Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil…
Psalm 23
The flames are moving northward now (or they were on Sunday as I wrote this,) but all last week I was glued to news about Cuyama Valley. They call it the Gifford Fire and rarely mention Cuyama; it’s huge, entraining fire fighters and equipment from all over the state. As fires flare up elsewhere, closer to plumes of population, some of these resources may be called away. But that valley and its people seem safe for the moment, which is good because they have my heart.
It’s only been a month since the last one. They called it the Madre Fire—why, I don’t know, but it was a mother. Luckily, where the Gifford has run up against the charred ground of the Madre, the newer fire has slowed for lack of fuel. God works in mysterious ways.
Out of concern, I called Jake Furstenfeld, one of the organizers of the Cuyama carrot boycott. A month before the Madre fire, Jake and his young family had lost everything when their house burned to the ground. He said the Madre Fire’s smoke had triggered plenty of terror, but they were OK. Friends and neighbors had helped them relocate and get settled, so they were still feeling the grace of that amidst the fear.
I was afraid this second event would set them back, but no. Jake was busy helping a neighbor, a rancher who had lost some cattle and all of his grass (meaning his cows’ entire food supply) in the Gifford’s first days. I haven’t heard back from other community members I called, but haven’t persisted because cell service is spotty and they’ve had power outages. They need their communication resources for each other, I think.
And each other is what they have. There are some really fine community leaders there who can call on their neighbors to speak up and be heard when needed. One of those leaders, Robbie Jaffe (with her partner Steve Gliessman), dry farms wine grapes and olives at Condor’s Hope Ranch in the valley’s southwest corner, where they sell their wine and olive oil and host events (www.condorshope.com). They also have several journalists sympathetic to their cause, which I think can be characterized as simply wanting to preserve their place and their lives within it.
The greater threat to these lives-in-place comes not from fire so much as from the evils of absentee corporate agribusiness, particularly Grimmway and Bolthouse. These two giants filed a lawsuit against every landowner in the valley, including the small community services district that provides drinking water to the residents in New Cuyama. The lawsuit is to determine the rights to groundwater in that overpumped basin, pumped heavily by these carrot kings. Carrots take a lot of water, delivered by overhead jet sprinklers that run even during mid-day heat. Organic carrots, which are grown there because they’re distant from conventional, pesticide-using fields, take more water than non-organic carrots. Weed control involves irrigating two crops of weeds which are plowed under prior to planting to make the carrot beds relatively weed-free.
If we were allowed to choose which form of agriculture to have in this small, dry valley with no surface water supply except the Cuyama River when it rises from heavy winter rains, which form would it be? The dry-farming example of Condor’s Hope, or the heavy extraction of Bolthouse and Grimmway? Condor’s Hope is not alone: there are other resident farmers and ranchers experimenting and demonstrating how to live sustainably in near-desert conditions. Quail Springs is a non-profit research-education residential farming organization dedicated to this very need (www.quailsprings.org).
This choice, this real opportunity to decide in favor of a more sustainable, more productive form of farming—productive in terms of people, homesteads and community as well as food—is not part of the adjudication process. Judges will look only at records of groundwater use, most likely rewarding the heavy pumpers and penalizing those more conserving users of limited groundwater.
This choice is also not part of the GSA’s work in allocating groundwater. The need for some way to evaluate and choose good uses over bad based on criteria supporting the maintenance of the local community—this need was identified at the January meeting of the Cuyama Basin GSA (see “Help Arrived,” Jan. 22, 2025.) But how to get that criteria established when the GSA’s board is dominated by people sympathetic to (read: “hand-picked by”) the carrot producers—that is the question.
This may be one reason why Cuyama has my heart. There is no veil there shrouding the process by which large, absentee landowners exert their power through their water districts and GSAs in ways that dispossess the smaller farmers. It’s completely visible. First they take their vote and voice, then their livelihoods and land.
To burn alive, or be sucked dry? Those are not the only options in Cuyama, but unless we work to preserve the local land-loving residents, that valley will look like the shadow of death after the carrot kings get through with it. May we find a way toward a new option for all of us.
Trudy Wischemann is a former carrot gardener who writes. You can send her your much-needed ideas about water law reform c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
