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In California's Central Valley, the state's greatest farming region, some farmers are being ordered to pump less water from their wells. Those limits have been in the works for years, but they're still coming as a shock for many. Dan Charles has this report from Madera, California.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: When Loc Cabrar (ph) started farming near the town of Madera, north of Fresno, in the 1990s, it was the most natural thing in the world to drill a well deep into the underground aquifer and pump out water for his crops.
LOC CABRAR: And we never thought that somehow the government would have control of the water beneath our feet. That was not even a thought.
CHARLES: But farmers across the Central Valley pumped so much water, the aquifer has been shrinking. Wells have been going dry. In some places, the ground itself has been sinking. In 2014, California passed a law that said, the aquifer is like a bank account, and it has to stay balanced. You cannot overdraft that underground account. After years of laying the groundwork, the requirements of the law are now starting to bite, although local officials have been coming up with different limits and timelines in different places. Among those local officials, Stephanie Anagnoson in Madera County. Her job is telling farmers they can't pump so much water.
STEPHANIE ANAGNOSON: I have a master's degree in theological studies, specializing in environmental ethics.
CHARLES: Is this an environmental ethics question?
ANAGNOSON: I think this is more of a math problem.
CHARLES: It's basic accounting, she says. Farmers can't pump more out of the aquifer than naturally seeps back in from rainfall, rivers and streams, which makes things especially tough in her area because farmers here depend almost entirely on water from their wells. Their land isn't connected to the networks of canals that supply many other farms with water from California's rivers and reservoirs. It's places like this where the law is hitting hardest.
ANAGNOSON: Oh, gosh. It is going to be rough.
CHARLES: Madera County was one of the first places to set limits on groundwater pumping almost five years ago. Year by year, the limits get tighter. By 2040, farmers here will have to cut their groundwater use by anywhere from half to three-quarters, which means they'll probably have to stop growing crops on most of their land. Already, farmers say a lot of the land is only worth half what it once was. Some of them may no longer qualify for loans they need every growing season. Kevin Herman, one farmer here, saw this coming and decided not to run for reelection to the board of a farm lender.
KEVIN HERMAN: I didn't want to have friends or neighbors come to me and say, hey, you're on the board. Can you go talk to my loan officer and see if he can, you know, look the other way on a couple of things so I can get my loan approved for next year?
CHARLES: That's going to happen?
HERMAN: It's already happening.
CHARLES: Stephanie Anagnoson says some of her conversations with farmers take her back to a job she had many years ago as a chaplain in a rehab hospital, sitting with people who had suffered heart attacks and strokes.
ANAGNOSON: Where they wonder, why is this happening to me? Will I ever be back to normal again? And that is the same sort of thing we have to do with farmers.
CHARLES: Justin Wylie is one of those farmers. He took me on a walk through his rows of trees.
JUSTIN WYLIE: Pistachios - this is a pistachio orchard. This is one of the first orchards we started doing regenerative organic on.
CHARLES: Wylie's really proud of this orchard. He'll keep these trees, he says, but with the water restrictions, he'll have to tear out other orchards, lay off workers.
WYLIE: And it's going to hurt the local economy, local jobs. We have a lot of employees here. We're going to shrink.
CHARLES: He's frustrated with local officials who he says aren't helping him get his hands on water from nearby streams and rivers when it's been raining a lot. Wylie would like to be able to take that water and flood his orchards. It would soak into the Earth and find its way down to the aquifer.
WYLIE: There's free-flowing water right now. I could put that back in the ground. I have areas to put it that would make my soil healthier. It would do all sorts of things.
CHARLES: This idea - capturing water that no one's using to replenish aquifers - is catching on across the Central Valley. Some places are building new pipes and canals to capture floodwater the next time there are big winter rains. For farmers who depend on their wells, it's their biggest source of hope. For NPR News, I'm Dan Charles in Madera, California.
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