Casting a Vision: Navigating California’s Water Future with Curiosity and Connection

 By: Morgan Campbell, Class 55

A blast of dry heat hits me as I open my truck door in Los Banos, reminiscent of opening an oven door. As I step down, my feet kick up a plume of dust and I can hear the land croak, “I’m thirsty”. Over the next two days, Class 55 would have the privilege of experiencing a whirlwind tour, illustrating how the area’s historical and current leaders innovated, engineered, and partnered to quench the land’s thirst. 

Each seminar, Class 55 is exposed to a new posture, or way of meeting and approaching the unknown. This tour offered the opportunity to apply “Movie Magic”, a posture we had previously explored during our most recent San Luis Obispo seminar.

Movie magic or “vision casting” requires leaders to do three things:

1. Name the future world before describing it
2. Put the audience inside the picture
3. Close the distance between reality and the vision with a concrete step

Behind every great film, there is a visionary director. Class 55 had the privilege of having our tour be directed by Chris White (Executive Director, San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority [Exchange Contractors], Class 43); a pillar of his community, a visionary in regional innovation, and a passionate historian looking to pass the torch to the next generation of agricultural leaders. 

Gathering in the inner courtyard of the historic Hotel Mission De Oro, Chris and his colleagues, Steve Chedester (Director of Policy & Programs, Exchange Contractors), Adam Hoffman (Water Resources Specialist, Exchange Contractors) and Jarrett Martin (General Manager, Central California Irrigation District, CALF Class 48) fortified Class 55’s breakfast with what those in the water world affectionately call “acronym soup” derived from ingredients like AF, SGMA, CVP, SWP, EC, SJR, CVPIA, and more.

After breakfast, armed with posterboard, expandable maps, and decades of experience, Chris painted a picture of the historical San Joaquin Valley. For time immemorial, long before any government agency had a name, this stretch of the San Joaquin Valley belonged to the Yokuts. With villages strung along the San Joaquin River and its sloughs at Kahwatchwah, Hoyumne, and Halau, the Yokut people named the San Joaquin River “Tihshachu”, which roughly translates to the “salmon spearing place”, back when the river remembered how to flood and had full connectivity to the Pacific Ocean. Later came Miller and Lux, cattle barons who developed water rights on the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers dating to the 1870s, resulting in some of the most powerful and senior water rights in California today. Then came the Great Canal, constructed by the toil of men and mules, which brought irrigation water to Central California Irrigation District and began an era of productive, irrigated farming along the San Joaquin River.

After the breakfast briefing, the bus doors slammed behind the last member of Class 55, and it was lights, camera, action to see in real time the “Movie Magic” of the Central Valley Project (CVP).

The CVP is the largest federal water storage and conveyance system in the nation.  It is also an audacious case study in vision casting. In the 1930s, federal planners from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and local water pioneers saw a dusty and thirsty valley dominated by cattle ranching and dry farming. Patches of irrigated agriculture, fed by disparate local projects along the San Joaquin, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern Rivers, made clear that a steady supply of water was agriculture’s lifeblood. Rather than accept what was, these leaders cast a vision. They suspended disbelief and named the world they wanted to see – a parched valley transformed into an agricultural powerhouse by a unified conveyance system bringing a dependable and affordable water supply. As the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation went on to design a water project stretching more than 400 miles, consisting of 20 dams and reservoirs, 11 powerplants, and more than 500 miles of canals, their vision became reality. And so the CVP, designed to capture surplus surface runoff from northern California watersheds and eastern Sierra snowmelt and move it hundreds of miles to the water-deficient San Joaquin Valley, was born. 

If the plumbing of the CVP is compared to a human circulatory system, then Scott Petersen (Director of Water Policy, San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority [SLDMWA], Class 51) and Seth Harris (Water Operations Superintendent, SLDMWA) gave us a tour of its heart: the C.W. “Bill” Jones Pumping Plant.

Standing next to the plant’s six massive 22,500-horsepower pumps lifting water nearly 200 feet out of the Delta, the deep mechanical hum is a whispered reminder of the immense scale of CVP. The pumps’ vibration underscores a key aspect of Movie Magic: an ambitious vision is only an idea until leaders close the gap between current reality and the future through a concrete, physical plan. The durable engineering and tangible infrastructure constructed in the 1930s remain viable today and are a roaring response to the question of “but how?”.  

The tour exhibited another critical aspect of the Movie Magic posture – the fact that you must put the audience inside the vision. When the federal government envisioned the CVP and wanted to construct Friant Dam, they would fundamentally alter the flow of the San Joaquin River, harming the local farmers and irrigation districts. In order to construct the dam, the federal government traded Sacramento River supplies stored in Lake Shasta for the older, more senior, San Joaquin River water rights. That 1939 exchange contract is why the four irrigation districts west of the river, and our generous hosts, still call themselves the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors, and why more than 240,000 acres of family farms are able to grow tomatoes, melons, leafy greens, and nuts – generation after generation.

As the tour rolled on, Class 55 met characters the CVP did not originally write into the script. Over the last few decades, these once abandoned audience members have been casted into important roles within the CVP’s film, fundamentally changing its operations. 

At the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, Ric Ortega (General Manager, Grassland Water District) and Jack Sparks (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service) introduced a key character left out of the original CVP vision: wetlands and migratory waterfowl. The original CVP design provided no statutory or firm water supply rights for public wildlife refuges or private wetlands in the San Joaquin Valley. As a result of the CVP and other federal and state policies, vast wetland and floodplain networks were extensively altered, drained, and converted to support intensive agriculture. Today, managed wetlands along the Pacific Flyway attempt to sustain millions of birds on only 5% of their historical habitat, an ongoing effort supported by statutory water allocations mandated under the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) of 1992.

At Mendota Dam, Jarrett Martin and Chris White detailed how the CVP treated a 60-plus-mile stretch of the San Joaquin River as a conduit that could be intermittently dried up and replaced with Sacramento River water delivered to the Exchange Contractors. This plan omitted self-sustaining Chinook salmon runs, native river ecosystems, and indigenous Native American communities who historically depended on the river system. Ignoring the river’s ecological and cultural presence triggered an 18-year federal lawsuit, culminating in the 2006 San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement that now mandates reintroducing salmon, restoring river flows, and constructing hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering bypasses like the Arroyo Canal Fish Screen and Sack Dam Fish Passage.

At the Tracy Fish Facility, as staff biologists painstakingly separated and counted individual wriggling fish, René Reyes (Supervisory Fish Biologist, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation) demonstrated the delicate work of monitoring native Delta fish species. This stop highlighted a major omission in the CVP’s initial design: the ecological health of the Delta estuary and native species such as Delta smelt, Chinook salmon, steelhead, and green sturgeon. That oversight forced the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to reactively construct the Tracy Fish Facility in the mid-1950s as a salvage operation. 

Combined, San Joaquin River restoration efforts, federal Endangered Species Act biological opinions, and salinity outflow requirements through the Delta have reduced average CVP south-of-Delta agricultural allocations from near 100% down to approximately 43-56% and have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Lack of reliability in a system as vital as the CVP is a real problem that impacts livelihoods and farm viability. Several curious questions came to my mind after these tour stops. If the environmental and indigenous stakeholders had been at the table in the 1930s, would the patchwork of expensive and disruptive band-aid fixes be necessary today? Or could a more inclusive and robust system, whose deliveries would be more durable today, have been designed in the first place? What aspects of the politics and systems of power of the 1930’s made it so those audience members were not considered? What aspects of that system remain active and exclusionary today? 

As the tour progressed, I was inspired by how modern, local water leaders have responded to the ongoing supply volatility. Today, they continue applying vision-casting strategies to craft resilient, multi-benefit solutions that address regional needs directly. 

At Del Bosque Farms, Joe Del Bosque (Owner, Del Bosque Farms) exemplified a relational approach to vision casting by opening his farm to a wide variety of stakeholders. As almond harvesting equipment rumbled by, Joe quipped affably that his melons were the best while imploring the class to remember that when lower water allocations come, you can fallow crops, but you can’t fallow the people that make up your labor force.  Joe builds local resiliency by welcoming lawmakers, journalists, and urban leaders to walk his fields, engage in dialogue, and see the realities of Valley agriculture firsthand. 

Other local projects Class 55 visited demonstrated how creative engineering and cross-sector partnerships can redefine water management. At the Mendota Water Bank, Leta Spencer (Vice President, Mendota Water Bank), Trevor Meyers (Manager, Meyers Farming, Class 44), and Trevor Warren (Vice President, Silvertip), showcased how a defunct sugar beet refinery was reimagined as a private underground water bank that can store nearly 35,000 acre-feet of surplus surface water from the nearby Mendota Pool. At Los Banos Creek and Detention Dam, Chris White and Jarrett Martin detailed how winter flood risks were transformed into a multi-benefit surface capture reservoir to secure supplies for farms and wildlife while protecting downstream communities. Similarly, Anthea Hansen (General Manager, Del Puerto Water District) presented the North Valley Regional Recycled Water Program, which established south-of-Delta self-reliance by recycling urban municipal wastewater for agricultural and refuge use. Anthea also showcased the proposed Del Puerto Reservoir project, which aims to build an off-stream reservoir in the Coast Range foothills, capturing wet-year flows to bolster long-term drought resilience for regional farms, communities, and refuges. 

In the oppressive late afternoon heat, the last vision for a resilient local water future was baked into Class 55’s memory at the Red Top Subsidence Area. Here, John Wiersma (General Manager, San Luis Canal Company, Class 52), Case Vlot (Ranch Owner, Vlot Farms), Darcy Vlot (Ranch Owner, Vlot Farms, Class 51), and Chase Hurley (Principal, Water Management Solutions, Class 35) made their vision of voluntary, local self-reliance on groundwater and surface supplies a reality. Their efforts proved that landowners could halt severe land sinking (subsidence) through cooperative agreements rather than waiting for state-mandated pumping cutbacks.

Dirt-crusted and sweaty, Class 55 rolled up to the Historic Delta Party Barn to close out our evening. We were embraced by a group of more than 80 local leaders and stakeholders, brought together as one community dedicated to improving California’s water system by Chris White and Joann White (Director of Finance and Administration, Exchange Contractors). As the clatter of conversation and silverware hushed, influential water leaders Kristin White (Program Manager, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California), Federico Barajas (Executive Director, SLDMWA, Class 33), and Cannon Michael (President, Bowles Farming Company, Class 39), exemplified the power of another posture Class 55 has learned called  “Zooming Out”. By stepping back from the emotional heat of water policy issues to examine the broader hydrologic, structural, and political systems governing California water, they illustrated how choices in one region, like shifting irrigation patterns in the Imperial Valley, create ripple effects that influence reservoir releases hundreds of miles away. Rather than treating reduced allocations as isolated incidents, I was challenged to look beyond surface events and trace the deeper systemic structures and mental models that drive recurring issues.

In closing, our agricultural community is frustrated with California’s water system and, in many ways, we are justified in being upset. Exponential increases in regulatory burdens, exploding infrastructure costs, and dwindling reliability in water supplies actively threaten the viability of our agricultural communities. On my cynical days, it is easy to enjoy throwing out a quick diagnosis of everything that is wrong with California water policy, without pausing to understand, explore, and be curious about all of the issues and stakeholders at hand. 

So, in the spirit of growth, I will offer up my own vision for California’s water policy future. Let’s embrace spectral thinking – where we can recognize that there are multiple valid positions without forcing agreement. We can simultaneously honor the historical triumphs of the CVP and acknowledge that key stakeholders were left out. We can invest in the maintenance of our historical conveyance infrastructure. We can also build new water infrastructure of the 21st century composed of both robust partnerships and durable physical solutions. We can be bold, expand the table, and invite in the stakeholders no one normally wants to talk to. Instead of throwing our hands up in exasperation when events don’t go our way, let’s take the time to learn from those patterns and understand what is causing the friction. Finally, what if we, as agricultural leaders, were fearless and relentless in making our water system better for all Californians, not just the ones we know?

With gratitude,

Morgan

A special note of appreciation:

This immersive journey was made possible by the extraordinary generosity, openness, and leadership of our hosts, speakers, and organizers. On behalf of CALF Class 55, we extend our sincere gratitude to everyone who welcomed us, shared their hard-won insights, and showed us what stewardship looks like in practice.

A special thank you to Joann White and Marisol Bonilla Reynoso for their tireless coordination, logistics gymnastics, and hospitality throughout the tour. We also thank the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority Board of Directors for sponsoring this invaluable experience.

Thank you all for taking time out of your vital work to invest in the next generation of agricultural leaders. Your dedication to your communities, land, and water resources leaves a lasting mark on Class 55.