How California can solve its water woes by flooding its farmland

This story was produced by and co-published with . The land of the Central Valley works hard. Here in the heart of California, in the most productive farming region in the United States, almost every square inch of land has been razed, planted, and shaped to support large-scale agriculture. The valley produces almonds, walnuts, pistachios, olives, cherries, beans, eggs, milk, beef, melons, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and garlic. This economic mandate is clear to the naked eye: Trucks laden with fertilizer or diesel trundle down arrow-straight roads past square field after square field, each one dense with tomato shrubs or nut trees. Canals slice between orchards and acres of silage, pushing all-important irrigation water through a network of laterals from farm to farm. Cows jostle for space beneath metal awnings on crowded patches of dirt, emitting a stench that wafts over nearby towns.

There is one exception to this law of productivity. In the midst of the valley, at the confluence of two rivers that have been dammed and diverted almost to the point of disappearance, there is a wilderness. The ground is covered in water that seeps slowly across what used to be walnut orchards, the surface buzzing with mosquitoes and songbirds. Trees climb over each other above thick knots of reedy grass, consuming what used to be levees and culverts. Beavers, quail, and deer, which haven’t been seen in the area in decades, tiptoe through swampy ponds early in the morning, while migratory birds alight overnight on knolls before flying south.

Austin Stevenot, who is in charge of maintaining this restored jungle of water and wild vegetation, says this is how the Central Valley is supposed to look. Indeed, it’s how the land did look for thousands of years until white settlers arrived in the 19th century and remade it for industrial-scale agriculture. In the era before colonization, Stevenot’s ancestors in the California Miwok tribe used the region’s native plants for cooking, basket weaving, and making herbal medicines. Now those plants have returned. “I could walk around this landscape and go, ‘I can use that, I can use this to do that, I can eat that, I can eat that, I can do this with that,’” he told me as we drove through the flooded land in his pickup truck. “I have a different way of looking at the ground.”

You wouldn’t know it without Stevenot there to point out the signs, but this untamed floodplain used to be a workhorse parcel, just like the land around it. The fertile site at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers once hosted a dairy operation and a cluster of crop fields owned by one of the county’s most prominent farmers. Around a decade ago, a conservation nonprofit worked out a deal to buy the 2,100-acre tract from the farmer, rip up the fields, and restore the ancient vegetation that once existed there. The conservationists’ goal with this $40 million project was not just to restore a natural habitat, but also to pilot a solution to the massive water management crisis that has bedeviled California and the West for decades.

In addition to these two functions, the restored swamp also sequesters an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produced by thousands of gas-powered vehicles. It also provides a haven for migratory birds and other species that have faced the threat of extinction. “It’s been amazing just getting to see nature take it back over,” Stevenot said. “When you go out to a commercially farmed orchard or field, and you stand there and listen, it’s sterile. You don’t hear anything. But you come out here on that same day, you hear insects, songbirds. It’s that lower part of the ecosystem starting up.”

Austin Stevenot walks through Dos Rios Nature Preserve in Modesto, California.

This year, after a deluge of winter rain and snow, water rolled down the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers, filling up the site for the first time since it had been restored. As Stevenot guided me across the landscape, he showed me all the ways that land and water were working together. In one area, water had spread like a sheet across three former fields, erasing the divisions that had once separated acres on the property. The advent of the restoration project, known as , has worked wonders for this small section of the San Joaquin Valley, putting an end to frequent flooding in the area and altering long-held attitudes about environmental conservation. Even so, it represents just a chink in the armor of the Central Valley, where agricultural interests still control almost all the land and water. As climate change makes California’s weather whiplash more extreme, creating a cycle of drought and flooding, flood experts say replicating this work has become more urgent than ever.

But building another Dos Rios isn’t just about finding money to buy and reforest thousands of acres of land. To create a network of restored floodplains will also require reaching an accord with a powerful industry that has historically clashed with environmentalists — and that produces fruit and nuts for much of the country. Making good on the promise of Dos Rios will mean convincing the state’s farmers to occupy less land, irrigate with less water, and produce less food. Cannon Michael, a sixth-generation farmer who runs Bowles Farming Company in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, says such a shift is possible, but it won’t be easy. “There’s a limited resource, there’s a warming climate, there’s a lot of constraints, and a lot of people are aging out, not always coming back to the farm,” Michael said. “There’s a lot of transition that’s happening anyway, and I think people are starting to understand that life is gonna change. And I think those of us who want to still be around the valley…