A Letter About Water to the Yolo County Board of Supervisors.
Please consider a different future for Yolo agriculture, with greater respect for water and land resources.
This is an open letter to you from Letters About Water, a digital Substack magazine documenting the implementation of SGMA in Yolo County and other water-related topics. Letters About Water | Ricardo Amon | Substack
The purpose of this letter is to examine the decision made by the Board on April 8, 2025, denying Ms. Annie Maine’s petition not to approve a new well permit in the Hungry Hollow Focus Area.
The permit was approved thus consenting to the continued degradation of the Hungry Hollow aquifer, already under pressure from hundreds of new deep wells drilled to supply 100 percent of irrigated water from groundwater sources.
Converting more historic non-irrigated land into irrigated perennial plantations.
During the proceedings, the Board members were aware that the well permit had to be approved, as requested by County staff and Board Legal Counsel.
Due to the Board's decision in November of 2024, when new well permit standards were adopted for the Focus Areas, this well permit project found a lop-hole left open.
I appreciated the honesty from the Board members recognizing the gap left and committing to closing this gap in the forthcoming Board meeting.
A group of people in Yolo County are concerned with the laisse-faire approach to agricultural development during the past 12 years, transforming the agricultural landscape from annual crop rotations to perennial plantations.
Leading to overdraft conditions in the Hungry Hollow and hardening the demand for groundwater in the county.
We would appreciate that Board members considered a different future for Yolo agriculture, with greater respect for water and land resources.
We wish that previous Boards had predicted the impact these changes could have had on the Hungry Hollow, before allowing historic non-irrigated lands to be converted to groundwater dependent perennial plantations.
Knowing that there was no data to determine the sustainable yield for this aquifer.
The lack of data would have been a good reason to delay the issuing of new well permits for the past 10 years.
Instead, the lack of data has been used to expand the footprint of plantation agriculture systems in the Hungry Hollow area.
The damage has been done, with Yolo towns and families losing their well drinking water and family farmers drilling deeper wells, to compete with large corporate enterprises extracting Yolo County groundwater.