Fairmead Groundwater Resiliency Project

Sustainable Conservation advances the collaborative stewardship of California’s land, air, and water for the benefit of nature and people. The organization brings together business, landowners, communities, and government to drive solutions to meet the water needs of California’s environment, people, and economy for current and future generations. Working in some of the most productive yet economically disadvantaged parts of our state, Sustainable Conservation’s particular focus is advancing sustainable groundwater management and accelerating the stewardship of natural and working lands and waterways.

More than one million people in the San Joaquin Valley do not have access to reliable and affordable clean drinking water due to severe groundwater overdraft (taking more water out of underground aquifers than is put back in). Sustainable Conservation and partners Fairmead Community and Friends, Madera County, CivicWell, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, and Self-Help Enterprises seek to demonstrate how access to clean, safe, and affordable drinking water can be improved through two promising strategies: 1) implementing groundwater recharge projects to augment groundwater levels; and 2) repurposing agricultural land to reduce groundwater pumping demand. The demonstration is within the community of Fairmead: one of the many small, low-income, unincorporated communities in California that relies entirely on private domestic wells and small community water systems — and whose wells are going dry due to excessive agricultural groundwater pumping.

The Fairmead Groundwater Resiliency Project brings together private, public, community, environmental justice and environmental interests to co-develop projects for climate resilience, community health and wellbeing, drinking water protection, ecosystem benefits, and flood mitigation. Phase 1 of the project — its planning phase — is in the final stages of developing a plan, conceptual designs, and associated budgets for potential recharge and land repurposing projects. Phase 2 will keep the momentum going to move from project concept to on-the-ground implementation, while continuing to strengthen community engagement in the design, implementation and management of these projects.

Sustainable Conservation and its partners have a long-term goal of ensuring sustainable groundwater management in the San Joaquin Valley that prioritizes reliable access to clean and affordable drinking water for historically marginalized, low-income and under-resourced communities that face multiple environmental stressors. A main goal of Phase 2 is to demonstrate that recharge projects can be designed and implemented to achieve community drinking water benefits and also provide other ecosystem and community services. Groundwater recharge is gaining traction as a viable strategy to improve groundwater resilience, and the project partners want Fairmead to serve as a replicable case study of how recharge can be implemented with community voices and priorities driving decisions at the local level.

Since 1993, Sustainable Conservation has built an impressive track record of uniting people with diverse interests for conservation successes that endure. Most relevant to The Fairmead Groundwater Resiliency Project, Sustainable Conservation has been a leader in adapting California’s water management to prepare for climate change, and specifically in capturing floodwater to mitigate flood risk and replenish groundwater aquifers. In 2011, the organization partnered with Fresno area farmer Don Cameron to successfully demonstrate for the first time how active cropland could be used to spread out and slow down flood flows to mitigate flood risk and allow the water to percolate into the groundwater aquifers below. In the ensuing years, including with help from Battery Powered in 2016, Sustainable Conservation helped promote “on-farm recharge” to growers, water agencies and California state government. Those efforts resulted in over 300 farmers practicing on-farm recharge in 2019, and they anticipate that number went up substantially in 2023. In addition, Sustainable Conservation, in partnership with The Earth Genome, developed the Groundwater Recharge Assessment Tool (GRAT), a geospatial software tool to assist water agencies in optimizing groundwater recharge in their basins. Six different local water agencies now use GRAT, and the California Department of Water Resources has incorporated GRAT, along with Sustainable Conservation’s other efforts, into its Flood Managed Aquifer Recharge (FloodMAR) Program. FloodMAR is a state program to integrate flood and groundwater management throughout California. The California Director of Water Resources, Karla Nemeth, has stated that watershed scale planning and management — and FloodMAR and GRAT specifically — will play central roles in the State’s Water Plan Update and to California’s future water management.

Sustainable Conservation

Fairmead Groundwater Resiliency Project

Model and Strategy

Impact

Leadership

Ashley Boren

Barbara Nelson

Armando Ortiz

Grace Pearson

Andrea Uribe

Stephanie Anagnoson