As the water crisis in California’s Central Valley intensifies, farmers are fallowing fields, slashing jobs and hemorrhaging money. But according to a study released this week, some rural towns might be better off abandoning agriculture entirely and repurposing farmland to create better-paying jobs, ease water usage, decrease pollution and preserve landowners’ revenue streams.
“This is an opportunity for a positive change to achieve climate resilience and environmental justice for communities that have traditionally been underrepresented and underserved,” said Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and one of the study’s authors, in a press release on Tuesday.
The Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation’s food supply, but for the region’s small rural communities, agriculture has often been a double-edged sword. The study focused on a constellation of 154 low-income communities that have been classified as “disadvantaged” by state agencies. Home to many Latinx farmworkers, the towns rely on agribusiness economically, but the industry has also polluted local water supplies and helped make the valley’s air quality among the worst in the nation.
Now, Central Valley agriculture is facing an increasingly bleak future. California state agencies are cracking down on farmers’ chronic overuse of groundwater, and a historic, climate change-fueled drought is drying up the surface water supply. In the San Joaquin Valley, water experts predict that farmers will need to fallow between 10 and 40 percent of their land by 2040 to achieve sustainable water usage. According to the new study, rural communities could lose $4.2 billion a year and nearly 26,000 jobs if nearby cropland is fallowed without being effectively repurposed.
To avert these economic losses, the study’s authors propose a “multi-benefit framework” that would convert some of the farmland into “buffer zones,” a quarter mile to a mile wide, around those 154 Central Valley communities. These buffer zones could accommodate solar farms, aquifer-recharge projects, public parks or wildlife corridors.
If properly implemented and managed, the study found, the buffers would reduce the region’s water usage, prevent nitrate pollution from contaminating local aquifers and shield communities from pesticide drift. And if the buffer zones are transitioned to solar energy generation, the study also found they could create 62,697 new jobs in the region, all of which would pay 67-percent more than the farmworker jobs many residents currently rely on.
Such an economic shift would require the state to invest $27 million per year over the course of 10 years in each of these communities. But the study’s authors also say investment would more than pay for itself, generating up to $15.6 billion a year for 30 years.
The study stressed that landowners would need to be incentivized to fallow their land and convert it into buffer zones, or to sell or lease their land to private companies and government agencies that could create the buffer zones. For farmers, leasing cropland to industries like solar could end up being more lucrative that farming ever was. The study suggests developing loans or grants that could “help motivate” more landowners to embrace these kinds of land repurposing proposals.