that do come, you know, like in 2023.

I did wanna give an opportunity to the undersecretary to see on the GGRF and Prop four if you had any comments in terms of, you know, the window of opportunity that we do have in the last month here, the last four weeks. That and then just the one thing that got my attention was your comment around regulatory alignment study. If you can maybe just, you know, give us a little bit more information on what that is.

Yes. Thank you. This is the regulatory alignment study. CDFA received funding from the legislature a couple of years ago. We engaged an outside consultant to, survey farmers to find out when when you talk about regulations are difficult, what's the real rub there?

Learned pretty quickly it was food safety and water quality. The consultant then mapped out all of those regulations in those areas. It took them seven months to map them all out and make sense of them, and then communicated regularly with stakeholders to better understand what what the experience is in terms of compliance with all of those regulations. So the report was just released a couple of months ago. In fact, the state board is getting a briefing on it today.

There are 18 recommendations in the report. They look at near term easy things we can do in the near future, things that are a little bit harder, and then there's long term that require more investment, more time, more staffing. So that is the report that's out there, and I think there's a lot of opportunity there, a lot of legislative opportunity frankly. I'll cut to the chase on regulatory alignment. The big thing there is data governance.

There's a lot of information that farmers have to input in various systems. If we could make them all speak, it would make it easier but there's a lot around data security, confidentiality that would need to be worked out, would require some legislative changes as well. In terms of GGRF, you know, we received a lot of those funds for our Climate Smart Ag programs. Thank you to the legislature for our, Office of Ag Resilience and Sustainability received more continuous funding.

SWEAP is the program that's most related to our water issues generally for drought.

But we have found that there's such a high demand for that program year on year. We're very grateful for the continuation on that. And I would add to during the the big floods of twenty twenty three, there wasn't a lot that CDFA could do but we heard a lot from farmers. We heard a lot from farmworker communities.

Our farmer equity office really stepped up and provided support in terms of outreach to those farmworker communities that are not directly dialed in to the big organizations or work for the big growers that speak dialects that aren't easily accessible to Spanish English translations.

And we did receive money as part of that OARS funding for an additional staff person in our farmer equity office to provide technical assistance. And just having that extra body there, should we be in that situation again where we need to reach out to farm workers, we will be able to provide even more support than we did last time. So thank you for that.

That's something new for for me, and so I appreciate that that information. It appeared that during that time, majority of the flooding happened in rural communities. And so we've got to do better by capturing that water, doing something good with it. And so, I appreciate your comments. Well, I I any other questions?

Assembly Member Gonzales.

First, I wanna thank both chairs for their leadership on agricultural issues. It's been very evident throughout this year and the last several years of their leadership, and I appreciate that. I I represent the Imperial County, Riverside County, and San Bernardino County's 12 sovereign nations, Colorado River, Salton Sea, the unfortunately toxic New River, and the ninth largest agricultural county. We have cotton ginners to the to the East and cotton ginners and growers to the East in Blythe.

And, to the West, we have wine and grape growers, and we have dates and onions and everything else in between a partridge and a pear tree.

So and I also sit as vice Chair of of water. So for me, I'm looking at this in a in a in a unique way because I represent a a region that has a significant need for for water. I represent a diverse agricultural area, food supply area, as well as Colorado River with its, I wanna say, drama in its current days. So there's it's it's a complicated perspective, if you will.

One of the things I can tell you from from my district specifically, from the East to the West, North and South, my district is a little bit larger than New Hampshire.

And my farmers and farm workers are are struggling in California. These are farmers, growers that have been in in doing this for generations. And the onerous regulations upon them, have have hurt them. And they're you know, a lot of them are moving out. They're going to Arizona.

They're going to different places where they can still produce the same, crop, but do it in in a way that's beneficial for their their legacy. Right? I appreciate what you were talking about the individual, you know, farmer and farm workers because they're they're struggling. And if we if we lose another farm, it's not just a family that we that we lose, we lose families of farm workers also that lose jobs. Imperial County, we have a 20% unemployment rate.

That's significant. So for me, water, water management, and by the way, my growers out there are doing they're doing, if you will, God's work when it comes to saving every single drop of water that they possibly can to do it the most efficient way possible. And I invite you to come come visit us, check out the cotton in in Blythe and check out the dates in Coachella and the wine in the Temecula wine country, and everywhere in between.

So as I look at water and water management, I I see the challenges associated with that. As I look at the the food supply, I also see how we're the bread basket, but yet we're also pushing our our growers out.

So that being said and and by the way, I'm very thankful that the the Public Policy Institute of California is here, PPIC, who is a trusted source of mine and many others, and they'll be presenting here a little bit later. I'm anxious to hear about what they have to present. But for me, if you had and this is to both groups.

If you had the new governor here in front of us and you had, the the thirty second elevator pitch to help fix, if you will, the the problem or the challenge in California, How would you guide that new governor in saying And by the way, the thirty second pitch, right? So please keep it to that.

How would you guide that governor in in your respective area? So I'll go to you first.

Oh, boy. Okay. Thirty so we know we're not good with time. So that's not fair. But I would start with regulatory alignment.

What I've I've talked about previously, that is a huge driver for the cost on agriculture, and it is the one thing within this body, within our government that we do have some influence over. So I would take a close look at that. In my dream, there would be a regulatory alignment, czar, cabinet level that is orchestrating among all the different agencies that have that have a finger on what's going on with that.

And the other thing I would say is and this is something I think that the state really leads on already, but we can continue pushing forward on. That's looking at food systems.

It's not just farms. Yes, we have to keep the farmers going, but how do we get the food to the people who need it just within the state of California, let alone outside of California, really helping to develop markets. The food hubs idea has been great for farmers who just wanna focus on growing food. The food hub can then buy get that food, lightly process it, and then get it out into schools. This is our farm to school program exactly.

I think we're doing a lot of great work in terms of our food systems. Keep it going and grow it. Thirty seconds?

Well, kind of. Regulatory czar and and look at our food systems. Okay.

Thank you for the question. And I have spent a fair amount of time in your district including working closely with the Imperial Irrigation District and others on the Salton Sea and the New River. So familiar with your area and I'd love to get down there again soon. I think my quick answer would be to follow the water plan update that we're doing the 2028 water plan and just help with the resources and and the the tools we need to get that implemented.

I would also say we have an encouragement to the growers to join us at the table to the extent they're not already there and really partner with us so that we can understand because nobody knows their needs better than them.

So we need to hear that directly as much as possible.

That's great. Yeah. I appreciate both of those comments because I I understand having worked for the administration before that you you're hesitant to walk out and make a statement that hasn't already been approved by someone. But, I think both of those are very creative and, very instructive. I think there's work to be done.

So I apologize for jumping in, but I wanna get the next panel up here.

Yeah. Last sentence, is I I'd love to follow-up with both of your offices because there's some alignment issues down in my district specifically. And if there's a challenge in my district with respect to DWR or CDFA In my district, that means that there's some other alignment issues somewhere throughout. So I'd love to follow back up with both of your offices to try and sort that out. So thank you.

That's great. Sounds good. Very good. Well, thank you both for all three of you actually for being here. Excellent panel and I really appreciate your your inputs.

Thank you very much. We'll move on to the second panel. Panel number 2 is water climate and resource sustainability. We're gonna invite Kaitlyn Peterson, associate center director and research fellow from the Public Policy Institute, PPIC, which we've mentioned before. Josué Medellín-Azuara, professor of the school of engineering at UC Merced, and also Michael Bocadero, executive director of the Agricultural Energy Consumers Association.

We'll start with, miss Peterson. Welcome. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Madam Chair and Madam Chair. Honorable Members, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today on this important topic. It's gonna be a little bit of an encore to panel number 1. Hopefully, I'll bring some new information as well. For those of you who are not familiar with the Public Policy Institute of California, we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research institute.

And the Water Policy Center specifically, we've been working on issues related to water and agriculture among other things for over ten years now. So let me begin with just a quick review. Agriculture uses about 40% of the water in California or about 80% of what we call developed water, which means the water that's actually captured and available for use by communities and businesses.

Note, this figure here that the value of farm output has increased over recent decades while ag water use and land use, the dark blue and green lines in the middle here, have remained flat. And this reflects a shift toward perennial crops in the state's production portfolio as well as increased productivity of agriculture and water use efficiency as well.

So that's good news. Now we know that all of California's farming regions face distinct water challenges, but I wanna focus on what I think is the biggest potential disruptor sector, which is the groundwater issues in the Central Valley that you're all quite familiar with. Groundwater is our drought reserve. And as director Gibson mentioned, 40% of our water supplies come from groundwater on average and much more than that during drought years. And of course, we have been misusing these assets for over a hundred years now.

So that is why the success of the sustainable groundwater management act is critically important, for securing our groundwater resources and ensuring that ag can continue to thrive in California. But it will entail difficult decisions and transitions for agriculture particularly in the San Joaquin Valley. So the San Joaquin Valley produces more than half of the state's agricultural output and value. It's also home to more than half of our critically overdrafted groundwater basins.

Overuse of groundwater is a problem in the Sacramento Valley as well, but the magnitude is far greater in the San Joaquin Valley where overdraft is nearly 2,000,000 acre feet per year.

That's about half of Shasta Reservoir. Reconciling that overdraft will require new supplies using less water or most likely a combination of both. So in a 2023 report, we estimated that the volume of water applied for irrigation in the valley would decrease by 20% by 2040 from the combined effects of three drivers, climate change, environmental regulations, and sigma. Of these three, sigma will result in by far the biggest reduction to water available for agriculture. So that is why I focus on it so heavily here.

The impacts of these reductions will vary across ground water basins largely depending on the severity of overdraft, which you

can see on the left hand figure here, as well as the degree to which that basin has access to surface water supplies, which you can see on the right hand figure. Groundwater sustainability agencies' plans for correcting overdraft rely very heavily on groundwater recharge as you can see here, or intentionally applying water to replenish aquifers. This is their strategy primarily for increasing supplies.

Collectively, if you add up all of the plans, they have put forth a goal of 1,000,000 acre feet of additional recharge per year by 2040, which is a very ambitious goal. Now basins are making progress on getting more water in the ground.

We conducted a survey in 2023 and found that 7,500,000 acre feet of water was applied for recharge valley wide using a variety of methods. This was a 17% increase over twenty seventeen volumes, which was a similarly wet year. Yet most basins remain far from their goals, and more water could likely have been diverted for recharge in 2023 while still complying with downstream environmental regulations in the Delta. So we're looking at the San Joaquin River inflow in 2023 here.

On on the San Joaquin River specifically, which is a smaller river than the Sacramento River but there's quite a bit more demand for recharge on that river, we estimate that 3,400,000 acre feet more water could have been available for recharge off the San Joaquin River.

About a third of that could have been diverted without a permit under the executive orders, of March of that year. But this is more, the realm of the possible. Right? We don't actually have the capacity currently to divert and store all this water when it is available. And not all of that water, particularly on the San Joaquin River, could be used for recharge without tradeoffs for downstream users such as the state and federal export projects.

So we have a couple of recommendations for scaling up recharge, and this is a bit of a laundry list. I'm happy to provide more detail on this if needed. But the first is to continue to refine the rules on when and how much water can be diverted for recharge without harming the environment or downstream users, but also addressing other regulatory barriers including processes for obtaining permits for building and operating projects, not just for getting the water for recharge.

Easing infrastructure constraints, which has come up already, enhancing groundwater accounting, this would help facilitate setting allocations, ramping up trading, ramping up banking, and also accelerating recharge on farmland, which we found can be very cost effective. But we can't escape the fact that these supply side solutions like recharge or new surface source projects, they're only going to solve half the problem most likely.

If we do a great job of acquiring new supplies and let's see let's say we hit that 1,000,000 acre feet goal, that still leaves 1,000,000 acre feet that must be made up by other means. This includes reducing overall demand for groundwater principally by removing irrigated agricultural land from production. So the the numbers that under secretary Birdsong cited came from us. The 20% supply reduction that we anticipate equates to about 500 to 900,000 acres of irrigated farmland that would need to be followed by twenty forty.

And it's difficult to overstate the importance of this for the valley.

That's about $4,500,000,000 in agricultural GDP losses and up to 50,000 jobs that would be affected by this.

What what was that number again? What's the,

On the GDP, 4,500,000,000.

No. The, acres of ag land.

500 to 900,000. So 900,000 would be the case where we manage the groundwater deficit purely through reducing groundwater use. 500,000 would be if we manage to bring in new supplies. We are more flexible in trading and how we use our surface water. So that's more of a best case scenario.

The 4,500,000,000 specifically just to the valley?

San Joaquin Valley. Correct. Yes. So there are ways to reduce these costs. That's the good news.

And so finding new supplies, for example, through groundwater recharge will help as well engaging in robust transparent water markets. Some of the land that is slated for fallowing could be kept in production using different crops and management systems that are more suited for low water availability. We refer to these as sigma ready crops. This would avert some of the costs of fallowing. Other land could also be repurposed to non agricultural uses that provide multiple benefits such as wildlife habitat or renewable energy.

But the valley must prepare for widespread following, which raises the prospect of public health risks from dust pollution as well as increased costs for mitigating nuisances like weeds and pests. Local and state efforts that, aimed at reducing these downsides are ongoing but by and large, they fall short of the needed scale. The valley is going to need investment, strong incentives, and coordination to navigate these coming transitions.

So again, some of our recommendations for facilitating those transitions include, again, strategic infrastructure investments, and that's especially to address subsidence related damage, which is worse than we originally understood and it is not slowing down. So that has the potential to really throw a wrench in the works of Sigma.

Also promoting water trading, which can help reduce the regional economic costs of attaining sustainability, aligning regulatory and fiscal incentives, which we've heard a little bit about already. And lastly, supporting pilots and, strategic incentives for sigma ready crops and farmland repurposing. Growers may require policy or financial support to manage the risks of crop transitions and funding and technical support for farmland repurposing will also be needed. So I'm happy to go into more detail on any of that, but I will I will leave it there for now.

Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Okay. Now, we'll go to, Professor Medellín-Azuara.

Thank you.

Yes. Chair Caballero, Chair Soria, members of the committee, thank you very much for the invitation. Today, I'm gonna talk about applied tools that may help California growers to adapt to climate extremes. California water supply is expected to decline by 10% by year 2040, with the Sierra snowpack down more than a half by 2100. SGMA responds to decades of ground water overdraft, and it does not cause this decline.

It helps fill the gap that is very much needed in replenishing aquifers. SB 72, led by, Chair Caballero, now commits the state to identify 9-million-acre foot of new supplies by around the same time horizon, 2040. Feed crops and many field grain crops are particularly vulnerable to water shortages and are—and so are dairy and beef industries that they support, especially as exposed water growth is scarcer and opportunity cost of water rise in allocating among various commodities.

Here, at a basin scale, it was alluded by Director Gipson, we have forecasting for reservoir operations at Lake Mendocino already showing real results. About 19% of more storage has estimated economic benefits of 9 point million—$9 million—analyzed.

A statewide economic study of FIRO, led by my colleagues at UC San Diego, is now underway for publication and is showing a statewide benefits of FIRO operations, and while an NSF funded pilot project led by colleagues at San Diego State University further expands this scope by combining FIRO and managed aquifer recharge benefits and costs.

But at a micro-scale—a doctoral dissertation I co-advised with Professor Harmon at UC Merced for a student, Humberto Flores-Landeros, in partnership with Stanford University, uses a taut electromagnetic survey in the device. Looks like a little figure there in the tractor, just going through the fields of an experimental station, helps find shallow aquifer opportunities at individual farms.

About a third of an acre can bank up to 20-acre feet per year and scaling that statewide, with the help of the Department of Water Resources Aerial Surveying Program, this approach could add 5,000 to 18,000-acre foot of across the year for the Merced Sub-Basin, where Chair Soria represents, a complement to conventional recharge and a promising water augmentation strategy for the state.

At—on land repurposing, UC Merced co-developed a participatory geospatial toolkit for California's Land Repurposing Program, scoring land in Tule and Kaweah Basins, mostly in Tulare County for recharge habitat, renewable energy, and crop transitions, rather than idling outright. This brings transparency to the local groundwater agency sustainability agencies in planning efforts. Other—more tools that are worthwhile exploring is the Project Nexus, testing solar panels over canals with Turlock Irrigation District piloting a study with UC Merced as our research partners.

Also, Agrivoltaics research, led by Professor Sarah Kurtz, co-locating solar panels within crops in our—at our experimental smart farm—where Professor Reza Asani also looks into moving agrivoltaic systems. Both projects point to potential water savings while generating clean energy as alternatives to line idling alone. On crop flexibility, UC Merced's Secure Water Future Project, led by Professor Bierz, shows that deficit irrigation on alfalfa can save from 60—16—to 50% of its water use, with little impact on revenues, making more water available, not coming back.

New preliminary work from that project puts the statewide savings for a collection of, for a group of 10 most—the 10 counties that produce most of the alfalfa savings at around 645,000-acre feet a year, so far, from suspending alfalfa....by past July 1st. UC Merced is also piloting agave cultivation in the experimental farms, and recent work by my fellow panel member, Dr. Peterson, points to winter crops and other practices, contributing to substantial water savings in, in a new recent report on SGMA-ready crops.

But none of these happens without better data and tools. The Climate Toolbox from Professor Abatzoglou projects future conditions and the viability of crops in certain regions in California and other places in the United States. OpenET tracks water used by satellite.

COEQWAL models water allocation among different uses under climate and regulation. And the programs of the Department of Food and Ag, including SWEEP program, involves improvements in deficit irrigation and lowers net carbon footprint of agriculture. And likewise, for healthy soils with other benefits for water retention and other—and other benefits as well.

And OpenAg, led by UC Merced and funded through the Department of Water Resources, quantified the 2021 and 2022 drought cost to agriculture and also has since guided latest studies, including the recent PPIC studies on the potential of the cost of San Joaquin Valley agriculture from regulation and environmental cutbacks. My recommendation is sustained investment on this full portfolio data and analytical tools, recharge at every scale, land and energy flexibility, and crop adaptation, so growers and agencies can act before drought or flood becomes a crisis.

Thank you, and I will be happy to respond to questions when the time comes.

Thank you very much. Really appreciate the, the different pilot projects that are being done all over the state, that provide us with data and using good science. I'm—I really appreciate that. We'll have, I'm sure, some questions for you.

Thank you, Chair.

And last but not least, Mr. Boccadoro.

Madam chairs, members, Michael Boccadora, on behalf of the Ag Energy Consumers Association this morning. I don't think I'm reminding you of anything when I say we're having an energy affordability crisis in California. You hear it daily. It's true also for the agricultural sector. Rates have more than doubled in the last twelve years and nearly tripled in PG&E service territory, and there is absolutely no end in sight.

PG&E is proposing upwards of a 40% additional rate increase between 2027 and 2030. It's not sustainable and the impacts are felt across the entire food production supply chain. The water agencies that provide water to farms, the farms themselves, packing house operations, cold storage, food processors, and ultimately, the grocery store, and it has huge implications. Rates for food processors are equally troubling when you look at the business price of electricity here in California.

It's more than double the national average, more than every other Western state.

It's nearly triple what we see in Nevada. It's not a national crisis or a Western crisis. It's a California affordability nightmare that we're experiencing, and it's, it's hugely, hugely problematic. This next slide talks a little bit about the implications of SGMA, and, and you've already heard a very good discussion of SGMA today on, on numerous aspects.

I'm going to focus on the energy use aspect of it and with declining water pumping, the availability to pump groundwater, agricultural energy use in California will decline between now and 2040. We're somewhat unique in that and it's really important for people to understand that energy use, electricity use in particular, is going to go up dramatically as we electrify everything in this state from automobiles to buildings to our homes, even discussions about the hard-to-electrify sector or food processing and industry.

But ag will decline because we are going to see land come out of production in the San Joaquin Valley. There will be—and we can argue about how much land, but we can argue that with less land, there will be less water pumping, there will be less food production, there will be less energy use in the food processing sector as a result of that.

And it's really important because a lot of these other sectors are going to be driving energy rates in California, and we need to make sure that ag is not getting stuck with the bill for a demand, a significant increase in demand that we're not driving. So, we'll be talking more and more with you about those issues, and we have some ideas for legislation next year that I'll, I'll mention in a moment.

So, I wanted to save the the most of my time for what I call the "money slide," and these are the takeaways. But ag energy costs are unsustainable.

They ultimately affect not just farmers, but they ultimately affect consumers in California, both in terms of availability and the cost of groceries. And you know, like all things in California, even groceries are more expensive in the food basket to the world. I'm not sure how that happens, but it happens. But groceries are about 30% more here in California than they are in the rest of the country. If you've traveled in Europe, you've seen how inexpensive food production and groceries can be there.

Ag load on the grid, as I said, is going to decline. We need to take steps to recognize that and make sure ag is not on the hook for increasing costs. We have no problem with data centers, but we need to be very smart about where we put data centers and putting them in the San Joaquin Valley, other rural regions where we have water scarcity, not a good idea. And so, we need to make sure we stay focused on that.

I know you're hearing a lot about that over the course of the next several weeks. It's not just the energy consumption. It's the water consumption, in particular, that would be problematic for the San Joaquin Valley when we're already facing severe water scarcity. State agencies are not coordinated on Climate Smart Ag. This is a huge, huge issue.

The CPUC has eliminated the ag net energy metering program called Net Aggregation. As a result, we're not able to put, with any significant degree, new solar applications on farms in the San Joaquin Valley. That is the foundation of Climate Smart Ag, and it's been taken away from the agricultural community. So, we have no alternative to these rapidly rising rates, and that was a PUC decision. They also eliminated the Biomap Program recently, at the end of last year.

That's a huge problem because it's not only creating problems for agricultural biomass, but we have lots of, you know, agricultural tree trimmings and orchard removals, as well as forestry waste that's piling up with no place to go. So, that's a huge issue and we need to make sure that these agencies are much more coordinated. Ultimately, the Central Valley and other food production regions are being left behind.

...Gets taken care of. Silicon Valley gets taken care of.

The Greater Los Angeles area gets taken care of. San Francisco Bay Area gets taken care of. But there's no funding for farmer. You heard all about these wonderful programs that we have. There's no funding for livestock methane reduction.

There's no funding for the Food Production Investment Program. There's no funding for ag burn and the biomass programs in the state, and there's no funding currently for the SAFER Program. And so, the valley really, truly, is getting left behind, and the state is unfortunately—and I'm not present company included here, but the state generally is increasingly taking food production for granted and it needs to stop because it's getting harder and harder to farm.

It's an expensive place to do business. It's an especially expensive place to farm, and it's starting to be reflected. The staff asked me to just mention the dairy sector. 20,000 farms with about 40 cows seventy years ago. Today, we have less than a thousand dairies remaining.

We're losing more every year. So, it's a huge crisis. You mentioned, Assemblymember Soria, small farms. They're the ones that get impacted the most by SGMA, the most by all these other regulatory programs that we're seeing. We're gonna see smaller dairies continue to go out of business as they consolidate with larger dairies in state.

So, it's a real, real significant problem. Final point is we will be preparing some legislation related to energy use—Assemblymember Soria, very much in line with what your legislation did for Westlands last year—to try and provide some additional energy tools to water agencies in the San Joaquin Valley as we seek to, to mitigate the impacts of SGMA and other issues.

So, we'll be reaching out to folks with some of the ideas we have about programs we can put in place to help mitigate some of the impacts of SGMA. And then the last thing I'll mention is the San Joaquin Valley Water Blueprint is going to be releasing its Unified Water Plan, which will fit right into the California Water Plan Assemblymember—excuse me, Senator Caballero, that you put in place with SB 72.

And that'll be coming out the next couple of weeks, and it'll be really important for us to find the funding for that critical water infrastructure that we need that Caitlin so eloquently talked about on all these different projects that we need to put in place to mitigate SGMA. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

What's, what's the timing on that?

In the next couple of weeks, it should be released. Fresno State's going through some legal requirements they have to go through with the final report. And as soon as that's done, it'll be released, but we'll make sure it lands on all of your...

...All of your desks. And there'll be a lot of opportunity for further discussion later this year and early next year.

Okay.

Yeah. Because...

There will be some legislative funding, in particular, that will need to be put in place.

Yeah, as we look to next year, I think that's going to be important. Thank you.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you very much for your presentation, and the last page is probably the most important. We took a picture of it, so we're going to keep it. I don't disagree with anything on that list and I would add a couple more things. And the bottom line is we have to diversify.

We have to utilize the Valley to diversify creating energy that returns clean water to the, to the residents that starts to reduce greenhouse gas. There, there are solutions, but, but there's this push to put in nothing but solar panels. And what you end up is blowing dust, no permanent jobs, and a real devastating impact on small communities that really rely on agricultural production. So, really appreciate it. So, let's see if we've got any questions.

Assemblymember Soria, would you like to, to start off?

Again, grateful for that information. Thank you for providing, for us, I think, recommendations. I know, obviously, it's always easier to kinda present the challenges, you know, and I think they're—we've known these challenges for, for a long time. I know that, at least in my short, now four years here, it's the same story, and yet, you know, we continue to get left behind, to Michael's point.

I've attempted to try to remind my colleagues, especially those that are not from the Central Valley or an agricultural community, of the importance of ensuring that they also are helping us get to a solution and to support some of these recommendations and, and that they don't lead in legislation that ends up having unintended consequences to the regions that we represent and then impacting California Ag.

And so, just very curious, in terms of some of the recommendations for scaling up recharge, because I'm interested in the short window of opportunity with Prop 4 and, and maybe even GGRF. And I know the, the, the dollars are limited, but where can we get the most bang for our buck to be able to address some of these challenges that you guys outlined very eloquently?

Interested in just, so that as I'm, you know, having these conversations with my colleagues, so that we can, we're able to, you know, tell them very specifically, especially in this year, what are some of those things that we can do before end of session to help kind of start up those types of investments and address some of these recommendations that you guys have outlined in your various presentations?

Right. So, as, as you said, the dollars are limited. So, one of the things that I will emphasize first is that some of the solutions are policy and not—it's not all about building more infrastructure. Right?

So, there been efforts recently, there are bills under consideration to refine the language of SB 122 that's now codified on how much, what, what counts as high flows that can be diverted, when can we divert those flows, and that's all good, but there is much more that needs to be done there, particularly to create those assurances for downstream users, the export projects in, in particular, that their water rights are not going to be infringed upon if we divert more water upstream. So, a little—there's also a little bit more flexibility.

That's, that's the bill that I got sideways on the two irrigation districts.

That's exactly that issue.

Yes. Yes.

So, the state water contractors, even if they're—so, they're entitled to X amount of water. Even if they don't have the capacity to pump all of that water, they're going to be reluctant to give it up, so to speak, to upstream users because they worry that they will, you know, infringe on their contracts and then, they're, they're concerned about their contract holders. Right? So, there's a lot of work that needs to be done there on partnerships, understanding when can we divert safely, we can assure downstream users that's not gonna impact your water right.

And, and that's a big job. It's gonna involve forecasting, better data, better accounting, all of the things. And more flexibility—you also referenced on, on when we can divert, when there truly is a flood emergency. In, in—for example, when Planada flooded in 2023, conditions in the Delta were such that you, you couldn't—you weren't, allowed to pull more—the, the projects were not allowed to, to pull more water.

So, there can be flood conditions elsewhere in the watershed when the Delta is not in excess.

And if we add some more flexibility, we could start to take advantage of that water and have a benefit for recharge and a benefit for flood management at the same time, but we have to kind of align the downstream regulations and coordinate on that upfront so the projects are on board with all of that. So, that's a big one that's really about the rules and the regulations.

I think the—working with the irrigation districts, as you've been doing, to understand what are the local infrastructure just needs and how can we find just the resources to build small holding reservoirs, local interties, and that kind of thing to allow us to slow down that water, because it comes in these big gulps, so that we can distribute it for a longer period of time, and that's gonna enable us to get more of the water actually in the ground. So, that's the infrastructure piece.

And then, also, we need to look to—on farm recharge, I believe, as well because that is the most...

More?

Yes. So, that is the most cost-effective version of recharge that we have available at the moment. It has increased quite a bit. We've ironed out some of the technical difficulties, I'd say, and now, most of the difficulties revolve around the grower shouldering a lot of the initial costs and not being sure if they're gonna get credit of some sort for the water that they do manage to get in the ground. So, it's, it's about the incentives and the crediting and accounting, in that respect.

Well, they, they took out the, the, the weirs and put in a different system in order to do drip irrigation, and now, they gotta go back and put in those weirs and it's...

Yeah, so they're—what do you want me to do?

Yeah. Exactly.

Okay. Okay.

I don't know if there's...

Well, is Caitlin—Dr. Peterson actually led a very nice study on, on it, that she eloquently described on opportunities for recharge. I would like to go back a little bit to the micromark, to the farm level scale as is one of the most cost effectiveness—effective—methods. One thing there is that there's—the surveying allows identifying pockets in which the recharge can occur at the farm scale.

And having some clarity on how and when to move that water for the farmer is, is, I think, is very beneficial for, for the use of it. So, make sure—making sure—that water is available for the farmer to, to use it.

And also, get some clarity on the allocations and have the institutional infrastructure to allow this water to be diverted and put into farms or into larger scale recharge. Yes.

That's good.

I'm here all the time. I'll defer. You've got another panel that you need to get up here and

Appreciate it.

One of my clients is on that panel. So I wanna make sure he gets his time.

Oh, very important. That's great. Well, we will get moving then on the next panel. I wanna make sure they have an opportunity to testify and really appreciated this information. It's really critical.

I expect you'll see more discussion in the future about what's the infrastructure, what do we need to start looking at, and how do we fund it. Because some of it is not real expensive. We just have to have the will to be able to do it. So thank you very much for your information. Really important.

Like to invite the third panel, which is workforce innovation in the future of food production. And we do have about 35 minutes. We're gonna invite Roger Isom, the President, CEO of California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association, and the Western Tree Nut Association, Alexi Rodriguez, President CEO of the Almond Alliance, and Diana Melero Silva, the Director of Communications for the California Farmworker Foundation. Welcome. Thank you very much.

We'll start with Mister Isom.

Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning. I'm here to talk about the state of the food and fiber processing side of the Ag industry. And my comments are gonna have a common theme, and that's our inability to pass along increased costs. And you've heard a lot of this today and I'm gonna reiterate it because it's it's important.

Let me start on the energy piece. As as Mister Boccadoro said, we've seen over a 100% increase on electric rates in the last decade. And if for the PG&E territory, which is a lot of yours districts and a lot of my members, they're looking staring down the barrel right now of a 20 set or 23% increase by 2027 and a 44% increase by 2040 on top of that. As Mr. Boccadoro said, we used to have an ability to offset or mitigate that with solar.

With NEM 3 and now the elimination of aggregation, that is no longer a solution. It just doesn't work for agriculture anymore. And so we have no way to mitigate that. In addition, if you're familiar with the California Energy Commission's Integrated Energy Policy Report, that's the thing that they put together every two years that looks at energy for the next 20 years.

One of the things that stands out in that is they said due to the states push to this all electric economy, natural gas rates are gonna skyrocket.

And this is their numbers, they're not mine, that natural gas rates right now at a $1.50 a therm are gonna go somewhere between $8, which is more than a 400% increase to as much as $70 a therm by 2040. When you look at my cotton gins, my walnut hullers, my nut pasteurizers, my nut roasters, and you know, folks, I don't I don't represent like tomato processing plants. That's the end. There's another you can't mitigate that. There's no way to offset that.

And right now, the technology doesn't exist or it's too expensive to put in place to offset that. So energy is a huge issue when you look at the food processing and fiber processing. Labor, and I know somebody's already touched on this, but when you look at minimum wage being at $16.90 and going up, and the rest of the state $7.25, I had an almond processor, almond butter processor moved to Lubbock, Texas.

I asked why. They said, Roger, it's $7.25 an hour. That that's it. That's the only decision. You lay on top of that workers' comp cost, and I can speak to this because I have a member who has a cotton gin in California and a cotton gin in Arizona.

Workers comp rate for the gin in California for the workers, $29 per 100 of payroll. Arizona, same guy doing the same job for the same company. It's $14.50. Our workers' comp rates are twice what they are in other states. And again, the big thing here, the most important thing to remember is we're subject to a world market, especially the commodities I represent.

Right? We export a 100% of our cotton, 70% of our tree nuts. We can't charge more for a pound of cotton or a pound of almonds just because of a California requirement. Doesn't work that way. They're simply gonna buy elsewhere.

China's gonna source their almonds from Australia. India's gonna source their walnuts from Chile. That's the simple truth of it. Add on top of this regulations that California has that nobody else has. And let me just talk about worker safety.

Nighttime lighting, workplace violence, indoor and outdoor heat illness, wildfire smoke, Those are all very important regulations. Don't get me wrong. I'm not I'm not stating that, but nobody else does it. Not even Arizona. Arizona doesn't even have a heat illness regulation.

It's a hell of a hotter there than it is here. But we have to overcome the cost to comply with all that that nobody else has to. Again, that puts us at that disadvantage, right? We have another one coming at us that Oh, I say it's coming at us. It's already here, and that's the single use packaging regulation.

We're gonna have to change our packaging. We're gonna have to change our packaging lines and somehow to try to make this work with other state and other countries, their regulations and their needs and demands. Again, and that all cost is on us , and the of the agency that's overseeing that or or organizations overseeing that has a $17,000,000,000 budget that's gonna be paid for by us.

That's we are the ones who have to pay the fees to do that. But again, I can't charge more because I have to change my packaging. Just doesn't work that way.

So the the solutions, the first and foremost right off the top is incentives. Whether it's the farmer program to replace tractor equipment, whether it's the Ag burn alternatives on burning, whether it's the FPIP, the food processing investment program for our processing units, our processors, or sweep on the irrigation, those need to be funded.

You know, and I know you opened up with it and and Chair Soria, I just like to remind the audience of the comments you made on the floor a few months Ago. And that is, if we're gonna ask agriculture do more, we have to provide the support and resources. I couldn't agree with you more.

That's really how I wanna close today is we have to find those resources to help us compete. We understand where we live. Right? Those challenges are gonna be here. This is the major way to overcome those. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Miss Rodriguez?

Of course. Committee chairs and members, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Workforce innovation and the future of food production hinges on our ability to grow safe food at a cost that is sustainable for producers and affordable for consumers. And they're

Make sure your mic is on. Is it red?

It's red.

Okay. Got it.

Hot. Outdoor outdoor voice.

Several factors are making that increasingly difficult. One of the most significant we've talked a lot about today is Sigma. Its implementation has started a ripple effect across the entire supply chain, beginning at the farm and extending to grocery store shelves and beyond. Recent analysis, as previously mentioned, projects that as many as a million acres of irrigated farmland will be followed or could be followed.

Reduced production means fewer agricultural jobs, less product moving through processing facilities, and greater economic pressures on rural communities, ultimately resulting in an increase in cost to the consumer.

The burden is particularly difficult for small growers, which make up the majority of almond farms in California. Many of these small farms are having to absorb fixed compliance costs that do not scale according to the size of an operation, and this challenge is is not limited to almonds.

A recent LA Times article highlighted a woman who farms 19 acres in Merced and has stopped growing vegetables on her half of her property over concerns of the cost of new groundwater pumping fees.

Our efforts and I'm sure I know I'm preaching to the query here, but our efforts should be to preserve small farms, not to be reducing them. We also anticipate that sigma related land transitions will contribute to California's abandoned orchard problem.

Land that is fallowed or removed from production will still need to be managed for weeds, rodents, and invasive pests, which will incur a cost. But once fallowed, there's no longer going to be income to offset that cost. And unmanaged land can become a burden to a breeding ground for pests, that move into neighboring orchards that increase the cost for those that are still operating, which leads to the urgent issue, which is rodents and invasive species.

Just last week, I visited a 36 acre orchard that had been completely picked over by squirrels. And actually, just I was as I was sitting here today, I got a report from his insurance that showed that there was zero almonds in that field, literally just twenty minutes ago. That's a revenue loss of over a $150,000 for the second consecutive year for that ranch.

And that's just one of many examples. But what is more concerning is that the source of that infestation appears to be neighboring land owned by the State of California and most specifically, the high speed rail. High speed rail currently has no integrated pest management program.

And so the Omni Alliance, we at the Omni Alliance, have been working with state agencies to address this issue because growers should not be expected to absorb the losses created by unmanaged public property, especially when their ability to respond depends on continued access to effective rodent control tools. And with that context, I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge your leadership on AB 1603.

We recognize that the difficulty of balancing environmental objectives and public concerns with the practical realities facing Agriculture, and so we appreciate your willingness to engage with AG community in the pursuit of a more balanced and workable approach. That same need for balance applies more broadly to the cumulative regulatory pressures many mentioned today.

Agriculture, California agriculture has absorbed more than a decade of compliance costs, increase that many competitors in other states and countries also discussed today do not have. These include groundwater, labor, pesticide, energy transportation, and other mandates.

We encourage the legislature to consider periodic performance and return on investment reviews of existing regulatory programs. Programs should be evaluated not only for their stated objectives, but for whether they are achieving measurable results, whether those requirements remain necessary, and whether the cumulative economic effects are sustainable.

These pressures also have a direct impact on innovation. Innovation requires capital, and capital is increasingly scarce in an industry facing multiyear financial pressure. Dollars spent responding to sigma, invasive pests, and rising compliance costs are dollars that cannot be invested in new technology, equipment, water efficiency, or improved production practices.

Targeted state investment can help, particularly as it pertains to orchard removal, invasive species, and ag alternatives for the counties that can no longer do so.

California must also modernize its invasive species response system. With threats such as carpophilus beetle or the golden mussels, it just demonstrates that our system is insufficiently equipped for early detection and rapid response. Weeding allows infestation to spread and makes the eventual mitigation far more expensive. These threats can reduce production, quality, and in some instances create food safety concerns.

Many innovations are ideas that begin at the post production level, but they ultimately require changes and investment on the farm, which is why these issues cannot be addressed in isolation.

Water policy, pest management, regulatory cost, processing, and affordability are all connected. We appreciate the committee's leadership and your willingness to hear directly from agriculture, and we at the alliance look forward to continuing to work with you on solutions to support environmental progress, food affordability, and the long term viability of California agriculture. Thank you.

Thank you very much. A lot in that statement. Appreciate it.

Good morning. Thank you so much to the chairs and the members for allowing us here at California Farmworker Foundation to be a voice of California farmworkers and for the industry and the work that we do. My name is Diana Melero Silva.

I'm the Director of Communications for the foundation, and I have to do a very proud but shameless plug that I am a proud granddaughter of immigrant grandparents and immigrant mother that came here to live the American dream to build a better life, and they've done they've been able to do so.

So very proud to be here and be proud to be a part of this organization that does so good for California farm workers to build a better quality of life for all of California farm workers. So a little bit about us, ten years in the making, we celebrate our anniversary this year. We have six counties in which we operate across California, from Fresno to, Madera, Kern, Tulare, down in Coachella area, and also on the Center coast of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo County.

Everything that we do is centered around uplifting and empowering the voice of California farm workers. We do that through our needs assessment.

Every program that we create, every service that we implement or we partner with, it comes because of the voice and the need of a farm worker. Our three focus areas are centered around health, wellness, education, and civil assistance. The what makes us so unique as far as a non profit organization is the fact that we get to work together with the organizations in the industry. We get to partner with grower partners and producers to get access to farm workers in the fields.

So that means our programs, our services, they're not just at our, you know, four wall offices. We're actually in the fields with farm workers because of that golden access that we have with Ag producers and companies. We build meaningful relationships with them. We build trust. We've earned respect.

And we've seen a difference, and that's allowed us to reach over 65,000 farm workers just last year in all of those services in those focus areas that we reach. We talked a lot today about a lot of concerns within the Ag industry, and I'm really happy to hear that, you know, labor of farm workers is at the table today.

The California Farmworker Foundation, yes, definitely prioritizes the health and well-being of our labor force. We do know we have an aging labor force, and what are we doing for them? Chronic illness, diabetes continues to be at the forefront of that.

When we talk about lack of health care and access, what are we doing to support that aging labor force?

Well, what we're doing is we're actually partnering up with health care providers. We're bringing, chronic illnesses and bringing clinics to the fields, enrolled communities in which lack access to these resources. And you will see a difference when an individual comes through and gets a general wellness check, finds out that they're diabetic, needs a prescription for medication but don't have insurance, not enrolled in MediCal, don't want to get stuck with the bill.

CFF is able to do health care navigation to ensure that when a farmworker comes through one of our clinics, they are seen, they are heard, they are treated, and their health doesn't stop there. We are actually, certified through a health care navigation to continue on their health care journey there to ensure that when they leave, if they're not enrolled in MediCal, let's get you enrolled.

If not, let's get you a solution. We have to take care of our farm workers. That goes hand in hand with the big challenge of food security. Our small rural communities, yes, a fireball, yes, of Huron, Kalinga that don't necessarily have access to big grocery stores. They have small little marketas.

Or, once again, because today's economy, it's do I put food on my table, or do I pay the electricity, or do I pay my rent? So we've been able to partner up with a lot of food banks to serve over 800,000 pounds of food back to our farmworker families throughout the Central Valley, throughout California. And that goes a long way.

And making sure that we're having conversations at these food boxes and the food that we're bringing to their tables is also food appropriate and sensitivity as well with the foods that we know that they eat every single day in their homes. We're really fortunate, once again, besides health care is, also the big conversation of immigration.

We've seen over this past year what immigration what has happened in our own backyards, in our communities, in our counties across California. The fear is very much still there.

And what the foundation has been able to do to support with education, preparedness plans, working with school districts, working with partnerships to bring that ease, to bring that awareness, to bring that education once again in the field, in the in the communities, partnering with our Ag producers, with industry to ensure that people are heard, they're aware, and they're educated. And I can tell you very much that it also has affected our labor shortage because of that scarcity. Right?

People are faced with that. Do I stay? Do I leave? What do I do? Do I wanna leave my home?

It's still very much does exist. But at the forefront, CFF has been grateful to be able to bring those partnerships to help bring that education preparedness plans, working with the school district to ensure that they know that if tomorrow is uncertain, what about their kids? What about their family? That they're equipped and they have the preparedness plans ready for that. Something that we're really, working with when we talk about innovation.

We know technology and and agriculture is advancing, but what are we doing to also advance our labor force? And we're proud to say that at CFF, we're working with our workforce development initiatives to upskill our farm workers, to give them tools, to give them opportunities, to then be able to bring something to the table. All of us in this room here have some kind of degree, have a certification, and farm workers deserve the same.

Through our workforce development programs, we're able to offer ESL classes, mathematics, leadership development, certification, forklift, boom lift driving. And for many of us here, you think that's very simple.

Right? We did that in elementary school. But when we're working with the labor force that have barriers, have challenges, right? with reading, writing, this is a huge deal for them. It opens up opportunities. It opens up doors.

And what we've seen for success, especially down in Coachella Valley, is you have individuals that have gone through a workforce development program and now are getting hired for a higher position. Individuals that went through the program now learned a little bit of self, you know, leadership, self growth. Now you're seeing mayordomas. Now you're seeing the leadership with women now, you know, building individuals now have a resume, something they didn't have before. Right?

What farmworker can say that they have built a resume or own a certification. And so we've been able to uplift and be able to provide that opportunity to open doors for farmworkers. And I have to give credit where credit is due. We can provide the programs. We can provide the sources.

But the successful formula to that opportunity with workforce development has been our partnerships with the producers, has been the partnership with growers saying we want our our people, our staff, our employees to go through these programs. They're investing back in their farm workers and their staff, and that's a beautiful thing to see. So we're really fortunate for the amazing work that we get to do.

We appreciate being here at the table to have this conversation about labor, the challenges, but also what the work CFF is doing every single day to ensure that the hands that feed us, our homes and our community and our nation, that their needs and their hands and their hearts are also met with the needs that they need. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Very, very interesting panel. I think the challenges are trying to figure out what's, what comes next. What are the, so let me ask it this this way. What are the, what are the opportunities that we have to make changes that involve legislation or that involved either legislation or resources, either through our bond, through the GGRF fund or through our our general fund.

Again, this is probably more for next year than for current currently, but I think there's some real opportunities. And we have to do it. Otherwise, we're gonna lose our farms and that's really unacceptable as far as this, as far as the Chair of the Assembly Committee and myself. We don't wanna see it happen. So start with you, Sir.

Sure. Resources is it. I mean, in the immediate short term, funding the programs that we know are proven have worked. Farmer, FPIP, all those those are they have a proven track record. They get they help the state meet its goals.

Right? Their goal state's goals are very ambitious. But frankly, without that, we can't do anything. We just the farmers don't have the resources to do that. So really, a short term, it's that.

Longer term, it's what you had almost entire panel talk about the water side of it. Whether it's, you know, those are all long term projects, whether it's cross valley conveyance, increasing our storage, increasing our groundwater recharge. There's a ton of projects out there, but they require resources. And don't get me wrong, growers are paying. They are paying their share of it.

That's absolutely the case. Whether it's farmer funding, we will pay half or even investments that the GSAs are paying for some of their projects. But that's what's needed.

Sounds good. But some a lot of that is through the GGRF, and we're doing our our best to impact that.

We just need a little help from the rest of the folks out there.

Yeah. We do. We do. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Yep. I think just to add on to what Roger said, not only do we need to look at getting resources to these programs, but we also need to look at how we can make them operate more efficiently. I've heard that from members at the farmer program, suite program. They just are not efficient programs. In addition to that and, you know, more on

Can I ask you on that one? Can you tell me what you mean by efficiency? I mean, I think I know what you mean, but I may be looking at it entirely differently.

I think The Efficiency in the implementation, communications between agencies, you know, applications, things of those nature, I think that can all be streamlined.

Okay. Alright. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to

No. No. No. You're fine. And then long term, we need to take a look at just the regulatory compliance as a whole and identify areas where we can either trim back, maybe sunset some of these issues or regulations that have been implemented, especially those that have served their time and their purpose.

But I think that would be another area of opportunity. And then, again you know, to whatever degree we can identify water storage and conveyance opportunities, that's really critical for growers.

In terms of the regulatory compliance, one of the things that I've I've asked the industry to do is to identify what regulations we duplicate in different sectors. Right? Or that don't actually get you the product at the end that you thought the regulatory, the regulation was implemented for, that would be really helpful.

And I give you an example, very quickly is that, back in the day and it was really back in the day, the Forestry Association heard that message and they were required to do a forest mitigation plan every three years. And they'd spend a million dollars, which is like an EIR, they'd spend a million dollars.

They'd send it to the agency. And it took the agency 2 to 3 years to stamp it as approved, and the next one was due. And so they said, if they're not looking if if there haven't been any problems and it takes that long to look at it, give us a longer period of time to produce number 2. And ultimately, we changed it to seven years and that's made a tremendous difference. It's cut down cost tremendously.

It's that kind of thing where, if the problem that we were looking to solve hasn't been produced, it's things are working, then maybe the plan can work a little bit longer. And those are the kinds of things that it it and because they do it, they knew about it and could give us real specific instructions. And that bill that went through the legislature went through very quickly because people understood an EIR, how complicated it is, how much money you spend.

So ahead of this upcoming year, ourselves and a number of trade organizations are actually working on those various.

That would be excellent.

But one thing, and I'd be remiss not to mention it because and it hasn't really been talked a lot about today, are just the cost of lawsuits and litigations to our companies and processors and employers. It's predatory. We have a lot of, you know, law firms from downstate that are launching lawsuits against businesses within the valley. And one of the things that we're really, you know, observing is that it's creating this environment where it's pitting employers against employees, and that's not great for anybody.

And so I don't know how you fix that, but I do wanna put it on your radar as a major concern and issue for our industry.

That's important to know and I'm doing a lot of work around predatory lawsuits. So I'd be more than willing to have a conversation about what that would look like. How is it happening? That kind of thing. Thank you for that information. Appreciate it.

In terms of, you know, from a nonprofit sector supporting the industry, especially looking at supporting our farm workers. For us, you know, a short term barrier has been the lack of funding. You know, from not only the state perspective, also the federal, and also, you know, kind of some new policies that are in place regarding some of the sensitive information that is now gonna be required to support farm workers for, you know resources.

So, I do recommend if we can, you know, be a part of those conversations, you know, when we're asking for certain information, you know, to take into account, you know, how is that going to affect a farmworker, whether or not they do, proceed to be part of a program or, you know, workforce development certification, you know, program, how that could really impact them and their decision because of, you know, one possible question or a part of the application, that could either possibly hurt them or help them to pursue opportunities for their future.

You know, I say long term, the best way we can ever implement change, implement policy, especially from farm workers and our labor side.

We welcome you to the fields with us. We welcome you to have conversations with farm workers as we're talking about labor and anything that's going to impact them or change them. Please know that when there's conversation at the table and a voice of the farm worker needs to be heard, I encourage you to please turn to CFF, and we can get you access to farm workers because, once again, we do need labor. We do need ag.

We do need our producers, and we all need to make sure that our industry is stronger more than ever.

But on the labor side of things in farmworker, we need to make sure that we're continuing to support them and meet in their needs. So long term, once again, anything that we can do to be a voice for them or inviting people out to to have conversations with farmworkers, we definitely encourage you and we invite you.

Sounds great. Really, really appreciate that. We'll follow-up on the discussion about what information you're concerned about and how we can be helpful with that because we wanna make sure you continue to do really good work.

Really important in the community. Well, thank you to you all. I appreciate, your testimony. Look forward to follow-up. I think there's more to be more to be done.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you very much. So, now we're moving on to, public comment and wanna give every anybody who wants an opportunity to make a comment, please come forward. State your name for the record as well as any organization. And if you could stick to a minute, that would be great.

Yep. Good morning. Jamie Minor. On behalf of a large coalition of ag users as well as water districts that are laser focused specifically on forecasting tools and snow surveys, just given how vital they are to water infrastructure and water management in the state. Again, we have a large coalition looking to to receive funding.

I think we're all a little nervous going into next year with massive, you know, El Nino forecast, and given what the Director from DWR said about how essential these tools are to getting allocations right, to water management, to flood protection, there was no funding in the state budget for snow surveys or forecasting.

So very concerned to see that, again, as we head into a massive what we hope, you know, massive water year, but that can lead to really unpredictable, heavy rainfall, snowfall that and we're just simply not prepared. So, thanks to your leadership on those issues. We know you guys have both been, you know, strong advocates for forecasting and just will continue to, you know, raise awareness and advocate for those items. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good morning. Kyle Jones representing Community Alliance with Family Farmers and just wanted to mention, this year it's super important that we get continued Prop 4 funding for land access. Assemblymember Wilson has been a champion that we look forward to working on that with her and and y'all in the future. We are also, just wanted to mention the CUSP program has run out of money.

We asked for 5,000,000 of that general fund, and that's the only program that provides climate relief to farmers who've been impacted by disasters. Unfortunately, without that funding, there's there's just no no relief out there.

Can I ask you, was that a GGRF or was that a

It's a general fund. Unfortunately. And then but we did wanna just acknowledge that the local food perch LFPA program was funded with 15,000,000. That'll need continuing funding to support that program next year as well.

So we just wanted to put that on on everyone's radar. And then finally, CAF just released a report, with the support from DWR, TA funding on implementing Sigma and how we can support small ag there. So I'll be sure to get a copy of the committees. And then finally, on behalf of the San Joaquin Valley Water Collaborative Action Program, we just wanted to thank you, Senator Caballero, for getting a letter out requesting that all the groundwater recharge money moved this year from Prop four.

We have projects ready to go. We don't wanna miss a wet year, because of just delay. And then, finally, just support for SAFER. And thank you, Assemblymember Soria for challenging that champion that. It's super critical that we get full SAFER funding. So thank you.

Thank you so much. The list is really helpful.

It's very long.

I know. This is like

Good morning. Beth Olaso on behalf of the water blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley. Really just wanted to to echo miss Minor's comments on the aerial snow surveys. If we don't know

I did a bill on that a number of years ago. It's like every time somebody suggests something, it's like, bill that got vetoed. Just saying.

I know. But there is an opportunity for funding. It's not, you know, one of those huge funding programs. You as you guys know, if we don't know what's there, we can't be ready to capture it.

So it is just part of that process in groundwater recharge. So I know you are are strong advocates for these things and anything you can do to boost it. It's just a small amount of money that would be really mouthful. About $30,000,000.

I mean, that's for the whole state. I mean, you have to fly each watershed. The less money we get, the less watersheds, but we can scale it.

So it is a scalable program, and we can you know, the number of times we fly gives us more information. But every time we fly, it helps. So anything you could do would be helpful.

There's no other technology nowadays that can be utilized for that?

It it's lidar technology is what it is.

Yeah.

And I'm sure it if we spend money, it gets cheaper over time. Because you can do it in different places.

And, unfortunately, it's not just something we can do once. The snowpack changes. Got it. But, again, as many times as we can do it, the better the data is.

Even a little bit of money helps. So

Thank you.

Good morning. Noelle Cremers with Wine Institute. Appreciate the conversation earlier this morning by Undersecretary Birdsong and Assembly member Aguir Curry about the impacts of the glassy winged sharpshooter and the Costco nursery sales that, we're trying to respond to. We are asking for $19,700,000 to help deal with the trace forwards and then also ongoing eradication work that's necessary. Glassy wing sharpshooters spread Pierce's disease, which is a devastating disease for grapevines.

I also want to make sure that people are aware that the industry has spent $92,500,000 since the Pierce's disease glassy winged sharpshooter board was founded, and so I want to make sure that people understand that industry is putting dollars forward for this as well. But that $19,700,000 is very important to deal with the urgent issue right now.

We also need to be aware long term about how we make sure that we're keeping pests out of California, and have those long term conversations around how to make sure that our border stations are functioning properly.

Thank you. Well, and not only that, but with the downturn in the industry, you have abandoned fields that have been left abandoned. And so that's gonna breed even more Pests.

Yeah.Tens of thousands of acres have been removed. So thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, chairs and members of the committee. Thank you for an excellent, conversation this morning. Great panel members. I am a fifth generation, farm family here in Sacramento County. Our sixth generation, our boys are taking over the operation, which is really great.

So from a farmer perspective, having those tools in the toolbox is essential. And I think one thing that was missing from today's conversation was SALC, Sustainable Ag Land Conservation Program, the GGRF funding. That's a real essential tool. And much like sweep and healthy soils and the manure digester programs, this also is a very meaningful program that still needs to have a continuous funding. We just closed on a project yesterday.

It was a $9,000,000 payout to that farmer. That's some real money, and that's a perpetual easement that ensures that that land stays in farming for agriculture or for in farming forever. I also wanna pivot. The number 2 topic was regulatory. And, some of that oversight needs to happen, ensure that we can have some efficiencies done in the regulatory programs across the board.

CUHRP was one of that that was passed in legislature some years ago. It's the, Consolidated Uniform Hazmat Reporting Program. We as farmers report our hazardous materials to the CERS program with a CUHRP oversight. It is supposed to respond to multiple agencies that take that information and use it, but I'm not sure if that's being done.

So that, I think, is one essential program that should have some oversight to see is it doing what the legislature thought it was going to do when it passed it some years ago. That was all. Thank you for an excellent presentation this morning.

Thank you so much. Good suggestion.

Good morning. Sylvia Solis Shah here on behalf of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. Would like to take this opportunity to amplify the call for additional resources for the Farmer Program as well as the alternatives to ag burning. Specifically to the Farmer Program, the LAO has found that this is one of the most cost effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time, address the reduction in particulate matter.

Funding Farmer is a win for cleaner air in the Valley. It will also reduce GHG emissions, and it's also a win for economic development.

Every time we replace some of the older, heavier polluting farm equipment that is replaced with brand new, state of the art, equipment clean equipment. So, we really ask for your support for additional state resources. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Well, good morning, Chairs, Caballero and Chair Soria and members virtually for watching. Melissa Koshlaychuk with Western Growers, and we represent, small, medium, and large sized farms, processors, shippers for fresh produce, veggies, fruits, tree nuts.

And I very appreciate, the conversation today in the hearing. I feel like there's a wealth of knowledge in industry and a wealth of knowledge in the legislature. In moments like this, I just feel like it we come together.

We talk about a lot of things. Gotta say it was a little depressing, but also inspiring. Right? Because we're here. We're having these conversations, and I truly feel grateful for that.

Definitely a shout out for the farmer program. So Assemblywoman Soria, you mentioned the farmer program. There's currently no GGRF funding for that program. And I was just looking at the numbers from the past. So '23-'24 budget year, we saw a $150,000,000 allocated for the farmer program.

And then, a tiny bit less in '24-'25, it was $2,000,000. So, an estimate from 2025, it was about $630,000,000 in pending applications. So a little over 6,500 potentially pieces of equipment. So it's a very much needed program, and did all the comments that you've heard earlier today on the farmer program and its success. And thank you so much.

Thank you. Really appreciate it. Is there anyone else? Well, thank you. This has been an incredibly important hearing.

I wanna thank everybody that participated today, whether you were giving personal testimony or professional testimony or professional testimony or coming up and speaking at the mic right now, really, really important. Know that the Assemblymember and I are absolutely committed to doing whatever we can to get the resources for the programs that are really working. They're working in our communities. And, we look forward to continued conversations on a number of things that that were brought here today. So thank you very much.

Anything else?

Also, just thank you. I did want to make sure that we do have some follow-up especially on some of the energy conversation and the opportunities that exist. Just want to publicly say, you know, over the next few weeks, I will continue to stay committed to figuring out, I know the interest in farmer program and some of the other investments that were made.

I think it's critically important that we ensure that even if it's a few million, that we make the investment because once it goes away for multiple years, it will never come back or will be very hard for it to come back.

And so I think that, we need to push over the next several weeks, and build a broader coalition, obviously, not just amongst the legislators that have agricultural, land and production happening in their district, but, you know, our friends in the more urban areas who also benefit from the delicious fruit food that we all grow in our area.

So thank you again for the information. We'll be, looking forward to following up, for also some of some potential legislation next year. Thank you.

That concludes the hearing of the joint informational hearing. Thank you very much.