California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) campaigns to prevent agricultural pollution entering the state’s rivers and streams. CSPA campaigns to hold agricultural polluters accountable and to enforce existing laws under the Clean Water Act (CWA). This campaign involves taking action through regulatory proceedings and by taking legal action when necessary.
Central Valley waterways and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are severely impaired by nonpoint sources of pollution. The majority of this pollution enters waterways as runoff from millions of acres of irrigated agricultural land.
Runoff from agricultural land carries nitrates, phosphates, pesticides, and other chemicals into streams, rivers, and the Bay-Delta. This pollution causes significant damage to Bay-Delta ecosystems, and poses a significant threat to human health.
Water quality monitoring reveals that virtually all surface water sites downstream of agricultural areas exceed water quality standards: 63% are toxic to aquatic life, 54% exceed pesticide standards (often for multiple pesticides), 66% violate metals criterion, 87% exceed pathogen standards and more than 80% exceed standards for general parameters (dissolved oxygen, pH, total suspended solids, salts, etc.). State Water Board studies reveal that 40% of the groundwater assessed in California is polluted.
The Department of Water Resources has stated that three-fourths of impaired groundwater in California is contaminated by salts, pesticides and nitrates, primarily from agricultural practices.
Background: Initial Efforts to Develop a Regulatory Program
As a result of intense lobbying by farming interests, discharges of wastes from irrigated agriculture were exempted from permitting requirements of the federal Clean Water Act (CWA). However, agriculture is not exempt from regulation under California’s Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act (Porter-Cologne Act).
The Porter-Cologne Act requires that anyone discharging or proposing to discharge wastes to surface or groundwater must submit a Report of Waste Discharge (ROWD) identifying the location, volume, and constituents discharged. Based upon the ROWD, the applicable Regional Water Quality Control Board would issue a Waste Discharge Requirements (WDRs) specifying the specific pollution control measures necessary to ensure that the state’s waters are protected.
However, the Porter-Cologne Act also allows waivers of WDRs for specific types of discharge.
Again, as a result of intense lobbying, the Central Valley Regional Board issued a waiver for discharges from irrigated lands in March 1982. Consequently, farmers did not have to identify where and what they were discharging.
Between 1982 and 2003, irrigated agriculture was exempt from water quality regulations routinely applicable to virtually every other segment of society.
Beginning in the mid 1980s through the early 1990s, studies by the United States Geological Survey and the Regional Board documented the extensive toxicity in Central Valley streams from an astonishing array of salts, metals and agricultural pesticides.
In 1998, CSPA worked with San Francisco Baykeeper in drafting proposed amendments to the Porter-Cologne Act that would eliminate waivers as an alternative to issuing WDRs.
As passed by the legislature in 1999, the bill (Alpert, SB 390) rescinded existing waivers (as of 1 January 2003) and provided that any new waiver of WDRs must meet certain conditions and be renewed every five years. However, the fight to create a meaningful regulatory system for California’s irrigated lands.
CSPA’s Better Alternative
CSPA will continue to fight for a meaningful irrigated lands program that effectively controls toxic wastes discharged by irrigated agriculture. CSPA campaigns to:
- Implement an effective, protective, and legally adequate regulatory program that requires dischargers of agricultural pollution to notify regional boards what pollutants they are discharging and where they are being discharged.
- Implement a regulatory program that requires dischargers of agricultural pollution to notify the regional board of the local impacts to surface water, if any management measures have been implement and to report on the effectiveness of such measures.
- Protect water quality through a surface water monitoring program predicated upon a very few ambient monitoring sites far removed from actual points of discharge that collect water draining hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, especially for pollutants that are toxic in low parts-per-billion and that frequently occur as intermittent pulse flows.
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Stop Agricultural Pollution Campaign