Dry Cuyama Valley was once dominated by ‘thirstiest of crops.’ Then water worries began

Cuyama Valley residents just called for a boycott of Big Carrot after two giant growers sued local landowners over water rights.

The debate over the groundwater basin in that parched corner of Central California has been raging for at least four decades.

Roughly an 80-mile drive from San Luis Obispo, Cuyama is near the corners of San Luis Obispo, Kern, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties.

The vistas are breathtaking in the 1,200-foot-high valley running between the walls of the Caliente Range in the northeast and the Sierra Madre in the southwest.

Longtime residents talk about falling in love with the dramatic landscape but more folks drive through on an average day than live there.

Community members are used to managing on their own, far from retail and political power centers.

The Cuyama Valley, which is 26 miles long and 2 to 6 miles wide, once served as a natural pathway for Native Americans traveling between the San Joaquin Valley and the coast.

Later, two Mexican land grants were located there.

Oil strikes in the mid 20th century brought on a mini-boom to the area and electric power brought the technology to bring groundwater to the surface.

Warning bells about water started being sounded in the early 1980s, as electricity prices went up and the water table went down.

As Jeanne Huber wrote in April 15, 1982, Telegram Tribune story, the area was already a popular spot for crops.

“The sagebrush gives way to fields of onions, potatoes, parsley, garlic, hay and wheat,” Huber wrote. “Carrots grow so well that one valley farm holds the national record for carrots produced on an acre. The valley also has a dairy with 1,000 cows, fields where thousands of sheep spend the winter and several turkey farms.”

Back then, carrot farming was seen as a less water-intensive alternative to alfalfa.

Here is one of three stories Huber wrote and photographed for the Telegram-Tribune, even taking a short airplane ride over the valley.

Cuyama farmers face the desert

Cuyama Valley is a high desert where some spots get an average of only five inches of rain a year, yet much of it is planted in one of the thirstiest of crops, alfalfa.

That irony has been possible because:

• Until the advent of electricity in 1946, relatively little water was pumped up from the 255-acre valley. Its sandy soils had absorbed centuries of rain from 435 square miles of surrounding mountains, and the sponge was ripe for a squeeze.

• Relatively few families — 10 according to one land owner’s estimate — own most of the valley, and the valley is not upstream of any city, so no urban official hollers when well levels drop 100 feet or so in a decade, as Santa Barbara County Water Agency hydrologist Jon Ahlroth estimates they have for the last 30 years in part of the valley.

• Alfalfa prices were high and power costs relatively cheap in California. Now, running a pump costs a mint. Dairymen need less hay because grain is cheap, and they’re reluctant to stockpile hay because interest rates are so high.

“When you’re paying 20 percent for money, the dairymen would rather let the farmer hold the hay,” explained Norman Hahn, who divides his time between farming in the valley and selling real estate through offices in New Cuyama and Santa Ana.

“But the farmer has to pay the power bill, so he sells it for …” he stopped, realizing he would be quoted.

Masquerades don’t continue forever, though, and Cuyama Valley land owners are beginning to face up to what they own: a piece of desert.

The valley is not in danger of running out of water, but it is at a point where pumping costs are so high that farmers will choose to abandon their wheeled irrigation pipes and haymaking equipment in favor of drip irrigation systems and other crops, Ahlroth said.

The farmers in the valley could continue to pump (at the current rate) for probably several decades,” he said. “But at the rate they’re pumping, they’re going to continue to get hit by the economics of high lift.”

Hydrologists and conservationists warn of excessive pumping in many places in California, he noted, but Cuyama Valley is the first place on the Central Coast where the effects are clear. Money talks louder than scientific or philosophic arguments about the need to conserve natural resources.

“What you need out there are very low-duty water crops,” Ahlroth said, suggesting jojoba, a bush grown for its oil-rich fruit.

Jojoba seemed ideal because it needs no irrigation and thrives in sandy soil, but test plantings in Cuyama failed because the winter was too cold, said Ed Fields, an agricultural biologist with Santa Barbara County agriculture commissioner’s Santa Maria office.

Apples were grown commercially for a while, but one major grower’s refusal to use pesticides allowed a coddling moth infestation to “run wild,” Fields said. The orchards died.

One large pear orchard is doing well, however, and overall, Cuyama Valley seems “a real good fruit area,” he said.

Before alfalfa farming became big business in the valley, potatoes were a mainstay, and in the past few years some Cuyama farmers have returned to growing root crops, carrots, potatoes, sugar beets, onions, garlic. Root crops use less water than alfalfa.

But the big money is in more permanent crops, and of those pistachios and grapes have the most glitter.

Paul Young, a Madera pistachio grower whom Hahn hired as a consultant, thinks both crops will do well. Hahn has a test vineyard and a few fledgling pistachio orchards, not yet old enough to bear.