There’s something in Santa Maria Valley’s wastewater: It’s pesticides and fertilizer. A fight over what can be done with that wastewater, however, has some in the ag community on edge.
The subject of contention is a wastewater discharge waiver updated in 2012. It spells out what farmers can do with water once it’s been spiked with fertilizer or pesticides. A group of environmentalists took the waiver to court, claiming it didn’t do enough—that it did so little, in fact, that it violated state law.
Superior Court Judge Timothy A. Frawley agreed, directing the water board to come up with tougher rules. The window for an appeal hasn’t yet closed, so the fight’s not over, but the decision isn’t sitting well with Claire Wineman of the Grower-Shipper Association of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties.
“We respectfully disagree with the court’s findings,” Wineman said. She’s worried that more stringent rules will put the squeeze on those who don’t have the resources to fight back.
“There’s really concerns that these requirements will make it difficult for medium- and small-sized growers to operate. There’s a vested interest in the water quality of an area,” she pointed out. “We are interdependent on water.” The farming community, she said, is “absolutely committed to the responsible stewardship of water resources.”
Allison Jones, a staff environmental scientist with the water board, recognizes that specific rules and penalties imposed on farmers can hurt in the event of a subpar harvest.
“One of the biggest concerns that the environmental community didn’t understand was how little control ag has—what they get for their product,” she said. “Farmers talk about concern for cost. They don’t get to set the price for the product.”
But, at the end of the day, farmers big and small need to figure out where and how to pump their wastewater. And, in the Santa Maria Valley—the heartland of Santa Barbara County’s $1.5 billion agricultural industry—there are enough farmers, and enough wastewater, that some see a problem.
That includes the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Findings published when the board rolled out the 2012 waiver are quoted at length in Judge Frawley’s ruling.
“Water quality conditions in agricultural areas of the region continue to be severely impaired or polluted by waste discharges,” the board found. “Nitrate pollution in drinking water supplies is a critical problem throughout the Central Coast region.”
There’s a distinction between concentration and total load in terms of nitrate pollution. Concentration is the amount of nitrates in one place; load is “the total amount of pollutants entering a water body from one or multiple sources,” according to the EPA’s website.
A 2011 report by the water board came down hard on the Santa Maria Valley, concentration-wise. “We are not seeing widespread improvements in nitrate concentrations in areas that are heavily impacted, and in fact, a number of sites in the lower Salinas and Santa Maria areas appear to be getting worse.” Twelve bodies of water in the Santa Maria Valley are listed as having beneficial drinking water uses impaired by nitrate pollution.
Wineman with the Grower-Shipper Association counters that total load in the Santa Maria Valley has decreased dramatically. To support this point, she points to a graph of nitrate trends from a water board meeting in July of this year. Eleven sites had a statistically significant decline in nitrate loading, including four in Santa Maria.
Even with the reduction that Wineman describes, environmental groups are concerned. “Fertilizer from irrigated agriculture is the largest source of nitrate pollution,” said Ben Pitterle with Santa Barbara Channelkeeper. “This is about protecting public health. There are communities in the Central Coast that have had their health impacted by water supplies.”
Irrigated agriculture contributes about 80 percent of nitrate loading into groundwater, according to Frawley’s ruling, and “hundreds of drinking water wells serving thousands of people through the region have nitrate levels exceeding the drinking water standard.”
Also of concern are pesticides. Enough pyrethroids were found in the sediment at a test site on the Bradley Channel that the water could be diluted 42 times and still kill off test organisms. That dirt was more toxic than any measured in the study. Chlorpyrifos, another pesticide class, were also found in toxic levels higher than anywhere else at that site on the Bradley Channel.
Wineman remains optimistic that the ag community in Santa Maria can work with the water board to find a happy medium.
“Our local farmers are continuing to improve their nutrient and irrigation management practices based on the best available tech,” she said. “It’s important that we have workable regulations that allow our farmers to stay in business with a focus on implementing practices to improve water quality while growing produce in California.”
Staff Writer Sean McNulty can be reached at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 17-24, 2015.