The Water that Makes Local Food Possible is at Risk.
May 17, 2025
By Scott Steward
Add your voice. Contact your County Supervisor and our Water Board (YSGA). Best to make your request before Monday May 19th to place a moratorium on wells in the Yolo focus area that includes Hungry Hollow. But don't stop making this request on the 19th.
Everyone's hands are tied except the most important hands, yours. The public needs to insist on a well moratorium in the Yolo focus area in order to greatly speed the legal considerations that the county must make at the Department of Environmental Health and with County Council to develop the legal language (based on water table drop data from the YSGA) and other criteria to declare a moratorium. Here is the problem: this cannot take years as the water and the west Yolo farms are drying up.
The county, through our elected Trustee/Supervisors, has the ONLY authority (not the YSGA) to place a moratorium on the Hungry Hollow focus area. The county will not do this on its own - we need public pressure, or we will lose the ability to water our own food. The majority of Supervisors welcome the pressure to enact a sustainable water policy. We can win this. We need to speed it all up!
The Yolo County Supervisors are governed by the State Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), requiring local agencies to form groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs). SGMA makes it clear....
"extraction by the proposed well would "not be inconsistent with any sustainable groundwater management the program established in any applicable Groundwater Sustainability Plan adopted by the Groundwater Sustainability Agency and would not decrease the likelihood of achieving a sustainability goal for the basin covered by such a plan."
Years of effort from the Concerned Citizens group have not curtailed a consistent reluctance on the part of the County and our Department of Environmental Health to establish a sustainable water policy. This same question has been bouncing around for at least two years. Now we are facing irreparable loss. Are we at that place where the public finds it necessary to claim that the County has neglected its duty to take steps to sustain our groundwater? Is that what it will take?
The Concerned Citizens, made up of Hungry Hollow farmers and residents in Esparto, Winters, Davis and Woodland (where the threat to our Yolo groundwater subbasin has already been demonstrated), lost their appeal for the county to reconsider an obviously inappropriate well applicant (Cobram) on April 8th (described here)
On May 19th from 3:00 to 5:00 pm at a Woodland Police Department meeting room. In Annie Main's own words.
"It is very important that we make comments in person or via a letter to the YSGA Board meeting on or before their Monday May 19 3-5 at the Woodland Police Station.. This is an opportunity to voice our concerns to the permitting process that the YSGA plays, the hydrogeologic review process, and ask the YSGA Board to step up and set procedures in place so their staff can actually implement their authority with defending groundwater sustainability.
I would like to suggest that one of our goals that needs to happen NOW as part of moving forward is to ask the Yolo County Board of Supervisors to set a moratorium in the focus areas of Yolo County on historic non irrigated land. This would be in place until there is data, and clear knowledge of the water budget and determine the ‘sustainable yield in these parts of the sensitive subbasin."
The Concerned Citizens have a framework that works with the County and our Groundwater Sustainability Agency, the Yolo Subbasin Groundwater Agency. There are 10 requests in the framework that have been sent to the YSGA Board and our County Supervisors. These requests align with the YSGA goals and are likely refinements that the YSGA is considering and should be received favorably. Of those 10 requests, the request to place a well moratorium in the Yolo focus areas is, in my view, the most critical.
Please support the following request. You can attend the 3:00 YSGA Board Meeting at the Woodland Police Station (I assume the station has a meeting room). AND. - send in an email to your County Supervisor and to the YSGA Board
"REQUEST OF THE YSGA BOARD- The Hydrogeologic Reviews are using disparate information and using this lack of information to make their decisions. Current hydrogeologic data is inadequate specifically in the Focus Areas to the task of determining the effects of continuous additional extraction. Until adequate data is available new wells cannot be approved using hydrogeologic review –Ask for a Yolo County Moratorium in the focus areas." Concerned Citizens.
The position of the Board of Supervisors is not clear from this article. On the one hand, you state that, "The majority of Supervisors welcome the pressure to enact a sustainable water policy."
On the other hand, you note the "consistent reluctance" by the county (and the Department of Environmental Health).
Can you clarify the position of the supervisors (as a whole, and as individuals)? And if any of them oppose the effort, their stated reasons for doing so?
Posted by: Ron O | May 18, 2025 at 07:41 AM
The supervisors’ vote about Annie’s appeal close, 3 to 2. It could have easily gone the other way, which proves this is a difficult issue. As Supervisor Lucas Frerichs said, “This is clear as mud.”
Supervisor Angel Barajas (who’s district Good Humus Produce is in) tried to get staff to admit there were misunderstandings (from my point of view they were out and out mistakes) that led to their staunch support of Cobram’s arguments instead of the Good Humus position. They refused to budge— which is what most people do when caught in a mistake.
That’s why I think this push to get the supervisors and the county to change their verdict is unlikely to succeed.
Instead, we could boycott Cobram!
Maybe I’m full of feathers to suggest a boycott. The dozen people I wrote to have not replied. But hear me out!
There are 2 possible reasons for Cobram’s water bullying:
1. If Rob McGavin and Paul Riordan, Cobram Estate founders, know what their law firm, Kronick, is doing, that would be contrary to the Values tab on their website about “protecting precious resources,” and I would lose all respect for an otherwise impressive corporation.
2. However, maybe Cobram executives simply don’t realize how unethical their law firm is. We should tell them.
A boycott would be rather easy— with farmers markets in every town across the nation, a few fliers at some sympathetic farmers’ table would galvanize a lot of shoppers to tell their local grocery stores, “I’m not buying Cobram until they stop their water hogging in Hungry Hollow.”
The Power of the People can bring change, when the People respond to injustice loudly enough. Sure, early birds are starry eyed optimists who think the Truth will prevail, yet Truth loses so often that the rest of us might figure “Why bother?”
But if we got, say, 100 people contacting stores, that could snowball.
Or, we could write to Cobram directly:
[email protected]
Remember the grape boycott? Hundreds of thousands of consumers, including me, didn’t buy grapes for years, back when the United Farm Workers asked us to support their unionizing effort.
These stores carry Cobram (and probably others):
• Nugget
• Raley’s
• Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op
• Safeway
• Sprouts
• Walmart
Next time you’re shopping, leave a note like this for the manager:
I want you to know that I won’t buy any Cobram Estate olive oil because they are drilling 5 high-pull ag wells within a few miles of Good Humus Produce, which has farmed in Hungry Hollow for over 30 years.
Cobram, with stock worth nearly a third of a billion dollars, and with 250 acres of olives elsewhere in the county, finagled permission to drill these wells on formerly dry-farmed land, adjacent to a 20-acre family farm that can’t afford lawyers.
It takes Good Humus 80 gallons to grow a pound of chard, while Cobram needs at least 5 or 6 times that amount to grow a pound of olives. Annie Main, of Good Humus, told the supervisors, “Of the 19 landowners in our neighborhood, 13 have had to lower their pumps in the last 10 years, and 4 have had to replace their wells.”
It's not too late to remedy this situation. Cobram can find better water conditions elsewhere in the county or in the state. And then I will happily buy Cobram olive oil.
Posted by: Lauren Ayers | May 18, 2025 at 02:00 PM
The email I provided for Cobram founders Rob McGavin and Paul Riordan failed. A different one I found online also failed. They evidently don't want people to contact them.
Posted by: Lauren Ayers | May 18, 2025 at 05:15 PM
SS said in Vanguard comments about my inquiry about a mall mentioned in 4/8 article:
"“please explain to the readers as your time permits.”
I have no idea what that means.
I never got an answer about the mall in the 4/8 article. Why not answer that here?
Posted by: Alan C. Miller | May 19, 2025 at 09:18 AM