A bill with unanimous support is basically a unicorn in today’s divided politics, so California just saw the return of a water-planning unicorn in the form of SB 72 that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Oct. 1.
Prior to being signed, the bill — effectively an update to the California Water Plan that enforces the need for quantifiable water needs reports and water goals — passed through the state’s legislature without any “no” votes.
This also isn’t the first time it happened. Past iterations of the bill also received unanimous support, but this is the first time the governor signed it.
According to Jason Phillips, CEO of the Friant Water Authority — which supplies water to over a million acres of irrigated farmland in the San Joaquin Valley — the overwhelming and repeated legislative support shows a shift in the understanding of the state’s dire water situation.
“It is an acknowledgment that water conservation is not going to solve the supply deficit both current and projected that we have in this state,” he says.
The bill’s author, state Sen. Anna Caballero, District 14, said in an early September press meeting that the cost of this inaction has been borne mostly by California’s farmers. This is especially true in the San Joaquin Valley, a massive center of the state’s fresh produce production.
She said that the state’s water challenges have resulted in “a scenario where fallowing land has become the norm as a way to make it through the growing season.”
Caballero also characterized that fallowing of farmland as threatening the entire state’s economy — currently the fourth-largest in the world — to the tune of up to $14.5 billion and 67,000 jobs annually.
“It’s all the ripple effect that comes from taking millions of acres out of irrigated lands in California, and we just need to understand that that’s just in one region,” she said.
About the Bill
Caballero said that the California Water Plan “hasn’t seen meaningful revisions in 20 years,” but Phillips characterizes SB 72 as an effort to solve that issue.
“This bill is going to mandate that the California Water Plan do what it was supposed to do and what it used to do, which is identify the water needs of the regions of the state of California, both now and in the future, and put together a plan on how those needs will get met,” he says.
The bill creates a planning framework with deadlines that will require the state to establish long-term water supply targets and strategies to reach them. One of the earliest goals of the bill requires that, by 2028, the California Department of Water Resources creates plans on how it will achieve 9 million acre feet “of additional water, water conservation, or water storage capacity” annually by 2040.
Philips called the efforts necessary to achieve such a goal “no small planning task.”
“This is a very significant task that the state will have to go through to identify how [it’s] going to come up with 9 million acre feet per year statewide and with storage and conservation, recycling and desal,” he says.
California’s Current Crisis
Despite the daunting task, Phillips says there’s no real choice; the state must ensure there is water for farms and people today and into the future. But that goal can’t be achieved through the popular narratives, he adds.
“Water conservation is what people want to go to first when thinking of farmers,” he says. “But agricultural use in the San Joaquin Valley is already about maximized on water conservation.”
Phillips says the only things that will help solve the water challenges in the over 5.5 million acres of productive farmland in the San Joaquin Valley are more surface water to offset the groundwater overdraft or to permanently retire over a million acres of productive farmland. This would be in addition to the farms and farmland already lost.
According to USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service records, there were 24.3 million acres of land in farms in 2020. This compares to 2024 when there were only 23.7 million acres. The number of individual farms also fell from 69,600 operations to 62,500 in that time.
Policy and Planning
“The most unfortunate form of [water] conservation that we have in this state is people leaving and farms leaving,” Phillips says. This exodus of farms from California is not a policy decision but instead the result of inaction and a lack of reporting on current conditions, he adds.
“The governor of the state of California needs to have that presented with that; [farm loss is] a policy decision,” he says. “It needs to be highlighted to policymakers that we either find a way to develop that water or we’re going to lose a substantial amount of productive agriculture.”
That needs to change, and he hopes SB 72’s passage and the reporting requirements it contains will help.
“My engagement is going to be to make sure there is a thoughtful and thorough assessment of the water supply situation that we have today,” he says. “It’s very quantifiable and needs to be quantified.”
