Ag Water Info

The continuing and devastating drought we are experiencing in California (as well as several other western U.S. states), has taken its toll on several farming operations here in The San Joaquin Valley (Pearson Ranch included). If you are farming in the state of California or are a landowner, you are certainly feeling the effects of the drought to some degree. Therefore, the state of California decided to enact what is known as the Sustainable Ground Water Management Act (SGMA). The act itself is a statewide framework intended to help protect groundwater resources over the long-term for California and its landowners. The SGMA act breaks up the state and its landholders into regions where local SGMA offices manage and control water allocations to landholders who own 2 acres of land or more. Although Pearson Ranch has its own well that was developed, drilled and paid for by Pearson Ranch several decades years ago, we are now forced to pay our local SGMA agency both administration fees as well as "extraction fees" in order to pump water from our well to irrigate our trees. Once we surpass our "allotment" of water that SGMA has determined we have the right to use from our own well every year, we must then either purchase "water credits" from the agency, or from other landowners who are selling their water credits, or end up in a "penalty tier" where the price of water from our own well gets too expensive to pump! This, along with the increasing power prices from our local utility, Southern California Edison, has left us with a dilemma. We could either choose to start removing acres of trees and take good farmland out of production, or we could add a modest increase to each order to help offset these costs. So, we decided our best way forward would be to add a small increase to each order to help us pay for the water we use to farm our trees. We sincerely hope you understand our situation and continue to help small family run farms like Pearson Ranch. It's certainly not something we ever wanted to do, but in order to continue farming, we felt we didn't have much choice. The U.S. agriculture industry really needs your support now more than ever! Thank you for your understanding.

-Pearson Ranch