SGMA Overview

Fast facts and resources for a deeper understanding of SGMA and its impact on farms in the Tule Basin

Background

What SGMA Is: The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is a California law passed in 2014 with the goal of conserving the state’s groundwater resources

Who It Impacts: SGMA mostly affects communities and farms in areas that depend heavily on groundwater, especially ‘high’ and ‘medium’ priority basins in the Central Valley and other regions.

How It’s Controlled: SGMA calls for the creation of local agencies, called Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs), that are in charge of managing groundwater in their area. Each GSA must write a Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP). This is a roadmap that explains how the GSA will balance groundwater pumping with recharge.

Main Impacts: Farmers will need to use less groundwater, utilize new farming methods, and make new investments to achieve sustainability. This will affect jobs, land values, and local economies.

Problem Framing

Between 500,000 and 1 million acres of land will come out of production in the valley as a whole before 2040. About 70,000 of those acres will be in the Tule Subbasin.

Farms will need to take land out of production in order to comply with the regulatory requirements of SGMA, leading to wide-scale land fallowing, reduced crop yields, and job losses all over the region.

Large farms have greater flexibility to adapt to this problem than small farms because they have greater access to resources and often can afford to fallow a portion of their land instead of all of it.

A 2025 report assessed land value across a well-sampled variety of different crop acreage in the San Joaquin Valley and determined that it has decreased by between $8,000 and $50,000 per acre in the last 11 years. This huge loss, attributed to SGMA, also has a big impact on taxes in the area.