Flood Control and Water Conservation District - Regular Meeting

Okay, one thing. Go. Welcome There everyone to the 03/12/2026 meeting of the Technical Advisory Group, better known as the TAG. And if we could do the roll call, please.

Member Phillippelli?

Here.

Member Chambaugh?

Here.

Member Garcia?

Here.

Chair Condorf?

Here. Okay. We'll move on to public comments. The committee invites comments and recommendations from the public concerning issues relevant to the charge of the technical advisory group. Anyone who wishes to speak to the group in such a manner, if it is not on the agenda, may do so at this time.

At the discretion of the chair, individuals will be limited to a three minute presentation. No action will be taken by the technical advisory group as a result of any item presented at this time. Members of the public who wish to make public comment on a matter not on the agenda but are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the commission will have three minutes per speaker and may do so now. Please proceed to the podium.

Hello. My name is Chris CHRIS Malin, and I'm before you today as Resources newsletter says that the snowpack is 45% of normal. And with the heat wave coming up, they're worried about the snowpack melting quickly, which they say can then set up set us up for, wildfires. I know we always prepare for wildfires, but if we don't get any more rain and this scenario plays out, which, you know, we have plenty of time for more rain. Was it 2002 that we had rain in June?

Through June? So that certainly could change. The reason that I am before you today is because I would like to see the groundwater sustainability planning include nature based solutions to groundwater recharge. Prop four has a lot of money that they're making available right now, and they're holding webinars. So you can go up through the secretary of state's, the natural resource department, and they're holding webinars instructing and advising people on how to apply for prop for money.

Wade Crowfoot, who's

the

in charge of the secretary natural of natural resource resources is, did a nature based solution, summit a few weeks ago, and there's money there too for nature based solutions. The groundwater sustainability plan could really start talking about this more. We do have opportunistic situations going on in Napa County with vineyards being pulled out. And that, you know, some of these property owners could be, you know, asking for incentives or joining into incentives and joining into an effort to restore the riparian area of the Napa River, which as we know, the vineyards go right up to the banks. And if that isn't happening, they have their, their access to the vineyards, where they should be sitting back.

They're driving on it. So there's an opportunity here to restore the Napa River riparian area. And, I think it's opportunistic because of what's going on. So thank you.

Thank you.

Comments?

We have no callers.

Okay.

Moving along, the clerk of

the committee requests approval of minutes from the regular meeting held on 12/11/2025. Do I have a motion to approve those minutes?

Motion to approve.

A second. All

in favor? Aye. Any opposed? So the minutes are approved for the December meeting. I ask any members of the TAG or county staff if anyone has anything to announce or report.

Yeah, maybe I'll take over for the first part and I can turn it over to any TAG members that wish to share anything. A few things. This week is National Groundwater Awareness Week. It is recognized by the National Groundwater Resource Association. And just wanted to highlight that through March 8 through '14, all this week, there were a number of webinars put on by GWR and other organizations celebrating Groundwater Awareness Week.

The county did put out a press release highlighting the importance responsibility of managing and protecting groundwater resources here in the Napa Valley Sub basin. And our chair, Manfrey, of the Board of Supervisors highlighted the importance of the work that we're doing here to ensure the health and sustainability of the ag economy, rural communities, and waterways throughout Napa. So that is really good. County staff, I participated in several webinars. And I think I saw a few of your faces on some of the Groundwater Awareness Week webinars as well.

So that's really great. And I think that's all I wanna say about National Groundwater Awareness Week. Quick update on the water year 2025 annual report. County is currently in the process of reviewing a draft of that. And we have to have it submitted by DWR by April 1.

So we're trying to incorporate feedback, get it back out to the technical team to wrap it up and get it submitted. And you guys will receive a presentation on that at that April 9 meeting. A few other things for the I'll do an update on that CalSIP, on the California Stream Gauge Improvement Program. So planning is still in progress. And just as a reminder, that was funding that we got from DWR to reactivate five historical stream gauges in Napa in the Napa River watershed.

So we're in the process of securing final approvals and permits on reactivating these five gauges. The equipment was ordered, so there's gonna be some bench testing and calibration. And eventually, will be installed and we're hoping that it will be installed by early summer. We have a a deadline to have it done by have have the installation and have the gauges up and running by October. Try to move quickly on that.

Want to give an update on the CERT program partnership pilot that GSA is running. So as a reminder, coming out of the GPR and water conservation work plan, or the groundwater pumping reduction work plan and the water conservation work plan, there was this idea to have a partnership with certification programs or some entity in the county or outside the county to help incorporate some of the water conservation measures that the GSA was interested in pursuing. And we got a lot of feedback from you guys. That RFQ went out in October 2020. It closed on December 16.

We received two applications from entities that were interested in pursuing the pilot partnership. We reviewed and internally scored those applications and decided to move forward with both of those entities. And so we're in the process of working with Napa Green and Fish Friendly Farming on trying to iron out what sort of metrics both the certification programs and the GSA are comfortable with, trying to figure out what a memorandum of understanding might look like to sort of formalize that relationship and sort of the time frame of what we'll do and when we'll do it. And meanwhile, they're looking for any entities, any vineyards or wineries in their programs that might be interested in serving as pilot to work with us and work with these certification programs. So that's really good news.

And we're hoping to formalize that MOU with both of those entities by the end of this month, hopefully. Mid March, we are off to the races next week to collect our static well levels across the entire Navajo County Groundwater Monitoring Program. So that'll give us hopefully a snapshot of the spring highs throughout the Napa Valley sub basin, but also throughout the county. And I think that's it. Drone down a lot. I'll turn it over to see if any of the TAG members have anything that they want to share with this group. And otherwise, we can move on to the first item.

Anything? Okay.

Alright. I don't think, TAG members have anything to add on. We can, now take up any administrative items that, are needed.

All right.

Well, I think we can looking ahead, any suggestions for future agenda items. We can do that later. We'll move on to our first presentation today. And this is a bit of musical chairs. Miguel takes off the tag hat and puts on the expert presenter hat. So Miguel will talk about soil health and water storage assessment in dry farm vineyards, a topic close to our hearts. Take it away, Miguel.

Thank you. We have been working with the California Sustainable One Growing Alliance on a dry farming project. Last year, we enlisted a few vineyards, and we've been collecting data. So today, I I wanted to talk to you about our assessment on soil health and water storage in dry farm vineyards. Given everything that farmers are facing in California, you know, droughts, water allocation issues, extreme heat and everything in between, dry farming presents a very interesting strategy to strengthen agricultural resilience and to position these farmers in a place where they can continue farming.

So the purpose of this study was to understand better how is it that dry farms can function so that we can learn from them, hopefully incentivize others to try dry farming or at least to see if there's anything that they are doing that we could potentially use in irrigated farms. Dry farming is a little bit of a misconception because there's no such thing as dry farming. Living organisms need water. What dry farming is is a strategy to leverage the natural ability of the soil to retain water, enhance root systems in a way that can access that water in a more efficient way so that you don't have to use substantial irrigation throughout the season. But even to establish a dry farm vineyard, they they need some water, and then later on, we rely on what the soil can provide.

This map right here was developed by CSWA, and it's live now so you guys can use this link if you want to check it out. Every dot in this map is a vineyard in California and this is table grapes and wine grapes. And the grape icons in green, the green circles, those are actual dry farms that are dry vineyards that are being farmed in California. And if you click on each of those, it'll take you to each of those sites and it has descriptive information on everything that these farmers are doing on those sites from rootstocks to how they manage their soil to weather to everything in between that can help you understand how is it that they make it work. And the objective here is to give as much information to farmers interested in trying dry farming.

And if they can see that their neighbors are doing it, how they're doing it, they can potentially understand better how they could potentially try it. It also has a lot of information on the potential feasibility for trying dry farming. So not every side around California has the same potential but it could potentially be done everywhere. They worked really hard on this map. I definitely encourage you to go and check it out and play around with it.

So right now we don't have a lot of information about soil health in dry farms and the soil characteristics that will allow dry farming to take place. So for this project we wanted to develop a better understanding on soil health and how the different management strategies in dry farming can influence that soil health and then to try to characterize how these soils are storing and mobilizing water. This is a map of all the participating vineyards for this project. We have 15 vineyards total. Nine of those are in Napa and then we have a few in Sonoma and a few in Mendocino.

And for each of the selected vineyards, we have two separate fields, so we have a total of 30 different sites. We did soil pits as a way to collect soil samples. These soil pits were dug down to five feet and we were collecting samples at one foot increment And we did a collection three times during 2025. The first one was around bud break, so beginning of the season, then during duration or around middle of the season, and after harvest or towards the end of the season. And we also took lots of pictures.

And here you can see how deep these roots really go. The company that helped us with the soil sampling, it's, they they do a lot of work here in Nampa and in in around in in the areas around, and they told us that they have not seen these kind of root systems. They also don't work in dry farm vineyards. So we noticed that pretty much all the dry farm vineyards look similarly in one way or another. And this shows how robust the root systems really are.

So these vines are accessing water from a much larger volume than irrigated vineyards. And in some cases, we saw root systems going across the rows. So they are potentially even interconnected. So they're definitely accessing much deeper, much wider volumes than irrigated vineyards. So we wanted to understand how the way that they approach soil management is potentially influencing how the water is being stored in the soil.

Between all the vineyards that we assess, they have a very wide range of management strategies. We have some that are completely no till, other ones that till quite a lot, Some that have, you know, different kinds of cover crops. All of them use cover crops to some extent and compost also is being used across at different amounts. And given that reduction or minimizing disturbance is one of the pillars of soil health, we were quite interested to understand how tilling could potentially impact dry farm soils given that quite a few of them rely heavily and some of them may even say that without the tilling they just wouldn't be able to dry farm. But given that there were others that are farming just fine without it, that was one of the things that we wanted to look at.

So this wide range of practices gives us a chance to compare between sites and see if we can pinpoint the impact of tillage. We measure soil texture on all these sites down to the five feet and this will help us understand sort of the expectations for these sites. Given the soil texture we can predict to some extent the amount of water that the soil should be able to be retaining at different depths and that can help us understand whether those soils are performing up to their full potential or if there is any room for improvements. As far as soil health, we're looking at chemical, physical and biological parameters. There is a menu of different analysis that we typically do when we are assessing soil health.

We look at organic matter and total carbon as a way to just assess the amount of organic material in the soil and this influences the water holding capacity but also will have impacts on the biology and the soil aggregation. We looked at active carbon or epoxy soil respiration and potentially also nitrogen as ways to assess if there's enough fuel for the microbes, enough food available for the microbes. We're looking at the physical stability of the soil. The aggregate stability test will let us know erosion susceptibility and how well structured the soil is. And then cut and change capacity is letting us know the ability of the soil to retain nutrients.

Altogether, these indicators give us a holistic view of how the soil is functioning and potentially letting us know also how resilient the soil will be towards erosion and also how well it will be able to retain water. So the way that we are approaching this is by comparing the data for these dry farm soils with a soil health database that the NAPA RCD along with the RCDs in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake collectively known as the Soil Health Hub, the North Coast Soil Health Hub, We've been developing a soil health database over the last few years. We have over 600, potentially even more at this point, soil samples that have been collected where we've done this exact same analysis. So we have a point of reference to compare back. So what I did is I separated that data by soil texture so that we can have a fair comparison.

And then I just listed here which of the dry farm samples that we analyzed fall below, within average, or above average comparing these soil databases. And you can see that the majority of the dry farm soils actually fall within or above as far as the scores for soil health with a little bit of variability depending on the test. And there's only a small number of dry farm soils that are performing below the average that we're seeing for the region. So these prompted two questions. One, if the management in these dry farm vineyards is what is impacting soil health and we had that lingering question whether tillage is the reason for that.

And then the other question is, okay, well, with these lower scores, are these soils able to retain and mobilize water efficiently? And we were kind of focusing on tillage because in theory excessive tillage will break down the soil aggregates, will accelerate the loss of carbon, and in general we know that intensive aggressive tilling can just prevent the soil from storing water to its full potential. So we wanted to explore those two questions and see if there's anything that, you know, could tell us that tillage is is creating a negative impact. And one of the surprising things was that, statistically speaking for these dataset, tillage did not have a at least was not the main factor here because we had not all of the soils that scored low are tilling and we have some soils that are scoring higher than average that are still tilling. And I think that the reason for this is mainly because we're not looking at tillage isolated as a practice.

All of these vineyards are also applying compost. They have very healthy cover crops. And this is something that we've known for a while that is not just the action of tillage, but if it's done exclusively without any ways to replenish an organic matter, then you will end up with depleted soils. But in this case, we can say with a good level of confidence that the fact that there's compost and cover cropping happening at the same time as tillage, that is in one way counteracting whatever negative impacts that tillage may have. What this data does not answer necessarily is what would happen if these soil if you were to reduce tillage, would these soils improve even better?

They are already functioning quite well as far as soil health goes, but would they be able to improve even farther? And for those sites that are scoring lower, maybe for those will be a higher priority to reduce tillage. But for me as an advisor, if I look at this data, there's nothing here so far that would prompt me to go and tell any of these farmers that there's an urgency to change their management. Quite the opposite. With this information, I would say, let's keep making observations, keep doing what you're doing.

So this is quite promising, but it raises some questions that we won't be able to answer on this study. Perhaps on a different study, we could look at these same sites, isolate some spots, reduce the tillage, and then assess again and see what would happen. But the most important question here is how well are these soils stored in water? Because that's what the main thing that we want to know. So way that we're looking at this is we're making different measurements.

So first of all, we are measuring the available water. So this is the amount of water that is in the soil that the plant could access assuming that the roots can tap into it. So, again, in this case, we're not comparing it to our database. What we're comparing to is based on the soil texture. So based solely on the soil texture, we know what these soils the amount of water that these soils should be retaining and based on that every single one of the soils that we assess are storing more water or at least within the average for that particular soil texture.

Even the soils that had a relatively slower soil health score are storing more water within the average or above what we would expect based on soil texture. So with that, we can see that these dry farm soils are more than capable of storing water efficiently, even more than what we would normally expect. So that was very reassuring. The next thing we wanted to do is we wanted to assess how much water we had at the beginning of the season. So for that, we're looking at the field capacity, which tells us the maximum amount of water that the soil could potentially store after excess water has drained.

We're comparing that to the moisture that blooms. So moisture at the beginning of the season compared to the maximum amount of moisture that that soil can retain. And what we saw for the most part around the samples that we looked at is that there was not enough rain potentially because there was still room for more water to be stored. So we don't know because obviously we couldn't make it rain more, but there's definitely a potential. So these soils did not begin the season completely saturated.

There was definitely some room. And I'm giving you just one example here. I just picked one of the vineyards. But we're seeing the same pattern pretty much across where, except for a few outliers, most of these fields could have had taken up more water if it would have rained more. And then we want to see how the soils ended up at the end of the season.

So for that, we're looking at the permanent wilting point, which is the this is a measurement that we do in the lab to look at what is the maximum amount of dryness or how how dry the soil can get before the vines die, so permanent wilting point. And we compare that to the moisture after harvest. And here's where something interesting happened. So we saw that in some cases, there was moisture remaining at the end of the season. And then in other cases, we got pretty close or even beyond the permanent wilting point showing that towards the end of the season, we we had some vineyards where the vines could have experienced some kind of stress.

And this is just a snapshot at the end, but if we look at it throughout the season so this graph right here shows the the moisture going from zero left to right. Zero would be completely dry, and then as you move to the right, it's wet. And this is going down to the five feet depth. In this case, the root systems go all the way down to six feet. We only measure up to five feet.

Green is at the beginning of the season. Purple is the middle of the season, and then orange is at the end of the season. And something interesting shows here where, as you go from bud break to ration, obviously, the moisture starts declining. But then as you go closer to after harvest for some depths, we actually ended up with higher levels of moisture at the end of the season than in the middle of the season. And in some respects, this is showing just the the physics of the soil as, you know, water moves from wet to dry.

So as the upper layers are getting drier, moisture is moving upwards. And and we kind of expected that, but, honestly, I was not expecting it to be to this to this degree. And this shows that potentially it's not just the soil physics, the moisture moving through capillary force, but it's also potentially the vines influencing how this water is moving. So what this is telling us is that these vines that already are accessing water from a larger volume than irrigated vineyards not only have access to that excess additional volume of water, but they're actually accessing water from deeper layers to a point that at the end of the season they can end up with more moisture than they had consumed throughout the year. So they might have experienced some stress during, like, closer to duration, but towards the end of the season, we can see that the water was starting to redistribute upwards.

And we don't know if this is also happening in irrigated vineyards or to what extent so this could be a potential follow-up to this study. This is just two examples. This is one more example where we saw a similar pattern. When we finished doing the sampling, there was a little bit of rain on some of the sides but not all of them and we saw this pattern even when there was no rain. And even when where there was rain, was just, you know, less than an inch of rain.

But in this case here, it was, you know, to the point that the upper layers are have a significant larger amount of moisture than at the end of the season than in the middle of the season. So this is very reassuring as far as given that these vines rely on the moisture that it will be within the soil throughout the season. This is quite reassuring for the farmers to know that there is more moisture coming from deeper layers, not only from where the roots are. Obviously, this is happening to different degrees depending on on the farm, but we saw these across every single one of them. So we would like to see if we can replicate this in irrigated vineyards.

With all of these, we saw that the majority of dry farm vineyards have very healthy soils with just some minor exceptions where potentially there's room for improvement. But for the most part, these are very healthy soils that are functioning really well. We saw that the tillage is not necessarily creating any impacts, and we think this is because there's also compost in cover crops. So the comment to the farmer was the tillage might not be impacting your your soil negatively, but don't stop till don't don't stop using your cover crops. Don't stop using compost.

And then for those areas where the scores were much lower, potentially consider reducing tillage. But these are very healthy soils. They're storing water very efficiently. And in general, this gives us an indication of why these dry farm soils are have been, you know, successful throughout, California for many, many years. And I think that this gives us an opportunity to potentially learn how we can translate these into other sites that could potentially transition into dry farming or establish as a dry farming operation or just to realize that, you know, simple simple practices like compost application in core crops can have a potential benefit for water storage and these can be utilized in any farming system, not just in dry farming.

So I think with all of these, we are reassured that dry farm systems are a great alternative strategy for adaptation in the face of water scarcity. And with that, I thank you and welcome any questions you may have.

Thank you, Miguel. Fascinating presentation. Questions, comments?

Sorry, I'm late. I didn't see in the presentation where you reported which rootstocks were at each site and then how that might have varied based on a rootstock response, because hydraulic redistribution is something that's well reported in the literature based on, like, biogenetics, right?

Yeah, excellent question. So for this portion of the study, we did not look into that. There is another portion of this study that is being led by a couple people over at UC Berkeley and they're looking more into that. For me, I was mostly interested on the soil health aspect and understanding the the physical presence, just where the roots were, but definitely, I understand that the actual rootstock would also have a significant impact on how this is being done. I was mostly interested in how the management is impacting the the water dynamics.

So you don't have data on which site and which rootstock?

We have the information. Yeah.

It might be just interesting to see it. Yeah.

It's fascinating to see these deeper roots that have developed. Not a surprise, but to actually see it. But do you have a controlled data set against which to compare these deep rooted vines in the tri farmed areas?

As far as how the roots develop, you mean? Like how deep they are?

Well, In your pits, could see how deep the roots were. And we know that these are deeper than irrigated. But what numbers do you have from the irrigated? Or can you create a data set from the irrigated that you could compare this with?

For this study, the funding we can only stretch that to include the dry farm vineyards. Either we had a smaller subset of vineyards, dry farm vineyards and include irrigated, we opted for a greater dataset with the objective of using these as a proof of concept so that we can hunt more funding Okay. So that we can then include and do replicate everything in irrigated vineyards. Anybody that farms when they remove, you know, vineyards, it's this is an just an egg the tool where you can see where the the roots are. Right.

And then the company, as I mentioned, the company that dug the pits who has extensive experience, again, just an egg the tool. They told us that they had just not seen that. We wanna be able to have numbers and be able to see it. So we are brainstorming on how we can secure more funding to expand these.

Okay.

How about for the growers, were there concerns with they were Okay with digging the pits because there was obviously some impact on the vines when you did that.

Actually, nobody was really worried about it. We dug three pits. So we went three times during a year and every time we dug three pits, we pick one row and then we go three times and then we are collecting those samples and compiling them. That's why it goes to the lab. But it's it's a very small excavator. If you were to go the next day, very likely you might not even know, like, would not even notice. So none of the farmers were worried about. Quite actually, opposite. They were excited and a lot of them show up when we were doing the digging, what they were doing, I wasn't. And they were taking pictures and they were just excited to see all that. No concerns related to the digging at all.

No. That's great.

Yeah. It's uncommon to do that. It's not it's not invasive. Yeah.

Was the age of the vines a piece of data that was collected?

Yes. Definitely. And each of the farmers is gonna receive a report with all of this, and then we're creating a report for the entire project, and that will become publicly available, and we'll share all of that. Part of that age, we're also, indicating where the main roots are. So, obviously, for the younger vines, we have root systems a little bit higher, but we're we have that data as well.

Yeah. That along with the rootstock info would be very interesting too.

Mhmm.

And a bit similar to Matt's question on the different criteria for the soil health, like how does it compare to irrigated field? Because you said the RCD has database of that. And so here we were seeing that most soil were within or above the healthy ranges and how does it compare to if you look at irrigated fields, would we see there in terms of distribution?

The soil health data that I mentioned, over 600 plus samples, all of those are irrigated. So that's what we're using as a point of reference with now the 30 dry farm soils. And from the table that I showed you, it's telling us that they they are doing the dry farm soils are healthier than the average irrigated vineyard.

Sorry, I thought you were comparing to some specific criteria for what is a healthy soil, but no, when you call it the average, it's the average of the irrigated.

So for each of the tests, we have data of what the average is and we can separate by soil texture. I'm doing a fair comparison. I'm taking the average of the clay soils that match, let's say, a clay dry farm soil. And for each of the tests, I'm referencing back to what the average is. So if you look at each of those tests, dry farm soils for the most part score higher.

So not a compile soil health score but for each individual soil test. So overall, for some it was better than others. So for some they did much, much better and for other ones just slightly better. But in general, these are soils that if I would be using these just to advise the farmer, I would say your soils are doing really well just based on those tests that we're doing.

Can you remind me again of the length of the study? Are you guys gonna sample another season?

No. We're wrapping up the project now, so we had enough funding to do this one year of sampling. So we sample 2025 season. And I feel that this gives us enough to present this idea to get more funding so that we can expand, replicate. There's also other aspects of this project.

So this is just the portion that I was in charge of, but there there's a couple other, like, UC Berkeley's involved. And they're doing they have moisture probes, they have weather stations. They actually install Thule sensors in some of these dry farm vineyards, which had never been done before because dry farm vineyards do not need to know how much they are getting, but to understand the evap transpiration. So that data will be coming as well. The the project needs to be wrapped up by the May. So by then, my final report and then everybody else's will be out, I'll make sure to share with everybody.

I I get that the water content in the soil changed at the three different times. Did any other of the chemical properties of the soil change throughout the course of the season?

Don't know because we only measure at the beginning of the season. So I forgot to mention that detail. For the moisture, we looked at it throughout the season. For the soil health, we only went at the beginning of the season. The soil health database that we have, all of those samples were collected in the spring, so for a fair comparison. But, yes, it's expected that throughout the season, you know, things are gonna be fluctuating, but we did not look into that.

Sorry. One additional follow-up question on that database of that you're comparing to. So you're then you said you were matching clay to clay, you know, texture. Right? You're also matching then tillage practices because No. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No. For that one, it would be a little more difficult.

Seems like a big Yeah. Parameter.

It is. Yeah. So we were only comparing breaking them apart by by soil texture. And the reason I did not look into the management is because, in order to have enough numbers to actually get meaningful averages, that's one reason. The other reason is a lot of these samples were collected a long time ago and we did not I wouldn't have management data for all of them because at the time, that was not in our minds necessarily. So there is definitely some room for error just because we are not including that parameter.

Yeah. I think you need to be careful like, how you talk about how does a comparison dataset if it's not fully representative of the dataset that they're that you're using to compare it to. Right?

Yep. Absolutely. And honestly, that's an excellent point. If we utilize this as a research project, we definitely need to be more scrutinized a little bit more. The reason the database was developed was because we never had a point of reference to advise farmers. You know, we wanted farmers to send samples to a lab, but we didn't know how to tell the farmer what the scores meant. So this kind of, like, gave us an opportunity to at least have an initial point. I think the greatest value is as a benchmark. So now if we go back to these dry farm soils or if we establish trials where the management changes, then we can pinpoint more a little bit on how the management is more specifically impacting these parameters.

Right. Because at this point, there's too many variables to say that it's the fact that they're dry farm versus it's the fact that what the vineyard floor management is, what the rootstock planted on them is.

Agree.

With the soil textures, do you think there's any conclusions or recommendations that could be drawn on, like, extremes? Like, for a site evaluation, there's more than this percentage of sand. It wouldn't be suitable for dry farming. Or if there was this much clay, it wouldn't be suitable just as, like, a resource. Is that something that could be future result of additional studies?

The map that I showed you looks into that. They broke down how all of these dry farms are being farmed and where they're being successful. And in that map, it shows that suitability factor. I did not look into it as part of the study, but others included that in those maps. So there is information on you click on it, and it'll tell you people here are being successful, people here are not being successful. So it's like color coded like red, you should not try it here versus green, you should you would be most likely successful here. And it's not only the soil texture, but it's also the climate. Yeah. You know, and it also tells you which rootstocks are being utilized in that specific area so that you can see much better the climate of soil with the rootstocks. Cool.

Great. Really interesting study.

Thank you.

I'm excited that you're doing that. Thank you.

Are we having public

comments? Yes. Thanks for reminding me. Yes, we're open to comments from the public.

That was very interesting. I really enjoyed that. So, question. Heard when I talk to farmers that you cannot dry farm in the hills. So I don't know if some of your pits were in the hills or not, but if you have any, could I request a comment on that?

And then also, there are 32 vineyard projects on the county website right now, and they're all in the hills. So we know that clear cutting and taking the trees down in the hills impacts the groundwater on the valley floor. So, yeah, I'd be really interested to know that question and also about the cover crop. I mean, all your slides looked really robust on the cover crop. And so your sample where you did your pits, looked like a very robust cover crop.

So I guess the seed base doesn't matter because your results were the same no matter where. So I was gonna ask about the cover crop seed, if that does impact, how well the soil holds the water. But maybe it's more just the fact that it's a robust cover crop. Thank you.

Really short answer. We did have some sites up in the hills and through the advisory group of this group of farmers that are advising on the project. There are many successful cases throughout California of dry farming happening in hills. It has its own caveats but it's been done successfully and on the website you can I can help you find some of those and and learn more about what specifically they're doing there? And as far as the cover crop goes, I think it's what we were looking mostly at sort of like binary.

Was there a cover crop or not? We didn't go out and measure, you know, the actual biomass and all of that. Could have given us more information as far as are there any differences. We do have data on the particular cover crop species. Like, we know what they're seeding. Some of them aren't that's just reseeding itself. Some of it is just natural vegetation. But I don't have data on the actual biomass of the cover crop just from the pictures. We just wanted to indicate whether cover crop is being utilized or not.

Another comment?

Peter Nissen. I live in Calistoga. Very nice presentation. Got a couple of questions. Tillage, nontillage. Tillage, is it breaking the ground once, ring rolling it, smisering it, sealing it, and or just opening it? How many times are people making passes? It all has a a benefit or a less than benefit depending on the situation. Also, irrigated, non irrigated. Did you check any of the irrigated vineyards that were done in a minimal basis to see if their roots were deeper compared to ones that were more heavily irrigated? Just as a curious question.

So, with the tillage, we got a very nice representative of everything that you mentioned. Some are not tilling at all. We have some that are quote unquote the dose mulching effect which is like pulverizing everything, doing it a couple times during the year, and then everything in between. So we we saw from no tillage to excessive tilling, some people were tilling five, six, seven times during the year. So we went to both extremes and still wouldn't able to pinpoint because none of the sides were just isolating the tilling as being done with other practices.

And then as far as the root system in irrigated veneers, we just didn't look into that. That's something that we would like to go back and try to see if different degrees of irrigation could impact the redevelopment. What I can say is that part of another part of the study, the portion that I'm working on, but they're looking at developing a guide for transitioning vineyards. So vineyards that are already being irrigated that are established, how could you potentially transition? And from the meetings that I've attended from the advisory group, they feel pretty confident that they can develop a proper guide.

So through changes in management and changes the way the irrigation is done, you could potentially keep developing these root systems in a way that they could be dry farm.

Any further questions or comments? Any callers?

We have no callers. Okay. Oh, we have one now.

Okay.

Don, you have three minutes.

Can you unmute yourself? We can't hear you.

Thank you. Yeah. Don Monk here. Yields. Nobody asked any questions about yields, and it wasn't mentioned in the report. But are are yields is somebody tracking yields and the economic sustainability of the yields for dry farming versus irrigated vineyards?

Yes. Just not it wasn't me, but there there's others tracking that data, and there are many indications showing that these dry farm vineyards can more than compete with commercial, if not outcompete. But that was not my area. But when we finish these reports, there'll be information about that.

Thank you.

Miguel, that was a great presentation, stimulating topic. And now to another hot topic, looking at groundwater pumping reduction work plan implementation, and the recharge feasibility study. Ludorff and Skolmanini and ERA Economics to present.

Alright. There they are.

Nick Newcomb, if you're on Zoom, the clerk is going to send you another request to be a panelist and just accept it, if you're able to.

Alright. We'll get started to keep us on time, if we could throw slides back up. Thank you. Well, good afternoon. Duncan McEwen with DRA Economics.

I'm gonna do a quick update on where we're at with the GPR work plan implementation and then mostly hand it over to Nick. And then we're gonna really focus on the the recharge feasibility study work for this and just really kinda do a light touch on other GPR elements today. So I think we put this up there every time we present on this. There's the guiding principles that we've been working on under for the last couple of years. You all have them memorized at this point, and I don't know if there's anything else to say about that except that, you know, we're we're we've got a few different programs moving forward that are kind of these incentive driven voluntary approaches.

And I think the presentation that we just heard lines up nicely with some of the ideas and best management practices on what can be done on farm that we're trying to encourage wider adoption of for water conservation benefits. Here's a chart that kind of shows the overall process for the different components and how those relate back to the projects and management actions that are in the GSP. You already heard an update on the certification program concepts for water conservation, so that's moving forward in parallel. Today, we're going to focus on that project one, aquifer recharge, and looking at the feasibility study that we're we're working on. So for managed aquifer recharge, the recharge investigation is looking at ways to obviously increase groundwater recharge.

So we're looking at benefits for GSP implementation for ISW, interconnected surface waters and groundwater dependent ecosystems. And then there's a little bit of a link to the work on, like, the SERP programs and other BMPs for how we could tie in some of the concepts for, the demand management into the, into the, recharge opportunities. And then this will come together in you know, we use we keep calling it a feasibility study. It's kind of a I don't know. Feasibility study might be a bit of an overstatement because we're still kind of, like, figuring out what things can work, and then you would typically carry those specific actions forward into a feasibility study.

But it's kind of an overview of what's possible, and and that's what we're working on right now. So we go over what the different recharge opportunities are. There's four scenarios that we're looking at, go through some of the technical and legal considerations. Nick Newcomb at the last TAG meeting presented on some of the water right considerations. Economic feasibility, what's it cost, what are, you know, what does it take to actually get the program to work, and then how do you fund that program.

So the scenarios and and Nick Watersen will refer back to these in in his materials today. There's four of them that we've split up. So, scenario one, looking at just extending the replant period, so on lands that are actively farmed. And we'll talk about this a little bit more. You know, there's been, whatever it was, 900 and change acres, I think, that came out of production in the last couple of years, you know, with market conditions and other factors that drive those decisions.

So, you are there opportunities in those areas to hold land out a little bit longer, get some more water in the ground in various ways and get some recharge benefits? The direct on farm recharge, which can include like AgMar just running irrigation systems a little bit longer to get more water on the ground or dedicated basins. Those would be longer duration projects. Third scenario is looking at, pumping reduction or what you would kind of typically see as like an in lieu recharge. So divert more water, have it available to use in lieu of pumping for frost protection or irrigation during the season.

And then the last is this multi benefit recharge concept, which, you know, so lands that are in specific areas where you get other co benefits. Nick is going to talk about some examples about how different lands affect recharge opportunities. And again, this would be more of a longer term or permanent recharge option. So that's way we've kind of been bracketing the range of things that could be done for recharge, and we'll refer back to those scenarios in the rest of the presentation. And then updates on our end.

I mean, really, I'll hand it over to Nick to go through the groundwater modeling work. What we've done since the last time we met or we presented to the group here was, you know, complete an analysis to have a rough mapping of orchard or vineyard age across the sub basin on a parcel by parcel and field basis. That's got that's important for scenario one in particular. So like if you were, like, we need to understand spatially where these things could happen because that, you know, that affects what incentives would need to be and what the cost of different recharge opportunities would be. And then that's been provided back to LSCE to inform the groundwater modeling that Nick's going to talk through here and some preliminary runs for these different scenarios to figure out what the effects are on the sustainability indicators that we're trying to manage for.

So that is the I think those are the big updates. Oh, and I would and I guess I'd note that that mapping also includes lands that are idle, that have been idled over the last couple of years. So those are mapped within the data, vineyards that have been removed and not replanted or if they were replanted, those are noted as well. With that, I'll hand it over to Nick Go through stuff.

Alright. Well, thanks. I'm Nick Waterson with Ludorff and Skamenini. And Nick Nuka, I'm also I'm gonna be speaking on, I guess, say, in part on behalf of a lot of the work that Nick Nuka has been doing. I wanna, you know, give him full credit for this. He wasn't able to be here in person today, but I think he's he's he's in attendance online and maybe he can even chime in if he accepts the invite, it sounded like. So and he has. Alright. Well, good deal. So yeah.

And and and I'll say just up front that, like, when it gets down to an end of any any of the modeling nitty gritty, I I may be punting those to Nick to to take on. But but, anyways, I I you know, as as Duncan mentioned, we're preparing to and and then in the process of running these different model scenarios to evaluate various forms of of of groundwater recharge. And and and and and some of what we'll talk about today is really setting stage for actually tackling those four scenarios that we described. Some of them get at you know, nip at the edges, but we're still those like, full implementation of those scenarios is still in progress. And so but we wanted to give you an update on where things stand and some of the preliminary indications that, you know, from from the modeling that that we have conducted.

And so the one of the first scenarios that we were that we were looking at is just is simply the the replant scenario of idling of idling vineyards for some amount of time during the replant cycle. The model scenario includes a two year replant idling as part of that. And and that was and and and in order to determine the the scenario that we were gonna run, Duncan and and his team looked back at the at the at the land use dataset and and and vineyard ages and then estimated if you assume a thirty year crop, you know, replant cycling, like what that would mean for what the, you know, what the age of vineyards were in the past and when and when that replant cycling would be occurring. And you can see the the graphic there just showing the difference between the the baseline and then and then the replant scenario in terms of acreages that are that are in in production during during those those times. The map on the right is just an example of two years, and so they actually you know, we we did implement it it was a spatially, you know, configured scenario.

So we, you know, we actually we actually took and simulated based on based on the the different locations of these of these vineyards throughout the throughout the scenario from 1987 through 2024. And so some of the results from this, and and, you know, I think I'll I'll I'll describe a little bit of them, but I think most of them are are you know, there's a lot a lot of the details are just shown in these in these graphics here. But generally, number of acres that are idled in a given year range from 200 to 1,000 acres, depending presumably on a lot of different factors, including periods of heavy of heavy planting and and and whatnot. And then the and then the resulting pumping reductions range from from 2,500 to 1,250 acre feet. There's a you know, as as you might expect, there's a very strong correlation between the number of acres that were idled and and the and the pumping reduction that occurs.

It's not it's not perfectly one for one, but pretty, you know, pretty close to it. And and, yeah, and it's gen generally, the the reductions range from 2.5 to to 10%. So, you know, not an insignificant reduction in the total pumping. And I think, you know, while we didn't in the in in what we've done so far, didn't explicitly evaluate the scenario three that Duncan was pointing to, which is the in lieu recharge. I mean, you can you can kinda think of this as effectively, to some extent, what what would you know, what you might achieve in some way, you know, if you were to scale it at these same levels during, you know, during the period.

And I think so this, you know, so these this the the previous figure, this is showing primarily just the the total acres of replant and and idling and then the and then the effect on groundwater pumping. And then this this slide here is the effects on streamflow. And as we all know, that's one of the key sustainability indicators in the sub basin. And so we're primarily this is something that's of intense interest, of course. The chart at the top shows the the relationship of of, you know, comparing comparing the baseline scenario, which is in in the orange line, which is largely on the on the top on the top chart is, you know, overlain by the the replant scenario.

And what you can see is that the the difference in in flow at the at the Oak Knoll gauge on on Napa River is it's we only we we largely it's what's primarily evident is that low flow low flows are increased during years when there's actually flow in the river. What we're not seeing here and is not as evident on the chart is that you actually not on you know, we were actually you know, we're know, presumably, you know, we're increasing groundwater levels, but they're not rising to the point where it actually changes flow during these dry during those dry years. What it does do though is, and it's shown in the in the lower in the lower graph, is it actually increase or it decreases the the the duration of when those streams are dry or when the river is dry. So it's not as evident on the chart on the top, but you can see it on the lower one where the percent of the time that you have zero flow less the under the replant scenario than it is under the the baseline. So so, you know, some some some notable increases in those in those flows during you know, of about 2%, you know, or I guess I should say, you know, the duration has decreased by about 2% of those dry flow times and about one CFS increase during times when there is flow in the river.

And there's a strong correlation between the the pumping reduction and those stream flow. So any I I guess, quick questions? Well, maybe just we, you know, typically have some of these touch points along the way, but I know if there's any if there's any specific questions or feedback on the replant scenario update, we'd happy to happy to hear those and

And that that's a two year It's a

two year idling on that. Yeah. Every every 30 years, two years of idling.

Is there any benefit or reason to try to model it longer?

I I think I I guess that's probably a question of what is what what would be what is practical in the in the, you know, in the context of, you know, the broader, you know, economy of the of the sub basin. But but I think, you know, we would we would anticipate, of course, that if you if you scaled it up to four years as an example, that you'd essentially double the, you know, double that benefit.

So you're showing two and a half to 10%. Right? That was the assessment. Two and a half for two years about maximum 10%. If it would be double that could potentially help us reach that sustainability goal sooner. Not to say that anybody will keep it idle for for years, but also given the current wine market, there's some people that might

Yeah. Yeah. So I I think it's and I'll but maybe maybe maybe I should backpedal just a a hair and just may I I think it I think it's I think it's a linear relationship there, but we would, you know I mean, it would it would be, you know, be wise of us to to run it through the model, make sure there isn't some nonlinearity that, you know, that pops up there. But, yeah, I think that and I, you know, I I think it it would it would be something that, you you know, if if the incentives were there and, you know, the benefits to on both sides of it were, you know, present, it could be something to explore for sure.

While you're exploring different temporal scenarios, you might look into a twenty year versus

a More frequently. Twenty certainly

due to some extenuating factors. Vineyard lifespan is not optimistically as long as we would hope it would be in all cases.

Good point. Yeah.

In your replant scenarios, you talked about having 1,000 acres taken out of production for this two year period, whatever, and that that would save twelve fifty acre feet. So in other words, over that 1,000 acres, you would have applied one and a quarter foot of water, which which are not anymore. Is is that that's the right interpretation?

This this one right here? Yeah. Some I think in some cases, yeah, if you were to look at the those those extreme numbers, that that would be there are probably some areas where yeah. Or some years and some times when that's that's accurate. Yeah.

According to this, according to the modeling. And and, of course, you know, one thing that is notable is that we are we are currently in the process of doing some model refinements, and those include and I think, you know, we've heard about them in previous tag meetings where we're looking at looking at at at at ET and whether or not the the you know, all of that information and the crop coefficients that are currently in the model are are are aligned with what, you know, what the the best currently available information are are telling us. But but yeah. So that that's using using what's the what we have in the in in the original model from that standpoint. That's what it's it's telling us. Yeah.

And If I can jump in real quick. There's also some feedback. You know, if you stop pumping in in in a in one parcel, you know, the groundwater levels will increase in adjacent areas. And so, you know, that that feedback in the model leads to increased root water uptake from the water table. So you kinda get, you know, this interesting feedback where, you know, you might reduce pumping by a certain amount, but you might end up reducing a lot more pumping because that water will be taken more water will be taken up from the water table. So it's not necessarily one zero one there, if that makes sense.

And so following up on that, Nick, did you then look at the net groundwater use reduction as compared to the net reduction in pumping, assuming it would be done a bit less?

Not at this point, but, you know, I think that's something to follow-up up on. And and, you know, at least internally, we've done a little bit of work on that, but we can present some information that kinda tracks the whole water balance and where, you know, where those are changing in other water balance terms as well.

And then is that correct that, I mean, looking back at those same numbers, basically, the one foot one acre feet a year per acre basically, is consistent with kind of what you have on average in the model for every irrigated acre is around a foot I mean, on average, of course, around a foot of water?

I don't some? Off Okay. I don't recall off the top of my head, but we can it'd be interesting to pull those numbers as well and see what we get. You know, just just track the the full water balance and and make sure it's kind of aligning with what, you know, our our understanding is.

I just have kind of a general question. Is anyone looking at specific management practices on the fallow land that would get us in the higher range? And maybe going back to Miguel's talk that varies based on soil texture would probably be a pretty big property.

Yeah, that's a question that I had. That's something that might not be able to be included in the model is if there's any improvements to water infiltration during that time where the land is not quote unquote being managed. I don't know if it depending on the situation, you know, if you don't have tractors driving back and forth, compaction will improve, and whether that can have any significant increases in in water absorption. But I think if this if if this is something that we're gonna do, it would be great. At least the NAPAR city is very interested in stepping in and trying to work with farmers to try to take advantage of that opportunity and enhance soil health and make sure the land would never be just left alone.

They will be doing doing some sort of management. But that will be a great opportunity to maybe do some studies and understand better what happens during that time and whether extending it three years makes any difference or four. Does that make any difference?

Yeah. It does seem to me like a RCD type thing to come up with best practices maybe in conjunction with

The best match practices already exist. It's just a matter of how are they implemented and if anybody's tracking what kind of changes are happening during that time. There's also a chance that nothing will change during that time.

That's possible. And it would be good to know that before you spend the money to do something.

And talking about the money, was there any evaluation already on kind of the fact that you removed between 201,000 acres per year? Like what's the cost of that or the loss as compared to the saving and kind of what is the dollar per acre foot and how it compares to the price of water.

I think you're thinking about it the right way. Yeah. We're working on we have those numbers coming together, and they'll definitely be in the feasibility study. Don't have all that pulled together today. I was I was gonna comment earlier on Miguel's idea, like, you know, extend the duration. You can calculate what, you know, what that is. And then the big driver there is what what are your what are prices at currently and what do you expect them to be, you that know, that drives interest and the cost of letting land rest for a year? Because what you're doing is just shifting an income stream back and, you know, a twenty or a thirty year income stream back by one year or four years, and that's a very different cost.

Because

I'm assuming when we start comparing those different reach out scenarios and kind of the dollar per acre foot of water becomes one way at least comparing.

Yeah, I agree. And I I think it'd be nice to also compare to some of the demand management activities, which we already have some rough numbers, dollar per acre foot. In my head, it's always like, how do you like, are the cheapest ways to get, you know, get benefits?

And we're not even thinking about potential changes in crop, right? We're assuming it'll be grapes again.

Are there any benefits to the soil in terms of recovering from being fallow for, you know, one, two, three, four years?

Yeah, absolutely. If it's done with best management practice in place. Yeah. I mean, the soil was already doing really well. You're not you're just maintaining it, but it is potential. It's the rest period. And then you implement management practices that would enhance that. So there's room for enhancing the soil for sure.

Yeah. So I don't know if you could throw that in your model of potential benefits that partially offset the lack of

That sounded like a threat

or something. Two

thoughts there. I mean, one, just a question. Like, is data or studies? Is that stuff that the RCD has that you could point us to? Because we could pull that in.

I don't have that just available. I'm digging to see if there's any data of, you know, if any of these has been done. But we will be interested on figuring out ways to partner out with farmers to study these further.

Yeah. I was just thinking, like, you know, I think when we first talked about this extending replant idea, it's it's been thought about for, like, orchards and other areas of the valley. That was where we had kind of initially seen it and borrowed it. And and there, there was definitely some soil health work that they were doing as part of that. And and then we did just as part of the economics, did some math to figure out, like, okay. Well, what would the yield affect what would the yield productivity benefit over the life of your next orchard need to be to justify resting it for another year? And, like, the big thing with orchards is, like like, fumigation and nematode management. So, like, I like, that yeah. That those are good questions that would be important for a program like this.

Anything else? Any additional discussion on it? We can always come back to it, but before we get into the second second phase of this these scenarios.

Peter, I think if we if you can wait, we'll take the public comment at the end of this whole presentation. Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. So then then and then the next the next scenario, I guess and it I guess we'll call I don't know if it's a single scenario or, you know, or if it's yeah. Anyways, it's a it's a combination of of a of a of some modeling runs that that that Nick and and and company ran to evaluate the the favorability of recharge and and essentially looking at trying to and I and I think about this as, a heat map of where the benefits from recharge are throughout the sub basin. So the idea is here that we could then rather than, like, have a shotgun of, like, where well, where should we be doing recharge, guide that a little bit more surgically to say, hey. These are the areas that are are coming to the top in terms of their benefit, and then then we can ultimately evaluate the practicality of of doing it in certain areas and and explore those in a little bit more detail through other model scenarios.

So the basically, the way that this was set up was essentially simulating recharge in every cell in the model and and then evaluate it, not all at once, but on on a, you know, single single run for every single scenario where that's the that all all we do is we put 20 acre feet of recharge on the cell and and keep all the other cells the same, and then we evaluate what the effect on the the stream flows are from from that from that simulated recharge event on on and so it basically walk you know, you can walk around the whole sub basin and every cell, you know, through you know, we just iterated on that and and determined the the benefit. The benefit was value or the benefit in terms of low flow was evaluated based on the, like, the the net seepage water budget output. So it's, like, a combination of of of of of changes in flow to all the stream the the modeled and simulated stream network in in the model. And and and then we and then we just, you know, basically displayed those and rated them in terms of the the capture, essentially, the the fraction of that recharge that that that was that manifest in the streams during different periods of the of the year.

The scenario was set up to run it was it was using water year 2017. That was a wetter water year, and so the the the thought was it would it would be it's it's a year when there would have been potentially more water available for recharge. And and so, you know, from that standpoint, you know, kind of the the the sort of situation and and conditions that where you when we might have been conducting recharge. And then and then the 20 acre feet was applied across the the months of December through March at a rate of five acre feet per month. So that's and that's consistent with the what a the the streamlined recharge permit would be for that for that kind of time period.

And when we when we ran that, here here are the are the results. And so we broke it down into what is and you can see that the warmer colors, meaning those those darker those darker browns and and reddish ones are those are higher values of of re of of capture in in in the sense of the stream flow. So the the highest values being if it was a 100%, that would be, know, 20 acre feet of of the total recharge would be captured. And then and then the yellower colors are are are are, you know, lesser lesser volumes that are captured. And so the at the you know, on the on the on the left side, we're we're showing what what is what is the difference in flows during the December to May period, so outside of the low flow period.

And so what we can see there is that we see we see areas, especially up up north in the northern part of the sub basin of at Calistoga and North of Saint Helena, where most of that recharge is coming out of streamflow during the December to May period, so prior to the commencement of kind of the low flow period. And then and we can also see that in some other areas. And generally speaking, you can see it it a strong correlation between the where the, you know, where the river network is and and that. And so it it all makes sense. The residents' time is shorter, and so that that water is going to it's gonna recharge, and it's kinda come back into the stream system under a, you know, shorter shorter cycle.

And and then on the right, we're seeing conditions. So those are the you know, we the magnitude of the effects that are that are lagged long enough to to benefit the low flow conditions are you know, it's it's different. So we don't see the color gradient shown on the right is a is a little bit different than the one on the left. But generally speaking, we, you know, we can we can see that there's some areas where where, you know, recharging during the winter does benefit the low flow conditions, And those tend to be areas where, you know, just on a general our general sense is they tend, you know, they tend to be areas where there's some aquifer characteristics, either that's or configuration in terms of, like, a you know, the deeper part of the groundwater system or where and then also the aquifer properties in terms of how fast the water is moving where those occur. So, you know, just a little bit Southwest of Saint Helena is kinda one of those areas where you see that, and then also just a little bit, you know, north of the of the city of of Napa.

One of the things that's that's notable here is that we're we're only looking at this these are these results are only for the for that 2017 water year. And so we're not actually detecting the effects of what would actually happen across multiple years. So as an example, we're not seeing, well, did it was it are there's there may be certain areas where you're seeing yellow on both of these two maps where water is actually even delayed even even longer, and and the benefits are accruing outside of even that even that one water year. So that's something to be thinking about as we as we as we start to look at this and, you know, go forward with additional scenarios to to evaluate. But, you know, we but, I mean, ultimately, though, the even though it's it it can be challenging to track such a small volume of 20 acre feet in the holes, you know, the whole scope of the of the sub basin, it it you know, the intent isn't to, you know, go away from this.

It's like, this is exactly where, you know, where we wanna do recharge, but just to, again, focus us in on some areas so that we're not trying to cover all and evaluate every every, you know, every field in the in the entire sub basin. So I guess I'll I guess at that point, we'll ask if there's any any questions or discussion on this model's scenario and these results.

I have a question. What is the cell size and how was that determined?

I'll well, the I'll I'll let, Nick Nick talk about I I can answer part of that, but I'll let him talk about the whole thing.

So so for the model cell size, they're 500 feet by 500 feet. So yeah. And that recharge is being applied over that whole cell. So if if in the real world, maybe you'd have a recharge operation over a smaller area. You might, depending on the site, not be able to get the, infiltration rate in there.

So it might be, you know, less. But it's, you know, this is kind of, like, a order of magnitude estimate just to kinda see, you know, where sites seem like they'd be, you know, favorable, from a big picture, and then we can, you know, hone in with site specific conditions. It's kind of the next phase.

Nick, was the on the second part, can you speak to how how how that cell size was selected?

Oh, yeah. Sorry. That was mainly just a function of kind of the land use and the hydraulics, trying to keep, it it's a balancing act with modeling. If you make your cells too small, you end up with a model that's gonna take a long time to run. But, you know, you wanna be small enough to to capture the kind of the heterogeneity in land use and some of those stream aquifer interactions.

And then the geometry in the sub basin is pretty complex as well. So that was that was kinda you know, having the small cell sizes, you can capture that geometry better in the heterogeneity, in the geology. But it's a, you know, it's it's a balancing act always. Know, ideally, you go as small as you need to to get the results you're looking for, but there is that constraint on on model run times and stuff like that. You wanna make sure your model is not getting too unruly with too many cells.

So did you explore other cell sizes, or you just sort of looked into parameters and decided that was the option?

It was it's challenging, in in this this scenario, in this in this basin to be testing other small sizes, cell sizes just because it takes a long time, to develop the geometry, you know, where the volcanics, the boundary between the volcanics and the alluvium. And then we have a pretty complicated stream network that so, yeah, in other systems, that's a lot easier, but there's so many details in this one that, you know, if we wanted to test another cell size, we would be looking at, a pretty involved effort.

So Could you test it on, like, smaller sections of the so essentially subsample the basin and then determine whether what might be optimal from those sub samples that you would could then apply across the basin?

We didn't. Those types of convergence analyses are are helpful, but I think we're pretty confident that that the the sell side we selected, you know, is adequate, I think, for for what we're looking at. But that's that's something, we can definitely, take a look at, especially for for stream depletion. And we spent quite a bit of time on that stream opt for interaction getting the model layering, appropriate so that we could capture that with, you know, as much detail as we could, again, given those kind of numerical constraints. But it's it's something we can, you know, take another look at.

And I I guess I'll also just say that it's you know, just the the cell side, it it it part you know, the cell size plays into it, but it's, you know, one of the challenges to then also have the information that feeds into the cell size so that you can vary that. Because you may not you just just discretizing, you know, and adding more cells when you're not actually changing the inputs to those cells may not it may not, you know, have any significant change in the in the outcome. So you kinda have to almost go back, in some cases, to the to your root inputs and regenerate those to this new cell size, which, you know, can be a you know, can certainly be a a a bit of work too.

We are actually looking at kinda subset. It's I don't wanna talk about it too much because it's premature, but we actually are looking at, you know, kinda subsetting the model and and doing smaller cell sizes to to look at some of these stream offer interaction components that we think are important. So depending on that how that pans out, I don't wanna get too far ahead of ourselves. But, you know, that could be a good opportunity to to do that type of convergence analysis and evaluate, you know, if we see, you know, big changes in water budgets based on those different cell sizes, and, you know, that's that's maybe an opportunity to to go back and reevaluate.

I guess, you know, the cell size selection may be optimal based on the hydrology. But then if you're looking at it from the practical aspects of management, is that the most informative cell size?

Yeah. And I I mean, I I'll also say that we, you know, we I I mean, there's it's great, you know, great questions. And I think one thing we also wanna do is keep in mind the role of the model isn't know, it we're everything is a simplification of the the real you know, the realities of the of the sub basin. And so we yeah. We're trying to balance balance that and and keeping in mind that we know we know that model scenario is not perfect. It's never gonna be the it's it's not reality. But, you know, to the extent that it is able to help us in you know, inform us on on, you know, various management actions, then, you know, that a a lot of, you know, a lot of ways, that's where the value of the tool is.

But

I might add too that if you actually add more cells, the model is gonna have a harder time solving. And so you might have to loosen your water balance convergence criteria as along with it taking much longer to run, it counterintuitively might make it more challenging to track small volumes of water. It's kinda a bit of a numerical dance with with these integrated models. So

Yeah. I just wanted to clarify too. I didn't mean that we need a smaller cell size necessarily Yeah. Because, potentially, a slightly larger cell size might give us different information. So I want to be clear that that wasn't the implication, my comment.

It is an interesting question about the sensitivity of the model to the cell size, though, that you're bringing up. Yeah.

Can you explain again what's happening South Of Saint Helena? Why do we have more recharge at the low flows?

Yeah. So it well, just to just to be clear, it's it's not more recharge. It's more flow it's more flow showing up in the in the in the network during the low flow period.

More discharge from the banks.

Correct. Correct. Yeah. So and I and I think and I think that's a function of that is that's an area where we you know, the the valley broadens. We see there's a there's a significant alluvial fan feature in that area coming off sulfur associated with Sulfur Creek. Right. And and so I think that's our our hypothesis is that's why you see you you see enough lag in that in that discharge to the stream system to to have it you know, when it was recharged in the winter, have it show up in the in the summer months.

Yeah. I think it's useful to see that the the darker areas in the on the figure on the right correspond to the area on the left where it's yellow because, basically the flow was put in the winter but at that time it doesn't my understanding is that then it doesn't really show up anywhere from December to May.

Right.

But it takes longer to make its way to one of the stream reach.

Right.

Just wanted to comment, I think the multiyear evaluation, I think, may become important thinking that in when we potentially would mostly need additional stream flow would be in dry year where maybe there wouldn't be opportunity in that winter to recharge and understanding if there are any area in the basin where there may be some multiyear benefits may be useful.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it and it's it's it's part of the it that's in the that's that's in that's part of the plan. Right now, we just just wrapped up this scenario, just trying to generate the the proof of concept that we would be we would learn something that was beneficial out of the exercise. And I think we've convinced ourselves that we have. And so I think that absolutely, like, understanding where, you know, over over a multiyear and how you could how you could bank during wet years and, or potentially, I should say, recharge during wet years and whether you'd actually see benefits that, you know, that can go beyond. You can go over multiyear periods to kinda, you know, sustain you during a dry year as an example.

Yeah. I mean, just in a general mindset, this really illustrates something that I've seen for a long time is that the northern darker area in the months of December and May, water table there is pretty high. Short shallow hump. That's surprisingly common even on like lower rainfall years that the water table is still pretty high.

Great. Yes.

Okay. We can take comments. Peter, think you had one.

Thank you again, Peter Nissen. To Monica's point, most vineyards are put in twenty year lives just because of diseases and just the the nature of of the business with plant longevity. Just it's not like it used to be. I have do have a couple questions, on the number of acres that are are you are you considering idle meaning fallow? Okay.

So fallow land, there's we had a meeting at Farm Bureau about a month ago with John Tudor, and over 4,000 acres have been pulled out in the county in the last year and a half. I would suspect that it's a lot more than a thousand acres. And I you know, it it would be probably beneficial to talk to his office at the assessor because they know how much has been pulled out, and, you know, they keep records of that with vine and tree count, surveys that are taken by growers on an annual basis. With the amount of acreage that's followed, are you considering the recharge that you're saving also from people that may not be diverting water with their water rights out of the river or its tributaries along with groundwater? I'm just curious if that's part of the the model, as as it's being developed.

And the cell size of the it's like 5.7 acres. I don't know. The 500 by 500, is is that just something you would mark out on in someone's vineyard or something? It it seems sort of I mean, I I would be more adaptable to just a piece of property that someone's donated to or or you're using in a way that is more economical to, you know, to to map. But but I I don't know.

I'm not a statistician or anything, but it's just it it's 500 by 500. No. I it it's it's an interesting challenge, but I think that the number of acres that you could be using in close proximity to the to the river for recharge might be more available because I know a lot of people are gonna be following land for three to five years on the books right now. So there might be a this recharge program or or model may have some very strong empirical results with with land that may be available by by different property owners that have land that they're not going to be put back into use. All right. Thank you.

Paul Brophy with EGS. Have you generally given up on the concept of perhaps injecting water down into the either the top of the groundwater or actually into the groundwater using excess seasonal rainfall. Is that something that is too complex from a regulatory point of view?

Groundwater injection, like through an injection well? Yeah. I don't necessarily say it's, like, too complex from a regulatory standpoint, but I think it's I I think it it it can be it can be complex from a practical standpoint and expensive from a practical standpoint. So I think we're you know, the the surficial recharge in in in a lot of environments tends to be a lot a lot easier to implement and and and achieve in a in a kind of an unconfined system such as we have in in in much of the sub basin can be equally effective where, you know But so. I I don't think we've I wouldn't say we've ruled out anything, but I don't but that that is, generally speaking, one of the more challenging.

It just more it just takes more more infrastructure and more

Too too costly in a direct sense?

We are paying attention to some of the ASR pilot studies that Sonoma is doing

Yeah.

On their side in Sonoma Valley. And then I think they have a couple wells in Santa Rosa Plain as well. So we are Yeah.

There's a good report on that.

Okay. Thanks.

Hello. Chris Mayland. So regarding the Napa Valley sub basin groundwater pumping reduction work plan update and recharge feasibility study, I find that throughout, there's really no framework for timelines, embedded in this. And I'm more concerned about the drying of the Napa River yearly, since 2017. There's miles and miles that go completely dry.

And, of course, then we're losing all the species, all the, steelhead, the frogs, all the animals that we care about that are endangered and, threatened and species of concern. So, on page three, bullet five, mandatory measures if voluntary programs do not achieve measurable reductions in groundwater pumping, then examples of that would be mandatory metering and reporting. When we first did the GSP draft, there was talk of thresholds of significance where regulatory tools would come into place if the Napa River went dry more than two years in a row. Vicki should remember that. There was a lot of discussion about that, and we've way gone past that threshold of significance because the river has gone dry many years in a row, and there still is no regulatory tools, to require mandatory metering and reporting.

So on this plan, I'm wondering, how long do we have to wait? Do we have to wait for another update in five more years? When are we going to see regulatory tools come into play? I think I, for one, and I know other people would like to see when does that happen? When do we stop dewatering the Napa River?

Going on to page seven, I don't know what TOC stands for. Working draft TOC. I don't know. I couldn't find it. Oh, okay.

Okay. Thank you. Recharge scenario, can we add scenario five and supercharge basically, supercharge scenario four and really give incentives and, all kinds of kudos for a landowner who actually replants this riparian zone, and then that helps recharge the Napa River. So I would like to plus, there's a lot of money out there available to do that kind of thing through prop four, and there could be some real benefits back to the vineyard owner. I think I think we really should look at that.

Thank you. Nature based solution to groundwater recharges kind of where I'm going with that idea. Thank you.

Nick, I know you had your hand up. I'm not sure if that was for a previous public commenter or this one. But if you wanted to comment on something, feel free to jump in.

Yeah. I just wanted to clarify in in case it wasn't super clear, like, the the cell size in the model is is five acres, but our land use, we consider land use fractions within each of those five acre cells. So if there's a mix of vineyards, native land, urban in that five acre cell, we we, you know, fully account for that through pretty pretty detailed analysis of land use that we're actually diving into again to try and really hone in on on the heterogeneity of portions of fields that might be idled, changes in urban land, and stuff like that. So that that the landscape side of things is is more detailed than the groundwater side of things in case that wasn't coming across.

Alright. Well, thank you very much. And I think we're at time for a break. So 03:16, how about we reconvene in nine minutes, 03:25.

And hopefully we'll have Doctor. Bachon, who is coming from field work in Petaluma.

Oh, good point. So do we need to

How much time?

He's supposed to start at 03:35. So maybe let's resume at 03:30,

and then

hopefully he'll be here. We can reconvene. And we have a presentation of what looks like a fascinating project, Alexander Valley On Farm Recharge Initiative on the Dry Creek Rancheria of Pomo Indians. Doctor. Philip Blachand is going to present.

So thanks for being here. Thanks for making the journey.

Thank you. Sorry for being almost late. So we'll just get right into this presentation on the initiative. So there were a lot of motivations for the initiative. Some of them I've listed up there.

Climate change and drought resilience was the driver behind the grant that we were awarded. It was a grant to the Dry Creek Granteria from DWR. Risk management was also, and that's a risk management for water users of all types up there and also for the businesses who rely on the water. So a lot of the vineyards were very, very interested in this project because stabilize risk related to either being able to pump groundwater or with regard to water rights curtailments that they had been subject to a few years previously. And so that got into the regulatory.

And then some of the cons of it were our cost. Everything costs money to do. Risk of outcomes, like we proposed this idea of doing recharge in the Alexander Valley with ideas that it would help fisheries primarily and also help relieve demand for irrigation. But there's always a risk in these types of projects that they don't work. So there's those risks.

And then there's regulatory risk associated with this type of project because when you're doing a land based, water based project, you're subject to pretty much every regulation there is. And federal, state, local, and it becomes a very, tricky business getting a project through like this. Just a brief cartoon here on what we're trying to do is basically we're trying to apply, water onto working landscapes, primarily, in this case, vineyards, and we're trying to raise the local groundwater level so that we have increased lateral flow to streams and creeks, rivers, and also that there would be potentially movement down to the deeper aquifer as well. And these are, this is an old presentation, I'm fairly certain Matt would appreciate these equations. Okay.

And then this is another cartoon, and this was just showing what we're doing. You can see we have the Russian River on the left. We have these vineyards going up the valley, and I guess I should tell you what this project looks like. It's for those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's it's a valley wide initiative in the Alexander Valley. Alexander Valley has about 7,000 acres of working vineyards.

We expected to we're targeting enrolling about 4,000 of those vineyards into this program. We're hoping to recharge about 7,000 acre feet per year typically, by drawing off the Russian River and catching, water during high flow conditions and not just flood flow conditions. So when people talk about the flood MAR flood MAR program, DWS flood MAR program, which this is one of the sort of on farm recharge was one of the drivers and one of the sort of parallel technologies of it. People think flood. You know, they think flood.

And there's a practical limitation with dealing with diversions during floods. One is that nobody's ever ready to divert during a flood. They're always trying to do something else like protect their house, protect their business, protect their pets. So there's that amount of time where you'd where you'd have off, can't do much. Also, during floods, it usually relates to heavy rainfall.

So heavy rainfall is a period of time where you're not gonna have good recharge anyway because you already have plenty of water coming down. And then, the third thing is that mechanical equipment that you might be using for applying water on during flood these conditions is limited by about an order of magnitude operational ability under best conditions. So like a pump running on a variable frequency drive can run from 50 to a 100% of its capacity. Piping, to to have it in a good range of not having too much pressure drop across it, you can run it about between one and a half to four feet per second. So when you talk about diverting during floods, if you want to really capture a lot of water during a flood period, you have to have really big equipment.

That equipment is very expensive. And so our our idea is instead of capturing it during floods, you capture it during high flows, high flows that exceed what you would need during water rights, protect fisheries, and that extends your period of application to periods that are during a rainy season but not always rainy, or, you know, during high flow conditions but not always flooding. And so that gives you an opportunity to divert much more water during these conditions than you would under, let's say, the ninety twenty rule that the water board has for expediting and facilitating water rights permits. So this is what it looks like at the Russian River. These are flows from the 2016 water year through the 2025 water year, and this is at the Jimtown Gauge.

That's right in the middle of Alexander Valley. And 210 CFS is what we're trying to divert above, and you can see that in in the the light blue is the first half of the water year. This clear is the second half. So one hundred and eighty days is about the March. And you can see and and and we're trying to capture water from about November, mid November to March.

So maybe day 45 to day one eighty is our window of opportunity above 210 CFS. And that dash line shows you the opportunity there. And even, like, water years 2020, 2021, which are really, really bad years for rain, we still had I think 2021, we still have, like, sixty days that we technically could have diverted water. And and and and we're diverting water for to help with groundwater, but you're also diverting water, you know, when you're trying to, like, limit your irrigation demand. You're also trying to fill the root profile.

And so so from a perspective of drivers for vineyards, you know, '21 was a real and 2020 were really hard years. They could never catch up through their irrigation, but our but this system not only would have offered offer us an opportunity to recharge, but it would have also offered us up an opportunity to wet the root zone and help with their vineyards and reduce some of the risk of these dry weather conditions. So the initiative, we had several things that we're doing at one time. We were doing a pilot study, different funding sources, pilot study primarily supported by the Department of Conservation grant, pilot at scale, which is our phase one study. I'm gonna talk about that a lot that a lot today.

And then we had these related governance, water rights, energy, financial things going on. And I wrote in the completion report that we're submitting for the OFR initiative phase one, and it was edited out by my coworkers. But you could argue that the regulatory loops you have to drop could jump for over and pass through for this kind of project exceed what you would for, like, building a highway. I mean I mean, it's just it's just because at least the highway, you only have to worry about the road crossings and, you know, some things specific to highways. But here, we have to do things specific to everybody.

And so, and then as far as governance, you know, if you have a GSA, which is here, for instance, you can kinda work governance into it and say, well, we're dealing with, you know, we're gonna have benefits and, costs distributed. But that's you know, in Alexander Valley, we don't have a GSA right now, so we don't have that structure. So there's a governance issue there. There's water rights issues. That's always a there's always that.

Whenever you're doing this type of thing, you're moving water, and one of the largest costs of in California for energy is moving water. So so, that's a that's something that you have to get by, figure out how to get by, get through in this type of system. So I guess the bottom line is that, you know, all we're trying to do is is throw water on land. That's all we're really trying to do. But to do it, there's a lot of challenges and a lot of challenges that the normal person doesn't think about, especially when they're playing with their kid and they're throwing water in the sandbox.

So, so, anyway, our targets are, for, the pilot scale. We've enrolled about a thousand acres of vineyards into the the program. The pilot scale was the idea of that was to develop it at a fit a large enough size, then you could pilot out some of these challenges so that when we go and expand the full build out, we're more we're better prepared. So we have a thousand, fields. We expect about half of those to to maybe 40% of them would be in operation at any one time.

We're trying to put about 28 inches on each field. And and for the pilot scale that's gonna if we hit those targets, we're getting about 2,300 acre feet a year annually and that would be about 36 duration on each field that we employ. So no one field is running during the whole time. And then at full build out, we're we're getting very similar operational things, but we have more acreage, almost 3,000. We were targeting 7,000 acre feet.

And the diversions off the river for pilot scale, the maximum diversion we would have is 16 CFS. In a full build out, it would be 55 CFS. So in both cases we will not divert below our threshold. And then as the flows increase we are able to increase our flows till we get to the maximum diversion rate we have. I'll talk a little bit about we have these pilot studies that we've been doing at the same time.

We've gotten a lot of data from them. This is sort of one of the sites typical setup. We have controls, recharge fields. We have moisture probes and lysimeters and time lapse electro resistivity tomography going on. We have a lot of cultural data collected for these fields, information on effects on bud break, information on yield, information on quality.

So far, last year was the first year where we ran these pilots. Last year, we saw no negative effects of this on crops, on on the vines, and we saw we we may have seen some benefits, as far as, yield and but it's just too early to say. And probably next this year, we'll probably see the opposite. So who knows? We have one more year pilot studies, which is this year that we're completing right now.

This is what it looked like last year. We were using a frost protection sprinkler system, and you can see them sprinkling. And they were sprinkling about eight hours a day. They were being operated by the vineyard operators themselves. And I think this is another important point we should bring up is that these types of systems are are are partnerships.

They're partnerships with landowners and vineyards and and agencies. And so there's a lot of, like, give and take when you have a system like this. There's a lot of also, like, you're you're there's a lot of benefits of, like, leveraging this infrastructure that's out there. You know, there's in in this case, we're doing the frost protection systems, but we've we we pivoted that year to using drip. And this year, we're primarily using drip instead of running it eight hours a day, five days a week, which is a a labor friendly approach for the vineyards who are partnering with us.

We're running it twenty four seven. And because the drips apply about a third of what you get with the frost protection sprinkler, but we're running it three times longer. We're hitting very similar targets on a daily daily basis about an inch a day. So but and and and moving to DRIP to do it, DRIP saves us about 10% on energy costs, more. We'll have those numbers by the end of this program, this year, and, these will have a direct comparison.

And it also is like, frost protection sprinklers are problematic in that they nobody wants to do frost protection with sprinklers because it's really horrible for your rivers because it's the only time where in a basin, everyone's gonna turn on the sprinklers at the same time. So the you know, so there's been a movement away towards the wind machines, And so a lot of these frost protection systems have been let go, torn down. You know? They're just not in that great shape anymore. So moving to drip has allowed us to more easily scale it.

So now instead now we have an op you know, everyone has drip, and they all maintain their drip systems. And so that's what we use, what we plan to use, and and here here it is. And it's not very dramatic. Here's the Alexander Valley. Here's the service areas that we have in the studies we did.

The work we've done now are in service area twelve, two, twelve, nine, and 11. This is coverage of the piloted scale within those service areas. One of them we have almost a whole service area over an SA 9 because that's all one landowner. In SA 11, we have a smaller parcel. We have we're working with four landowners on this.

Our champions are helping us shepherd this idea through. You can see the infrastructure there. I won't spend very much time on it, but every service area is run independently. It has its own point of diversion off the river. It may have multiple diversions at at full build out. They all have, points of connections to the vineyards. Those point of connections are the irrigate or where they pump. For groundwater, we tie into those systems because those are distribution points for their sprinkler systems. And, there's filters at those systems. We provide additional filtering where we do our diversion so that we can maintain a really high quality water to protect the drip systems.

And, some side benefits of this is that everything we're putting in is electric. So the grid has expanded with us, towards the river, through a lot of these farms, And, and so now it's giving them the opportunity to move move to electric too for their systems because they now they have infrastructure located. So that's a a benefit that's peripheral to the to what we have, an ancillary benefit, but a real one. And and even now, like, when you look at the cost of power with electricity and and fossil fuels, Right now is the darkest time for those prices because electricity is used to be cheaper for this kind of stuff. It's not anymore, but what but but it doesn't require the labor cost for maintaining it as much.

You can flip a switch and turn it on. Importantly, you can put it on a VFT, allows you to throttle it down and save energy, whereas with a fossil fuel driven pump, the only way you can throttle it is by throttling it, and you're just burning energy. So there's a lot of reasons that, it's still cheaper even though it's not. Here's some of the tasks that we have. A lot of tasks.

I've sort of talked about them already. Permitting water rights, CEQUA design and engineering. Permitting water rights and CEQUA have been real challenges for us in far as navigating. In the in the end, we had a lot of support from Sonoma from Sonoma as far as we were able to do our installations as agricultural equipment because they were also part of the agricultural irrigation systems. So we were able to put them in under that.

So it made installation easier. Water rights, we're working with the water board right now on on it. I think that will in the end, they'll be okay. But we're, you know, we're going for the hundred and eighty day permit. We didn't need it for the pilots pilot study, so we didn't apply for it then. So we'll have it by next, by next season. And then and then we had construction. We had we're still working through governance in the in the area. That's still a big issue for Alexander Valley. And financially, how you're gonna keep it running, that's also a big thing.

They'll have to figure out. You guys have the advantage of having a GSA. Considerations, I put some down. These are just things that have come up during the project. There's considerations about, like, when you wanna put a system like in like like, you know, there's no silver bullets.

Everything's a good idea, and it's all gonna do wonderful things. You know? But there's no silver bullet. And so something like this, I mean I mean, we still don't know how well it's gonna work. We know that, like, if we are too close to the river from our pilot studies that we're we're doing a lot for helping with the soil soil moisture profile, but the but it's but our measures of of hydraulic conductivity are are much higher than they were thought to be.

And so a lot of the water we're putting in has very short retention time. We think maybe it's like well, for it to spread out to where it could go to the river, maybe it's forty five to a hundred and fifty days, hundred and thirty days, hundred days. I don't know. So if you remember the map I showed, one of our ideas is to be able to move further up the valley. And so the idea at some point will be that we would apply water earlier season further up the valley so that has longer time to get down to the river.

And then for the closer stuff, maybe just apply less water and and maybe just shoot for root zone, and, for benefiting the root zone and doing in lieu recharge mainly, for those systems. So vision and expectations is really important because you you don't wanna overpromise, and that's why every project you would go into, there's a the one of the risk is the risk of the outcome. Holistically, you know, there's a lot of considerations, And and we were and and fortunately, we've been able to work with some good people. But, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of challenges when you're working on a project like crosses water, air, land, agriculture, domestic wells. I mean, everything.

Everything is in this spot, and it's pretty easy to get stuck in silos. You know? There's a you know, this this group is working on water quality. This group is working on water rights. This group is working on working on air quality and and and never get out. You know? And so there in in these types of systems, has to be a movement towards more holistic thinking, trying to make that part of a mission of a of a of an agency, which is a hard thing to do. I don't know how you do it. But, you know, when you're when you're tasked with taking care of water, well, how how do you get them them lost to be tasked with taking care of fish a little bit, a little bit of air? I mean, I don't know how you do it, but it has to be done.

And and then you have a lot of partners in this. These are all partnerships. Most simply, you have public and private, but you have tribes where they fall, another public. And then you have others. You have nonprofits. Energy and water connectivity are an issue. Funding constraints, governance, whole host of things. And maybe oh, it's I don't know what I said. Now these are the deliverables we had for this project. We can talk about those later if you want.

There's a lot of stuff. Some of it's, you know, permits, CEQUA, water rights, design stuff, some stuff from the pilot studies, pretty useful stuff, you know, strategies for operation, proof of concept, expectations, regulatory refinement. And then the policy and planning stuff that we had come out of here, we have a master plan, which would probably be useful for anyone who's thinking of doing it. See what our vision is for Alexander Valley. We have, for those of you who don't want to read a relatively it's not that long, but a relatively long document that's kind of boring, we have the fact sheets and the white paper.

The white paper is less boring and and kind of in-depth. The fact sheet is not boring at all and very light on details. But, you know, I'd recommend those. We have a project completion report, which is really just a standard thing you do with DWR, and ours is worth reading because we talked about a lot of the challenges that you face. And then we have a water availability analysis that we're working through, and it's not really ready yet.

But I think it's gonna stress there's a lot of the progress being made on water rights in in this state. Unfortunately, it's not a lot a lot enough of a lot. So, you know, I think I might close on this. One of the concepts I've been trying to get across to people is that, like, you know, there's periods of abundance and there's periods periods of scarcity. You know, in the Alexander Valley, winter is a period of abundance even during the periods that's not abundant.

Now if you think about water rights, water rights are about parsing out water that is scarce. You know, it's about, you know, making sure the farmers get theirs, the domestic users get theirs, these guys get theirs. If you look at, like, in the Russian River through the Alexander Valley, they take they water rights gives them about 200 CFS for those uses during July and August, which are, the highest periods of use. Our threshold, which is during a period where there's hardly any use of water, is 210 CFS. Now I'm kinda simple.

I don't know how that's a problem. And I'm almost saying I don't know how it's a problem under any condition, that you could not have some kind of rule, boundary, or something that says, you know, during periods of abundance, this is what the river needs, and we'll monitor the river to make sure it's at that or or more. And if it's not there and you you're talking about taking, know everyone's taking less than, you know, a 100 c of s. You know? You're all golden.

I mean, I don't get it. And and and and and so I think that there's a there's really there's really a need to for people to kind of rethink about this because it's a big challenge. You know, for us, we're going through engineering, legal, all that to get our water rights. But if you wanna do this at scale and you're and you're trying to do it, either the agencies will have to take care of it for you or you have to simplify it because, you know, the vineyard person can't do it without some help with water rights. The farmer can't do it without was help with water rights.

I mean, I've seen, down in Fresno, I see us having trouble taking water out of the, out out of the river there, and it's running under, you know, thousands of events. But it's fully out it's fully allocated or whatever they call it, so you can't take it. But you watch it go down the river right by you near flight conditions. I don't know. So, anyway, that's, I guess, the closing thought maybe.

Yeah. So any questions and thoughts on this? Hope I didn't hope hope this is what you wanted to hear. I'm not what you wanna hear, but what you were interested in hearing about.

Thank you. Yeah. I had some discussion that I wanted to have about the proximity of the wells that are in the program to the river. It looked like on the map, from what I can remember, that some of them were pretty far.

No. They're all pretty close. They're all we we have four wells. And, I mean, we have points of diversion, which are I have points of connection, which are further off. And those are the connections to the to the irrigation systems. But the, connections to the river, they're all they're all within the they're all kind of within the riparian zone of the river. And if you look at, like, well, our pilots are really showing that they're all really connected to the river.

That that's the kind of where I was getting to is how you what methods you've used or are using to determine that the well, the groundwater, the well is actually a river underflow river diversion versus a groundwater well.

Well, those wells have those wells have just been put in. So we we didn't use them for the pilots. We were because the pilots in them were going concurrently. So we use shallow groundwater wells for the pilots. But but we know from the drilling logs that it's all it's all Pruners River sediment. And and and and, I mean, the what everyone thinks out there is that they're connected. You know? And so everyone's sort of working off that. We put them up right against the river. If you look at, like, the soil maps and stuff like that, you see you see the soils adjacent there pretty pretty gravelly.

And then when you drilled them, we, I think I think the drill logs are basically I talked to the engineer, Tom Hammond, who was overseeing it all and designed it. He said, you know, we went through, like, first five feet. We went through the stuff. We hit some kind of layer then from five feet to 70 feet, which is the depth of our wells. It was just all ripped just like river gravel. It it's just yeah. So we're really comfortable with it being, you know, river underflow.

Yeah. And then from the governance standpoint, it sounds like that's been a lot of fun. What's DWR making you do? Are there applications for water rights for those wells?

We have water right applications that we have going. And we're they have in this program, they have, like, a thing about, you know, what what is your what are you doing of monitoring in the next three years or something? And we have getting our water rights as one of the deals that we're gonna do. And and we we put it into completion report too that we have a we have a schedule of things that we're gonna get. You know, the the water rights in theory, there's a hundred and eighty day temporary permit for recharge.

There's a five year temporary permit for recharge, and there's a permanent permit for recharge. To date, there is no no one has ever gotten a five year temporary permit.

Wow. There's probably a lot of applications in there.

I don't know. I don't know, but there's enough. But but it's it's too even like a I mean, YOLO is a really has been doing their their flight control district has been doing been applying for recharge a lot for for eight, nine years now. And they you know, the hundred and eighty day permit is is relatively easy to get, especially once you've got it. And and and to so they want to keep repeating it because they can do it.

And they and and and the excitement of going for a five year permit isn't there because it's you just see, you know, here's the hill for the one eighty day permit, and there's the hill for the five year permit. And god knows the the five the permit permits are outside the building. I mean, so it's, you know, it's so, yeah, we're we're gonna have a hundred eighty permit, hundred and eighty day permit, and then we're gonna start the application for the five year permit when we submit the second one eighty day permit. So

Got it. So the the areas that were identified on the map are are the areas that the re that you wanna that you wanna study the recharge, but the water is coming from single wells that are closer to the proximity of the river itself.

Yeah. And, like like, when I showed that whole map of all the service areas

Yeah.

All those service areas go from the top of the valley Mhmm. There to mount the hill edge down to the river, and all of them will have pumps adjacent in that area to the river. And putting those pumps in was not that hard as far as, like, permitting. It was actually pretty easy. Once once they understood what they were for, first interpreted in that we were doing managed offer recharge through those pumps where you're pushing water down.

So when you say pumps, these are like, secondary pumps that are pumping the the water is being pumped from the well and then a secondary pump to

No. There no. There's a there's a there's a pump in the well or that's pulling it up and it's charging the line, and then that then that is going off. And then there will be in some instances, there will be secondary pumps further up the place of where we have a lot of, where we have a lot of elevation to get. But we don't have any source pumps away from the river. Everything's right adjacent to the river so that we're getting underflow under all conditions.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And then at the vineyard, it's stored in

the Well, vineyards, it it I mean

Before it's applied or is it applied?

It depends on how they apply it because and we have a, like, an operations thing we put together for this that hits most of this. But, like, if they're doing so the idea is that we would, switch on everything's electric on the pumps. So and they all have variable frequency drives. And every service area is fairly small. I mean, it's not really small, but small as far as limited number of people in it.

You know, only so many people can farm in that area. So we'll, we'll end up having some kind of accounting program where we're finding out how much people wanna put on, and then we'll pump accordingly. And those pumps would run twenty four seven unless we drop below the threshold or we move into a period where people might do frost protection, like temperature wise. So those would be the the limits. And and the threshold is applied not only at Alexander Valley, but it's applied at there's a different threshold, but downstream to make sure that the river is not suffering any effect.

So we we do that. We don't pump during frost periods, and then we're hopefully pumping twenty four seven. And that's why people running drip is better for us because they can then operate their drips twenty four seven. People could go in and do the sprinklers like we showed in our first year pilot. They would be on a different schedule and they would probably have to have a place to store it because it'll be too hard for us to be turning on and off pumps.

But but currently it's not stored on farm. It's just

No. It's just

pumped and then applied.

Pumped and applied. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

So that's that's went on during the pilot studies. And and next year is the first year of real operation. So so because our pumps will go through their PG and E stuff in May. And at that point, everything will be good to go. We'll have the water rights in place by November 1.

And then next year, we'll we're gonna have the DWR grant stop now, but the but we have other grants that have are are going longer, and then we're trying to get an additional grant. So we would then have next year be sort of testing our operational model, you know, and then refining it after next year to to be better. Yeah.

How difficult was it to recruit farmers Given your list of challenges, where would you rank convincing farmers?

A few of the farmers are really easy to get because they came to us and said, you know, I heard about your work down in Fresno. We wanted to try to do this up here up here in Sonoma. And and so there's a couple like that. There were a couple other who were kind of champions for us too, And and they all all those four those four farmers we have, vineyard managers, operators, are all pretty were pretty easy to enroll. They were interested.

We had an outreach. We had outreach. We did a lot of one on one with them. We met with them. If we were you know, for the rest, you know, we have probably a half a dozen other big vineyards who are taking a wait and see attitude.

And then when you talk about the smaller vineyards, you know, they're really wait waiting for proof of concept because they're it's just too risky. But the bigger some of the bigger farmers, they see, you know, they see, oh, we went through this curtailment. The other thing I didn't mention, Alexander Valley also is losing some water from the their Potter Valley project being decommissioned. So they see the writing on the wall for more water or better or at least risk free water, whatever amount it is, or reduced risk water anyway. So, you know, I would say I would say that there's there's probably two tiers.

The first group of the people who are champions, they won't be hard to find. You know? The second group of guys of people who are who are interested in wait and see, they will be hard to fight, and and it won't be it won't be hard to make up your mind about them because they're not gonna jump in until it's till it's there. You know? And then the small farmers, I think if they see I think they could go either way. They're sort of like an independent party. You know? They can they they if they feel like they know this champion and they and their neighbors and everything's going great and they figure, well, it's good enough for them. I'm gonna do it. You know?

And they may all say, well, my other neighbor, he's waiting to see. I'm gonna do that. So I I I think it's like a mixed bag. I I think it's hard to to put agriculture into one group, you know, as far as, like, them, what what what's the challenge? I think that the challenge you know, my experience so far, and it's in here in Sonoma and down in Fresno, is that my biggest challenges aren't the people I'm working with.

It's it's usually it's usually all the things that we have to overcome on the way. And, I guess the last thing is that, like, this flood mark concept, you know, I I'm sure you're all familiar with it. You know, it's it's like, woah. We're gonna have all this water. We're gonna get people to put on their lands.

It's gonna go we have beautiful graphics of it going on in all these landscapes, working landscapes, and it's all hunky dory. And you know what? They're we're leveraging their equipment, and it's gonna be great, but you know, it's just not that way, you know, because one of the challenges with this grant and all grants is, like, getting the money to support to to, like, offset the risk and investment being done by these people. You know? Like, we only wanna put in new equipment that's specific to on farm recharge.

It's like, well, you're hooking up to this guy's vineyard. You know, you might get more value out of your your equipment if you let them also use it for irrigation, you know, because it is an electric pump. Right next to the river, they have a water right. It's better than them using their gas pump or their diesel pump. That's causing all sorts of problems.

But no, they want, you know, the rules they're putting they want you to have is it's for this. Well, I mean, you know, they're getting a lot of benefit from it. Mean, for heaven's sakes, I mean, this is a DWR grant. DWR would see huge benefits from a working partnership in which they would have everyone doing it. But then the other half of it says, well, we have these you know, we have to audit you know, count our money and we wanna make sure we it all goes to the good right thing it's supposed to go towards.

And, yeah, that's a great idea, but in practice, you know, it gets pretty muddy. So I think that's a big challenge is, like, how do you fund these things? Like, also, like, how do you fund the operations of them? I mean, you guys have a GSA.

I'm curious on can I jump in and just ask you? Like, how do you current currently reimburse farmers for running their drip twenty four seven? It's coming from the granite.

It's coming from the granite.

Yeah. So how does that work? You just

We They

figure out how much energy they use, and you reimburse them for that amount.

Yeah. Yeah. And and and so far, like, we haven't had to reimburse them for any labor. We haven't had to reimburse them for their use of their equipment. We haven't know, I mean I mean I mean, it's a fairly significant I mean, you know, one of the people had to, like, fix their I mean, it's it's just a dirt road, but they had to fix their road after the first pilot season because with the sprinklers, it was wrecking their road so much that that by the time they came to the growing season, they had to fix it. You know, they didn't charge us for it. You know, we've they've charged us for energy. That's it. You know? And it's just it is it's a you know, it's it's just it's it's just it's really frustrating.

So I I think that, you know, you know, if you're gonna have a public partnership or what a public private partnership or something for something that's benefiting public and the private. Let's treat it as a partnership. You know, let's really do it. We're gonna like we're gonna figure out how to you know, like, there's no way right now that there's so you're like, you guys are GSA, and you're going to so let's say you do this, and you're going to and your GSA is landowner supported. Fees on farmers, I guess.

Right? So you do this project, and you improve your groundwater situation, and your farmers pay. And, like and it's great, but, you know, there is wasn't there was, like, a benefit to fisheries, and there was a benefit to the domestic, well, drinker users, and there was a benefit for, you know, tourism probably. You know, there's all these little benefits, you know, and it's like, you know, you know, it's just not it's stupid to say this, but it's just not gonna be fair. You know, you're gonna you're asking these people to throw throw all their resources towards these things, and it's a great idea.

It's a really great idea. It's an efficient idea. It has a lot of work ahead of it, but it has a lot of potential, and and it's it's cheaper. Like like, when we look at the energy cost, those energy costs are dwarf they are dwarfed by the cost of putting in more storage and other things that will be needed to be done there. So if we can, like, take a chunk out of that, we've saved the county a lot of money. You know? But, you know, how's that company how's that come around? So, you know, those are all things to to think about. You know, how do you how do you pay for it?

Just one quick do you have to do any kind of accounting to look at how much of the water that is applied is

Yeah.

We'll have to do accounting. And and, I mean, you you know, it's you guys are gonna have the same issue. It's like, you know, despite the best GS model that you might be using, you know, what goes down and what goes sideways? You know? And I'm not the first person who's probably told you that's a really hard thing to figure out.

So, you know, we'll do accounting. We'll see how much water we we got, how much water we applied, and then that'll go into some budget water budget. We'll look at groundwater tables, see if if we like, if you look at our groundwater tables or you can see big drops that came during dry years, so maybe you get some indicator wells to show that, you know, things like that. Yeah.

Thank you. You're welcome, Marie. We'll open it up for public comments, questions now.

Did come in Chris Malin. I did come in late, so maybe you did show a graphic on, the hydrologic curve. Are you familiar? If you're familiar with CEF, California Environmental Flows Framework Framework guideline, this panel is familiar with, there's a hydrologic curve, and your project says that you're gonna be taking sipping water during the, fall to winter high flows. And so I'm wondering in terms of the fish, when they're migrating, you know, how do you know when you can sip from the river aquifer and not, diminish the flows that the fish need to migrate?

And in the CEF model, they have that all figured out of when you can do part c of their guidelines where you come up with a project that improves the flows and you understand, how your project's gonna impact that hydrologic curve. So I am wondering about that. And I am also wondering about you said that it doesn't really make sense to have storage, but it looks like it there could be storage. And, also, if you're sipping at high flows, that sort of tells the lay public person like me that there's been a storm or that we've had, you know, weather come through, and so the ground is already saturated. It could even be flooding on the ground.

So why would you be sipping and giving it to the farmers when the water saturation could really already be high. So that seems kind of wonky to me that, you're gonna be sipping at high flows. And then how do you how do you actually determine that that sipping of the water is actually gonna be in the percolation and not be runoff, like stormwater runoff. So I'm really trying to understand how you follow that water and that you can prove that you're actual that water that you're sipping is actually going back into the aquifer and not running off as storm water. So it seems kinda nebulous.

Thank you.

Yeah.

You can keep your comments brief and and follow-up offline, if that makes more sense.

Whatever you want.

He did go over it earlier in the presentation on slide seven. So it might be helpful to just chat offline.

Well, I I will say one thing about it. So I'm not familiar with the model. I mean, I'm is that the same as the TNC model and the UC, the one where they talk about fisheries and trying to draw? I I I will say this about a lot of models is that they don't really do very good with uncertainty and and variance. You know, they they deal with, like, averages.

And one of the slides I showed was of the Russian River during ten years and the variance between flows year to year is just huge way outside what a model is gonna capture. So so there's that. I wasn't sure about the storage thing. I won't talk about that. The the the way we know that you know, we have a well, the threshold for a high a high flow threshold that is not a is not a flood flow.

So it's it's a it's a high flow, and that high flow, if if you'd seen that slide, occurs during the entire during much of the winter period, and it's a response to storms, but it's not a response to a single storm. It's a response to a series of storms that have hit the area. Now in our pilot study, what we've done to prevent runoff, which is a good concern, is that we just don't do it during the rainy period. We wait for the ground to dry up enough. And so if you look at, like, the period of time we have thirty days of recharging the first pilot, we probably and last year, that probably occurred over fifty days or forty five days because fifteen of those days, we could not do it.

And then we're relying on the applicators to tell us that, yeah, the water is staying in in the field and and going down. I guess that I the one other thing is is is giving it to the farmers is kind of a a it's not really representative of what we're doing. None of the farmers actually need the water between November and March. None of them need it. They don't need it.

We are working with the farmers for them to do recharge, and it's and it's it's work. It's work for them. It's work for us.

Okay.

Is there any callers on mine?

We have no callers. Oh, Don, go ahead. You have three minutes.

Hello, Don Monk. I skimmed quickly through the fact sheet that's in the agenda package, and and I didn't hear you talk at all about until just your last comment saying that you've improved groundwater recharge. Is there information? And know you said you had soil moisture monitoring devices in the vineyards and everything that you're tracking. Have you have you improved groundwater storage and have the vineyards use less water for irrigation in during this pilot program?

We as we've improved soil moisture in in the soils. We've extended it out, the moisture longer. I can't as far as the effects on, like, a water table effect, we see when we do an application, we see an increase in the water table. I mentioned earlier that this the hydraulic conductivity in this area is very high, so it spreads out very quickly. So it's it's not strongly apparent if you look at the large larger scale.

You have to look at it event by event, and you see the response event by event. Our thought is as you move further away from the river, we know that the soils where we are are are very high hydraulic conductivity. We also know that as as you move out outside the river itself and further up, it's they they move they begin to be soils that aren't that way, so we expect that. We've done this same type of thing over at a place in Mark West, and in there, we'd saw with well, with that that place would have soils more representative of the ones further away from the river. And and there, we saw responses in groundwater to our applications as well that were more noticeable. And I missed something, I think.

Reduced need for pumping of groundwater for vineyard irrigation. Is the water are the vineyards using less water because of the diversions that you're doing during the winter months?

I would I I don't know for we don't we haven't gone through the data for the for that last pilot to say the first year of the pilot. We know in the Mark West study that they they did not do they skipped their first irrigation in response to the recharge work. In these, I don't know. We we do see indicate indications that they had improved yields and quality, but it those are just indications at this point.

Thank you.

Yeah. You're welcome.

Okay. Well, thank you very much. I think that brings us to the last item, which is future agenda items.

Yeah, and I'll keep it very short. I do want to thank Doctor. Vashan and all of our presenters for presenting today. It's a very interesting conversation, a very frank conversation. So thank you.

Yeah, just that next TAG meeting will be April 9. And we'll, again, hear an update on the water year 2025 annual report. We're going to have an item from ISW and GDE monitoring results and a presentation from our planning division on the county's update to the water availability analysis, which I think they're seeking your input on. And to please tentatively hold on your calendars June 11 for a special meeting, we'll confirm. But please keep that date on your calendars available. And other than that, thank you and see you all in April.

Okay. Meeting is adjourned.