A stone’s throw south of Half Moon Bay, just past the new fire station, Brussels sprouts and artichokes stand in regimental rows, dark green leaves fluttering in the ocean breeze. An old white clapboard ranchhouse commands the view from a nearby hill.

At first glance, the scene evokes a sense of agricultural bounty. But look more closely and the illusion falters. The century-old house, built by one of the area’s first farm families, is now a public historical building. A nearby field lies fallow, hosting only wild grasses.\

John Giusti, whose family has leased the 180-acre Johnston Ranch since 1949, when his grandfather Aldo arrived from Italy, smiles ruefully at the idle land. This year, despite plentiful rains, he says, “I didn’t have a way to irrigate it.”

Like other farms in coastal San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties, the Giustis’ farm depends on streamwater held back during the rainy season for use in the summer months. Artichokes thrive in the coastal climate, but they need a lot of water. To collect and store it, farmers erected dams across creeks. However, when their floodgates were closed, these dams prevented steelhead and coho salmon from swimming upstream to spawn.

Irrigated farming began in the region in the late 19th century, but agricultural water diversions peaked between 1930 and 1970. In the years since then, farming has faltered, and urbanization and a growing residential population have accelerated the decline of streamwater flow and fish.

Thousands of salmon and steelhead spawned in most local creeks in the early 1900s. By the 1950s, their populations were in freefall. In 1996, with many coho runs extinct and steelhead runs diminished to just a few hundred fish, both were officially listed as threatened. “It’s dire—they’re at the edge of extinction,” NOAA Fisheries biologist Joyce Ambrosius said recently. “We’re down to maybe a hundred fish in most waterways.” Of the 17 historically documented coho runs in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties, only four remain.

With the listing, an unwelcome spotlight fell onto coastal watersheds from Pacifica to Monterey. The California Department of Fish and Game, NOAA Fisheries, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began scrutinizing dams and water diversions. Farmers suddenly faced regulations that in essence separated them from the water they depended on for their livelihood.

Giusti leads me on a stroll to the steep bank of Arroyo Leon Creek, half-hidden in a thicket of willows. Two dams straddle the deeply incised streambed. One is 25 feet high, the other six feet higher. Cobbled together with slabs of concrete and wood, rusting steel and wire, they still function perfectly, according to Giusti, after nearly a century of use.

“In spring, we would close that big door in the center and the water would back up and fall down the top,” he said pointing to the flapgate. “There’s a big screwjack up there, you turn it and the thing would go down.” With spring rains, “this whole area would become a lake, maybe for a half mile back.”

Today, such a scene is hard to imagine. The wooden doors are hoisted high, and the creek trickles by unimpeded. The dams themselves look forlorn, like giant partitions in a huge empty trough.

“Fish and Game didn’t say ‘you can’t use your dam,’” said Giusti, “but they added so many restrictions, such as when I could close them, and how much water I could take from the stream, that it made absolutely no sense for me to close the reservoir anymore. They said that if closing my dam resulted in the loss of even one fish, it would be a ‘take’ situation, [involving the harm or death of an endangered species] and I would be in violation of the Endangered Species Act.” In 2002, Giusti felt compelled to stop using his dams altogether. Consequently, “We had to go from farming 180 acres down to 80 acres.”

South of the tiny town of Pescadero is the farm of Joe Muzzi, whose family has farmed in the area since the 1950s. They rely on a reservoir behind a small diversion dam on Gazos Creek. “There are years when the water flow is minimal, and that’s where everybody comes down on you because they say we’re taking the water from the fish and the [endangered red-legged] frogs,” Muzzi said. “It’s hard trying to make your plans when you don’t know what water you’re going to get. They can shut us down completely any time they want—we might as well not take a chance. If they cut the water off just before harvest, you lose the money and time and crop you put in there.”

San Mateo County Agricultural Commissioner Gail Raabe estimates that between 2001 and 2002, roughly 240 acres of the county’s approximately 3,900 acres of irrigated farmland was fallowed, in large part because of tougher stream restrictions. According to the county’s 2002 agricultural survey, six of the large growers curtailed production for lack of irrigation water.

Growers were already being squeezed by economic forces outside their control. Cut flowers and Brussels sprouts, staple crops locally, are now being imported at lower prices from South America, where labor costs are lower, and from the European Union. The imports have forced down local prices even as water and air quality regulations and restrictions on pesticide use became more onerous.

The Salmon Side of the Story

Coho and steelhead split their lives between freshwater streams and ocean waters. After hatching in cool, clear river riffles, the fry mature in their natal streams for a year to several years before swimming downstream to the ocean. As breeding adults, coho return to their native streams, spawn, and then die. Steelhead may return to the ocean and repeat the cycle for several years. Barriers too high to jump over or impossible to swim around can prevent adults from reaching spawning grounds, and keep fry from entering the ocean. The essential journey between ocean and upstream riffles can also be aborted by insufficient stream flow.

“We’re working with landowners and cities to get more water in rivers, make passages for fish, take dams out, and revegetate and plant riparian habitat to get populations back up again,” Ambrosius said.

What will work under current conditions is not necessarily obvious. According to a study by fisheries biologist Jerry Smith of San Jose State University, for instance, some reservoirs behind dams actually benefit these threatened fish. He found that Giusti’s deep ponds kept water temperatures cool, offered shelter from raccoons and other predators, and produced larger, healthier juveniles than reaches of river further up the watershed. A similar finding was made recently at Coast Dairies. [See sidebar.] Giusti says he opened and closed the doors of his dams in time for migration periods.

But such efforts will be for nothing if there isn’t enough water. A growing number of Coastside water users have drawn stream levels down to the point where there may no longer be enough water for farms, fish, and other users in some watersheds. “A lot of the streams in this area have the potential to bring coho back,” says biologist Jon Ambrose of NOAA Fisheries. “The biggest issue I see is the lack of water.”

Fish seeking to enter or leave many Central Coast streams today arrive at dry creek mouths. Many waterways that snake through the gullies of the Coast Range now routinely disappear long before they reach the ocean. Among these is Pilarcitos Creek, which meanders down northern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains near Highway 92 and reaches the Pacific in Half Moon Bay. Back in the 1890s, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) installed a dam at the creek’s headwaters, which diverts millions of gallons east into Crystal Springs Reservoir for San Francisco and cities along the Peninsula.

Other landholders in the creek’s watershed pump hundreds of acre-feet a year to water lawns, run showers, and fill drinking glasses. “It’s just cumulative. Everybody has a straw in it,” says Ambrosius.

Still, Pilarcitos Creek used to flow year-round, even if weakly, until the late 1980s, when the Ocean Colony golf course was built and wells were sunk near the creek mouth. Under California water law, it is assumed that wells draw percolating groundwater (i.e., basically, rainwater) unless proven otherwise. Tests that might prove Ocean Colony’s wells divert water from the creek have not been done, according to Keith Mangold of the Pilarcitos Creek Advisory Group. “You can walk down there and watch the water go away at night and return during the day,” he said. Why is Ocean Colony not required to use recycled wastewater, as other Coastside golf courses will soon be doing? “That’s a very good question,” said Jack Foley, manager of the Sewer Authority Mid-Coastside, which has a plant on Pilarcitos Creek. “There is no thought about that right now.”

The farmers’ plight is part of a larger story of excessive drawing on limited water resources. But they may be the hardest hit. NOAA Fisheries is negotiating with the SFPUC to improve downstream flows along Pilarcitos Creek. But because of limited budgets, the agency has not yet discussed the problem with other diverters along the watershed, according to Joyce Ambrosius.

Land Trust Relief

The dam trouble arrived at a time when many Coastside farmers had just begun to see relief from another threat—urban development. In the 1980s, land prices soared with the thriving economy. The sleepy town of Half Moon Bay began sprouting more and more houses whose commuter residents jammed the highways each morning to jobs in the metropolitan Bay Area.

Giusti felt vulnerable. The Johnston Ranch fields he was leasing were owned by developers. “Every year they would say, ‘figure on this being your last lease on the land.’ We fought it for years.”

The 1976 Coastal Act enabled farmers and conservationists to thwart development threats, including an effort in the 1990s to turn the Johnston Ranch into a golf course. That proposal violated the county’s Local Coastal Program (LCP),which had designated the farm as prime agricultural land. Attempts to amend the plan were shot down by county voters. In 1986, voters passed Measure A, which requires a county-wide vote before coastal agricultural land can be rezoned for development.

Meanwhile, some people concerned with the impacts of development on the public’s coast took action by supporting conservation bond measures and nonprofit land trusts. The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and the Trust for Public Land (TPL) bought land or development rights to thousands of acres of farms and open space, using bond funds and privately donated money. Both have since sold or leased some of their farmland back to farmers.

Today, POST is the largest single landowner on the San Mateo County coast. Its holdings include the Johnston Ranch, where John Giusti farms, and Bolsa Point Ranch, formerly owned and now leased by the Muzzi family. Placing conservation and agricultural easements on the land removes its value to developers, enabling farmers to lease from the land trusts at reasonable prices. Thanks to POST, says Giusti, “we’re much more secure of our land.”

Now POST is caught in the middle between the need to protect both fish and farmers. “We’ve already done our job on these lands in terms of protecting them from development, and it’s really up to the farmer to develop a sustainable method for continuing to cultivate it,” said POST’s director of stewardship, Paul Ringold. “Our objective is protection of open space and natural resources, and we obviously want to do the best thing for fish habitat, but we are also interested in maintaining agriculture on the coast.”

“I can see their point,” said Joe Muzzi. “Much of their money is public money, and nowadays people would rather relocate a farmer than a frog.”

The Steady Squeeze

In 2002, and again in 2003, local land trusts joined with farmers, natural resource agencies, and others to identify issues diminishing the viability of coastal agriculture. Lack of water available for irrigation emerged as the number one concern. As talks continued, the glimmer of a possible solution emerged: off-stream storage ponds. Instead of damming creeks, farmers could construct off-stream reservoirs and fill them with stream water during the rainy months. The cool, reed-lined ponds would also help to create habitat for red-legged frogs and the endangered San Francisco garter snake, while sparing creek water during low flow periods.

Although it’s generally agreed that these ponds are a workable solution, “it’s gotten more and more difficult to get the permits,” said Tim Frahm of the San Mateo County Farm Bureau. “It takes several years of concerted efforts by the applicant, and several hundred thousand dollars, just to get to the point where you can construct.”

Giusti said “That type of investment absolutely doesn’t make sense for me because I don’t own the land, and I’m a small business owner. It would cost us an astronomical amount—between $1 and $2 million.”

Therefore, POST began working with Giusti, and has already spent about $200,000 just collecting the data required to obtain a permit, according to executive director Audrey Rust. Meanwhile, the Coastal Conservancy provided $375,000 last year to the nonprofit Sustainable Conservation to develop a proposal to streamline the permitting process for off-stream reservoirs. To meet the requirements of other farmers in the county, some 30 new ponds holding an estimated 1,470 acre-feet of water are needed. Sustainable Conservation, based in San Francisco, specializes in bringing together different interests to promote natural resource stewardship. Aided by Conservancy funding, it recently helped to streamline an environmental review process involving 10 different agencies in an effort to reduce erosion along Elkhorn Slough in Monterey County and in Santa Cruz County.

“We’re hoping agencies will approve a standard for constructing a pond, so that each landowner’s project will require much less individual review,” said Carolyn Remick, project leader for Sustainable Conservation. “Because of the geography of the area and the number of different small watersheds, we must study them all separately and come up with recommendations on a watershed-by-watershed basis for how much we can safely take out of each stream,” Conservancy project manager Tim Duff hopes that “Landowners could work together on one watershed to collect data for the agencies.”

So far farmers, conservation organizations, and regulatory agencies view the ponds as a potentially viable solution. “I’m optimistic about the possibility of reaching an agreement,” said water rights specialist Linda Hanson of Fish and Game. “We’ve made the commitment to spend staff time on this to make it work.” Jon Ambrose of NOAA Fisheries said “It’s not going to be easy, but it’s certainly doable.” At the Farm Bureau, Tim Frahm was encouraging. “It’s a way to sustain agriculture, and benefit aquatic habitat at the same time,” he said.

The route from idea to implementation, however, is tortuous. Each agency has its own objectives and set of regulations to meet, and it’s not yet clear whether everyone will agree on a single standard. The Coastal Conservancy’s Dick Wayman, who has worked with the agencies in the past to obtain water for the Conservancy’s Cascade Ranch operations, isn’t so hopeful. “Regulations governing water diversion are so narrowly constructed and inflexible that they may well preclude any diversions at all. Just applying for the right to divert water is likely to require a great deal of time—probably several years—and far more technical research and analysis than a farmer can afford. Costs can easily climb into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that’s with no guarantee a permit to divert will be granted.”

Then there’s the issue of the San Francisco garter snakes and red-legged frogs likely to take up residence in constructed ponds. “That will start up a whole regulatory nightmare,” said John Wade, a local farming consultant. “There might well be some loss of the species in operating the ponds, but having the habitat would provide a great overall gain in the species, and that should be recognized.” And the scientific factors that must be addressed are daunting. “Taking the water during winter is generally held to be better than taking it in summer. But how much, when, and where remain to be answered,” Remick said. “My job is to satisfy all these regulations in a way that fits together like a puzzle.”

Sustainable Conservation hopes to complete proposed permitting guidelines by the end of 2005. If these pass muster with regulatory agencies, the first farmers to submit applications might be able to begin pond construction by summer 2006. By then, Giusti hopes to see crops, instead of untended grass, on the acreage he has had to abandon. “This is one of the best ranches on the coast here, and it’s a shame to me to see the land go to waste,” he said.

What if agreement proves elusive? “I think we will just continue to see fewer and fewer farmers surviving,” said Wade. “It’s been this steady squeeze for about 15 years, but if the water isn’t there, you don’t have a farm anymore.”

Time is running out for both fish and farmers. Without access to water, both could ultimately become endangered species along the coastside. And that’s an outcome everyone wants to avoid.

KATHLEEN M. WONG is senior editor at California Wild.