California farmers are hopeful that the Trump administration will deliver more water to the fields

Since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump has been talking about immigration, border security and government efficiency.

But in California’s farm country, his comments about water also get the most attention.

The Golden State grows three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts and over a third of its vegetables, thanks in large part to a complex network of dams and canals that divert water to the state’s fertile Central Valley.

In recent years, farmers have faced increasing restrictions due to environmental concerns on the amount of water they can access through this network, and on the amount of groundwater they can pump after years of overuse and drought.

Now farmers are hoping the second Trump administration will bring more stable water flows to their fields from the federally managed Central Valley Project and a plan for future water supplies. Trump recently posted on his Truth Social platform criticizing the “diversion of MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER PER DAY FROM THE NORTH TO THE PACIFIC, instead of using it for free for the towns, cities and farms across the world. throughout California.”

“It’s problem number one,” said Jason Phillips, general manager of the Friant Water Authority, which represents more than a dozen irrigation districts serving much of the crop-rich valley. “You only need labor and you only need the produce and the equipment and everything else to grow food if you have water.”

California depends on water supplies from the Central Valley Project and the state-run State Water Project. The federal project provides 5 million acre-feet of water annually to farms and 600,000 acre-feet to cities, as well as water to maintain water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides critical habitat for fish and wildlife.

During the previous Trump administration, state officials issued rules to allow increased water flow to California farms.

The move was rejected by environmental groups. The Biden administration has reversed those decisions and has been working on new rules aimed at balancing agriculture with protections for endangered wildlife such as the delta smelt, a small fish that is an indicator of the health of California’s waterways , and Chinook salmon.

In recent years, California farmers say federal water allocations have been more limited than they think necessary after two years of abundant rain boosted the state’s reservoirs. The state previously suffered a years-long drought that saw the driest January to March period in at least a century in 2022, with scientists saying weather whiplash is likely to become more common as the planet warms.

That’s a major concern of environmentalists and commercial fishermen, who want less water to go to agriculture and more to flow into the delta. Salmon fishing off the coast of California has been banned for the past two years due to dwindling fish stocks. Critics say Trump’s previous decisions to remove water from salmon spawning areas are to blame.

“They supplied all the cold water behind Shasta Dam. It literally cooked the baby salmon before they hatched,” said Barry Nelson, policy advisor for the Golden State Salmon Association, a nonprofit focused on California salmon recovery. “Math is a ruthless master, and we have reached physical limits on the amount of water we can extract from the Bay Delta, and the sign of that is the collapse of the ecosystem.”

California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, a longtime Trump critic, recently called on California lawmakers to prepare for a new Trump presidency to safeguard the state’s progressive policies.

However, environmentalists believe Newsom has not done enough to improve the delta’s situation for fish and wildlife. During the previous Trump administration, Newsom pushed back against his water flow rules and filed a legal challenge, but has since drafted his own rules, which Jon Rosenfield, San Francisco Baykeeper’s science director, said “have never been so different.”

Competing demands on California’s water have led to numerous fights over who gets how much. Advocates for fishermen, environmental interests and farmers all say more needs to be done to support future water supplies. But what that looks like depends on who’s asked, with proposed solutions ranging from increased conservation to expanding water storage to technology upgrades.

Aubrey Bettencourt, who oversaw the Interior Department’s water policy during the previous Trump administration, said she would like to see the system updated to respond to fluctuations in climate, rather than water releases based on to set the calendar. One of the problems, she said, is not how much water you get, but the question of how much water you get.

“It makes it very difficult to plan not only as a farmer, but also as a city manager,” she says. “I would expect an emphasis on restoring operational security.”

The new Trump administration has discussed a range of economic policies that could also impact agriculture, including tariffs that could impact some exports and drive up input costs for farmers, according to a recent Rabobank report.

But when it comes to water, many California farmers are hopeful.

Daniel Errotabere, a third-generation farmer and former president of the Westlands Water District whose family grows tomatoes, garlic and almonds, is one of them. As California tightens limits on groundwater pumping, it is even more important to ensure a steady flow of surface water to grow the food the country relies on, he said. Farmers have had to leave their fields fallow and often don’t plant as much as they could because of water uncertainty, he said.

“If electricity were supplied this way, an uprising would break out,” Errotabere said. “This is not a way to exploit resources.”