(gentle music) - Looking at the creek fire footprint, there's a number of locations where if you were to stand and look in virtually every direction, you're not going to see live trees that are remaining and so the possibility of natural regeneration is extremely limited.

- So how do we achieve this forest restoration, which benefits downstream water users and everybody in California?

Well, there's a couple of bottlenecks to getting there.

- You can't just order a seedling and say, I want it here in two weeks, you actually have to order the seedlings about a year and a half in advance.

- [Dean Gould] The forest is really inextricably linked with the San Joaquin Valley and it's ability to produce what it does and help feed both the country, the state and the world for that matter.

- There's this misconception that the agriculture and other south of Delta users, use all the water that goes in the Delta, but that's actually not correct.

On average, long-term average, four out of every five drops that enters the Delta actually goes out the Delta.

We as the south of Delta exporters or utilizing of that water, only use one out of five drops.

- Rather than just using runoff as a metric for the performance of these headwater watersheds, we're looking at water use by the forest as key because runoff is the residual.

So if when we thin the forest to reduce the severity of wildfire, we also thin the forest that thinning results in more potential runoff for downstream users.

- This is for measuring water potential of the tree which is essentially is how hard is the tree having to pull to get water.

- With climate change, we're seeing smaller snow packs, snow packs at higher elevation.

The snow is melting more quickly.

So we have less late season water availability and we're also seeing an increased incident of rain on snow flooding.

- You look at this ground right now, it's black and what happens with that is the amount of soil moisture that gets lost to radiation is insane.

- What happens up in the Sierra Nevada has a very real effect on our groundwater here on the valley floor.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - Production funding for American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag provided by, James G Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the central Valley's growing experts, more yield, less water, proven results we help growers feed the world by Brandt, Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing and supplying the AG inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day, by unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003, by Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979, (helicopter whirring) by Picket Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co. providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic M&A and financial decisions and by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family owned for over 50 years proudly featuring Coleman products dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (cheerful music) (enchanted flute music) - The San Joaquin Valley for all intents purposes is a desert.

But the reason that this desert is able to turn into this incredible agricultural industry around us is because of the Sierra Nevada mountains above us.

That watershed is so extraordinarily important to the water that allows this desert to bloom.

Last year we saw the Creek fire, which absolutely devastated the watershed above us and burned significant amounts of acreage.

people don't necessarily a lot of times see that, the connection between the two, but for us here as farmers, I mean, that has real, effects to us.

The overgrowth of the forest long term has significantly cut back the amount of water that we've seen over time.

But when you see these catastrophic fires come through, you actually see water yields go significantly up.

The chemical composition of the soil has changed, the soil becomes hydrophobic, and we're actually seeing additional water yields come off of that.

That's not to say, from my perspective, I'd rather see a healthy forest, a forest that's properly managed that would allow for both additional water yields as well as a properly taken care of forests.

But nevertheless, you do see ramifications from these types of catastrophic fires.

- At this point in time right now, we have an incredible opportunity.

On the one hand, we have the forest, which is in the most dire conditions that's ever been in its recorded history and if that's not a compelling call for action to anyone who is interested in the forest, I don't know what it would be.

On the other end of the spectrum over the next several years, there's going to be funding being made available from a variety of different sources to do treatments on these lands, the likes of which we may not see again for a very, very long time.

(bouncy music) - Here, we have some and ponderosa seedlings, that were planted this year.

All of this is this year's growth after being planted in the fall of 2021.

So I'm a resident here and I was evacuated from the Creek fire for three weeks, but being a forest service employee, I worked on on the Creek fire since day one.

I worked on the fire for 68 days officially during that time, I either slept on my office floor or at my mother-in-law's, but I think one thing that people don't realize for us on the Sierra and it's not just me, is that even though the fire was declared out, none of us really got to leave the fire and got to say like, oh, it's over and done with, because as the civil cultures here on the forest, it was working on how to reforce it, dealing with the site prep, dealing with all the stuff that's going to come next, because what happened here is going to be what I'm going to be working with for the next 10, 15 years of my life and it's something that I live in within the fire perimeter.

I mean, I never really got to go away from it.

So it's something that I'm dealing with every day.

So you'll see all these black dots because they started burning Sunday, Monday of this last week and they didn't finish there's still a lot more piles to get done because we had the rain yesterday but here you'll see, this was a good size pile that they're able to light off and get to burn down and it kind of clears the fuels out of the way.

(upbeat music) - So how do we achieve this forest restoration, which benefits downstream water users and everybody in California?

Well, there's a couple of bottlenecks to getting there and these bottlenecks, I can speak from being involved in forest restoration projects in the Central Sierra Nevada, one is financing.

You got to have the money to do it because the forest services estimated in California, there's 8 million acres that need restoration and the costs are coming in, a thousand to $1,500 per acre for that restoration.

So you do the math, that's, eight to $12 billion.

(upbeat music) - What we are looking and planning for taking climate change into account is to which species are going to be the most viable.

We're looking at different elevations and different species types.

The last thing we want to do is to look at a line on a map and assume that it has significance when it comes to treatments and the environment that's actually out there, but also the water, the water that comes off the forest on average, that would be over 800 billion gallons a year and just to put that into context, that would be enough roughly for 6 million homes to be sustained per year.

- Based on what we've developed in terms of water use by the forest.

We know that water use by the forest is about the same every year, unless you have disturbance to lower the water use and the subsurface storage provides a buffer for dry years for that water use by the forest.

It also provides some buffer for base flow in the stream.

But when you draw down that water during a dry year you have to refill it during the next wet year.

So that means growers downstream will get less water in a wet year following a dry year because the forest itself will use of water to replenish its depleted subsurface water and if you have a multiyear drought, it may take, quite a bit of upstream water.

- As a hydrologist working for the forest service.

I primarily address questions related to water resources management in the mountains, in our national forest.

So looking at how stream flow is generated, how groundwater is recharged, where trees access water in the subsurface and how all these things are impacted by disturbances like wildfire or management activities like logging or the other operations in the forest.

What happens with the overall water balance after a fire is still kind of an unanswered question, for example are less trees and so you might say, okay, there's less water being utilized by vegetation and so maybe more ends up in the stream but on the other hand, there's more sunlight and more heat energy reaching the forest floor and that can actually increase evaporation.

So a non-biologic kind of process, right?

It's just purely a physical evaporation of water but that water movement can actually increase after a fire and so how all these kind of pluses and minuses in the water balance add up is kind of site specific and is an area of active research.

- This is a pressure chamber and sometimes referred to as a pressure bomb.

This is for measuring water potential of the tree.

- All the vegetation's taking up moisture so, trees can pump, an Oak tree can potentially pump 100 gallons a day into the atmosphere if it's a big enough tree.

It's nature, it's not, you can't pigeon a hole into little boxes, it can be highly variable and often acts as a continuum from one thing to the next.

So, snowfall in my experience in Southern Sierra is totally dependent on water year.

We get most of our snowfall between December and March and it's usually snow lines usually sitting around maybe 6,500 feet, 7,000 feet.

2017 for example, the Department of Water Resources Bolton 120 report on snow pack for this area was somewhere in the 150 to 200% range of normal and then this year it was about 10%.

So yes we get snow, but it's pretty variable depending on the water year.

(upbeat music) - There's a lot of reasons why we reforced an area.

One main reason that we could say we do it is, it's a congressional policy that we reforced an area with the species that was there beforehand, that is natural for the area.

So this is a mixed conifer, serum mixed conifer and so we are using ponderosa sugar pine and we'll even have cedar and white fur.

This fire was so devastating down here that we don't have a lot of natural trees left that would have that comb bearing crop.

After a lot of fires, we will typically see natural seedling sprouting up.

We've been doing our survival studies this year, down here and so far in over 300 acres that we've surveyed we have not found a single natural seedling of a conifer species down here in the Jose basin area.

I mean, you look around, you look over here, you don't have a single green tree left in order to have cones to be able to produce that seedling and so that is one of the main reasons we're bringing the trees back.

You can't just order a seedling and say, I want it here in two weeks.

You actually have to order the seedlings about a year and a half in advance.

We had them on order for blue canyon and response to betel mortality and through the help of our partner, the Highway 168 Fire Safe Council and working with Cal Fire, who we got our CCI grant through, we were able to very quickly do a modification to our grant and move things around so that we could reforce down here four months after the fire was declared out.

- Pre-European settlement, at least the ideas that the fires can move through the under story without there's not so much under story fuel and specifically ladder fuels that allow fire to climb up into the canopy of the tree and start a crown fire.

Pre-European settlement the forest weren't so over stacked, fire can move through the under story and kind of clean it out without getting up into the crown of the tree.

Aggressive fire suppression over the last 80 years or so we have a lot of overstock forest and we're definitely trying to get ahead of that and thin the forest out so we can get fire back on the ground either through a prescribed burning or through natural wildfire cycles that the fire can get back in the forest and burn through the under story without causing, crown fires and catastrophic fires.

But it it's a challenge, if forest management of the 50s doesn't work for today.

(suspenseful music) - With regards to the Creek fire, I just want to make sure that the loss that was incurred, devastating and there was so much lost, to a include the homes, the over 800 structures total never before have we had anything close to that experience on the Sierra.

In addition to that though, as a result of some rather incredible efforts by those first responders that were out there and a very engaged, very savvy, very responsive community, there was not a single loss of life either to firefighter or first responder or to the public with a fire that size, it moved that fast with so many communities that were involved, that's remarkable.

(suspenseful music) - So what we've seen over the course of probably the last two to three decades is the continuing cutbacks of our surface supply and it's not just, when you look at here in Fresno County, we get our water from essentially four major sources.

It's both from the San Joaquin and Kings rivers.

We also get it from the groundwater beneath our feet.

But another important source of that water is the water that originates actually up in Northern California.

Up above Shasta, it's impounded at Shasta makes its way down the Sacramento river into the Sacramento know San Joaquin Delta and from there it goes into federal pumps and goes down to what a lot of folks know as the Delta-Mendota Canal into either farms directly or it goes up into the San Luis Reservoir.

Those pieces of infrastructure are so critically important for being able to take water from where it's available to where it's needed.

But that system are operates much differently today than it operated when it was first created and because of the operation going more towards environmental purposes and not towards human and agricultural purposes we have seen dramatic cutbacks here in the San Joaquin Valley that have led to farmers having to overly upon groundwater because their surface supplies have been cut.

- I know there's some efforts to build more above ground storage that's a tough road, that's a tough road.

If I was an an agency, I would be looking very seriously at more groundwater storage.

(upbeat music) - We're out here today with St. Joseph Tao, Kings River Water Association, one of our hydrogrophers we're going to be taking a flow measurement in the river.

The piece of equipment that we have in front of us here is a flow tracker.

It's an acoustic Doppler instrument, a modern electronic device for actually measuring the velocity of the water and when we know the depth and the width of the section, we can calculate what the actual flow rate is in the river.

The Kings river, similar to other Southern Sierra rivers are highly variable from year to year they can go from very dry years such as the one we're in and just coming out of right now, this ends up being the third dries year of 125 years of record.

We're going to end up with just shy of 400,000 acre feet this year of runoff.

Back in 2017, we had our third wetest year on record at a little right around 4.1 million acre feet of water.

So there's a tenfold difference between wet and dry years.

In those wet years, a lot of water goes to groundwater recharge to save that water for another day of a dry year which we can expect.

We have these highly variable from wet to dry years.

- So bringing the financing together has happened partly by state investments, partly by local investments, water agencies are beneficiaries.

They have their water sales revenue, their hydropower revenue, can they put some of that back into maintenance of infrastructure?

They do it for built infrastructure, can they do it for green infrastructure?

Yes, they are doing it in parts of California and I don't see this forest restoration happening and our water security through that happening without investments by the beneficiaries.

We need to reduce the forest water use, just like we need to reduce the wildfire risk in the forest, because we don't want to see this drought induced mortality in forest.

The forests are overstocked, there's more straws into the ground pulling water up for use in the forest then there is average precipitation averaged over time in certain areas and those are also the areas that are at high risk of high severity wildfire.

- So when a fire goes through a watershed, it obviously burns some vegetation and it burns at different intensities.

So a fire can go through an area and just burn out some of the underbrush, under the trees.

A fire can jump up into the forest and actually go through the trees and leave the underbrush or a fire can get very intense and burn everything from the ground up and post fire folks are looking at what the watershed looks like.

How intense was that fire in those areas that are very intense.

It can tend to burn the soil and in those areas, water can run off very fast.

Very little water will go into the ground, the water can run off very fast and those other areas of less intensity, it can have varying effects for anywhere from increasing the runoff to potentially decreasing the runoff out of an area.

So it beats very site specific.

(upbeat music) - Forest management is extraordinarily important for us here on the valley floor.

The reason being is that for essentially two to three generations, we have allowed our forest become overgrown.

That overgrowth has caused significant reductions in the amount of water we're seeing here on the valley floor and it's not just from the extra plant life, sucking that water up and utilizing it.

But it's also that a lot of that's in the form of snow pack never even touches the watershed.

It ends up on the top of this plant growth and evaporates before it ever has a chance to make its way down to the river there.

Here in California, the expectation now is that over 50% of the water that falls up in the Sierra is actually going to disappear before it hits the watershed, a lot of that through evaporation.

(upbeat music) - I would say we're moving into a grassroots effort where more and more farmers are looking to integrate groundwater management into their toolbox of irrigation techniques and activities that they're actually implementing on the farm to help facilitate groundwater recharge in those years that are wet, in those years where maybe a large fire has generated additional water supply.

It's a way to capture those supplies and save it for a future year.

- The fact that we had just cultures that came from everywhere to be able to turn this former desert into a blooming Mecca of agricultural production and that's something we're proud of.

It's getting more difficult though.

It is becoming much more difficult with the unreliability of the system that we have when we created mini generations ago, as far as water, we think there's potentially there's a shift in momentum that maybe will push us towards a more favorable climate speaking water in the future.

But right now we've hit some pretty dire straits.

I mean, this year, next year, the forthcoming years as the implementation of Sigma comes into existence and additional water cutbacks on the surface supply, we're looking at we can't continue this in the same method we've been doing it and the big question then becomes is who else is going to feed this nation?

(upbeat music) - Yeah, I think managing our forest in a more sustainable way can provide more water for downstream growers for agriculture, for communities.

It can provide more, I call it renewable electricity.

It's hydroelectricity and so many other benefits and if these beneficiaries can come together, we can get it done.

(upbeat music) - Production Funding for American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag provided by, James G Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years, by Gar Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts, more yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world, by Brandt, Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing and supplying the AG inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day, by unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003, by Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979, by Picket Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

by Harrison Co. providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic M&A and financial decisions and by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family owned for over 50 years proudly featuring Coleman products dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(upbeat music)