Terranova Ranch floods its own crops to bank water in the aquifer

In early 2017, after five years of drought, atmospheric rivers flooded California's San Joaquin Valley. While neighbors sandbagged, Terranova Ranch's Don Cameron — dreaming of such a deluge since 1983 and building for it since 2010 — ordered more water onto his land, keeping a quarter of his almonds, a third of his grapes, half his pistachios and all his walnuts and olives underwater. From winter through spring he siphoned over 3,000 acre-feet from the Kings River; one Barbera vineyard needing 2 acre-feet a year got 13. At harvest, 'the grapes were as sweet as ever.'

The real success lay underground. Decades of pumping had left a 230-foot-deep cone of depression in the water table beneath Terranova, but after the 2017 flood and snowmelt trickled down, the water level rose 40 feet. Central Valley aquifers could hold an estimated 140 million acre-feet — three times more than all of California's reservoirs combined — with no evaporation loss, at a small fraction of surface storage's cost, and without fallowing farmland.

Cameron didn't invent on-farm recharge but earned the title of its godfather: the first farmer foolhardy enough to experiment on his own harvest, winning state and county innovation prizes and appointment in 2018 as president of California's agriculture board. His problem inverted — 'right as he went crazy drowning his acres, it became something everybody wanted,' and outside claimants moved on the once-unwanted Kings River surges, threatening his access to the very water his project runs on.

Floodwater was treated as a disaster to pump away while the aquifer beneath the ranch kept sinking; Cameron matched one problem to the other.

Crops survived deliberate flooding that accepted wisdom said would suffocate roots, making the farmland itself the recharge basin.

Underground storage beats reservoirs on cost and evaporation and requires no land taken out of production.

The storage you need may already be under your feet: briefly flooding the asset you are protecting can beat building new reservoirs.

The once-unwanted floodwater became contested: a land developer and an outside water district claimed the Kings River surge, and the outcome of that fight put Cameron's recharge project at the center of California's building water war.