From above, California’s San Joaquin Valley spills out of the Sierra Nevada in a checkerboard of earth-toned farmland. It’s some of the most valuable land in the world; every year, the agribusiness industry here produces billions of dollars’ worth of milk, vegetables and nuts. But the scale, and the industrial intensity, of agriculture require an enormous amount of groundwater to be pulled out of aquifers deep belowground — more than the industry can afford to pump, according to hydrologic modeling.

According to projections from the Public Policy Institute of California, between 535,000 and 750,000 acres — around 15% of the valley’s irrigated farmland — will need to be taken out of irrigated production in order to meet the requirements of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.

Removing irrigated land from production — fallowing the land — could have disastrous and unequal effects on the area’s inhabitants: Small farmers are less equipped to weather the impacts, and thousands of low-wage farmworkers will be put out of work. Dusty, idle land is also dangerous: It hosts pests and weeds and spreads valley fever, a fungal disease that can seriously impact high-risk individuals.

But taking that much farmland out of production and considering alternative uses for it means completely transforming the landscape — something California is starting to incentivize with a new program headed by the California Department of Conservation.

Ideas for what to do with fallowed land remain largely conceptual, but advocates are busy putting together a vision of what is possible. Some of these uses give local government agencies across the West a prototype for a different kind of future for the region’s farmland — treating the transition as an opportunity to address public health, equity and access.

Read the full article about sustainable farmlands by Theo Whitcomb at The Counter.