The bio-assessment studies show a clear relationship between increased water pollution and increased agricultural and urban land use . Nationwide, agricultural non-point pollution is the chief impediment to achieving national water quality objectives . The EPA lists the chief components of these non-point source agricultural pollutants as nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers, pesticides, animal sources, soil erosion, and salts from irrigated fields. The National Rivers and Streams Assessment, conducted by the U.S EPA in 2004 and again in 2008/9, uses separate monitoring data from the 303 listings. Over the course of five years, between 2004 and 2009, the Assessment found seven percent fewer stream miles were in good biological condition. Similar to the Central Coast, throughout the U.S. changes to water quality in streams were variable over time and space. Overall, the report found that U.S. streams and rivers are “under significant stress and more than half exhibit poor biological condition” . Despite the diverse datasets,30 litre plant pots bulk frequency and consistency of monitoring data are still not sufficient to verify the effectiveness of the Agricultural Waiver .
The following two sections will assess the value of the Ag Waivers requirements, particularly the monitoring provisions.A closer look at the requirements themselves highlights why compliance may not lead to improved water quality. The Agricultural Waiver, in theory, uses an approach that gradually increases compliance requirements, called an “iterative approach,” meaning dischargers implement increasingly improved management practices until the region has achieved clean water. This approach recognizes that progress towards achieving water standards can take time. Logically, the 2012 Waiver should be significantly more rigorous than its predecessor. While Tier 3 farms might have more stringent requirements, a handful of significant provisions for Tier 1 and 2, which make up 99% of all growers, have been so watered-down and in some cases eliminated that the 2012 Ag Waiver has been regarded as “only marginally stronger than the 2004 Ag Waiver” . Several examples illustrate this point. First, in its modifications to the 2012 Agricultural Waiver, the State Board eliminated the only enforceable provision that would control nitrogen pollution—the nitrogen balance ratio target2 . Instead, grower snow only need to report the total N applied. Even with the 100% compliance rate of this mandate, the total N reporting provides substantially less information about which farms have nitrogen surpluses and might be contributing to pollution. Second, and arguably most importantly, the Ag Waiver does not have any quantifiable mechanisms to determine if management practices implemented by Tier 1 and 2 farms reduce pollution . Third, choosing which management practices to implement is largely up to the discretion of agricultural operators.
The Ag Waiver does not define what management practices should be implemented or verify if those practices are actually improving water . Though management practices are a means to reduce pollution discharges and achieve water quality, the California’s Non-point Source Policy establishes that “management practices may not be substituted for actual compliance with water quality standards” . One new requirement that can aid the Regional Board in estimating improved water quality is the mandate to report all water quality management practices and outcomes. The online form requires growers to check all nutrient, irrigation, pesticide and sediment management practices that are being implemented and the number of acres on which the practices are applied. While this new tool will provide baseline data for the Regional Board to better understand how growers say they are managing their land and crops, there are no means to verify if those management practices are effective. Growers have the opportunity to report if they have seen a positive outcome from their implemented management practices, yet outcomes are measured by the grower’s perception of change rather than a numeric or quantifiable water quality data. For example, in the 2014 annual compliance form, the most commonly used method to confirm sediment reduction was by walking the perimeter of the property to verify erosion controls were in place and that sediment did not leave the ranch/farm during irrigation events and/or storm events; the least commonly used method to confirm sediment reduction was to measure turbidity in stormwater runoff.
The Agricultural Waiver has significant monitoring limitations. In the 2012 Ag Waiver, the Regional Board acknowledged that a critical limitation of the 2004 Ag Waiver was “the lack of discharge monitoring and reporting… and the lack of public transparency regarding on-farm discharges” . The 2015 Superior Court Judge ruling reiterated this point: “The 2004 Waiver has not been successful because it lacks adequate standards and feedback mechanisms to assess the effectiveness of implemented management practices in reducing pollution and preventing further degradation of water quality.” Despite adding a handful of modest monitoring requirements to contend with these limitations, the updated 2012 Ag Waiver suffers from the same shortcomings as its predecessor. The biggest deficiency in the monitoring program is that data collected are neither comprehensive enough to verify the effectiveness of the management practices nor to identify individual operations that cause impairments . This issue points to the most controversial AgWaiver topic: public disclosure and transparency of information. The most effective means of identifying a polluter is to conduct individual discharge monitoring at the edge of a discharger’s field where pollutants enter the water. Because of its controversial nature, and the difficulty to collect data from thousands of individual farms, the 2012 Ag Waiver compromised by mandating that only the highest risk polluters—Tier 3 farms—need to report individual surface discharge monitoring. The biggest fear among growers is that of being identified as a point source polluter, and subsequently regulated under WDRs or NPDES permits, rather than a Waiver. As one Regional Board staff member put it, growers “don’t want to deal with a government agency managing their land and water, and they don’t want to be called part of the problem.” With individual discharge monitoring requirements as the driving force,wholesale plant containers growers did anything they could to get out of Tier 3. Farm operations split their ranches into sub-parcels, stopped using certain pesticides, or stopped farming altogether. To depict the drastic exodus out of Tier 3, in 2010, over 10% of farms were categorized in Tier 3, yet as of September 2015, only 1% of all farms in the Region are regulated under that Tier. As a result of the shift to lower tiers, monitoring and regulatory provisions, and the overall Ag Waiver itself, have been severely hindered, since most growers are not held to sufficiently strict mandates. A goal of requiring individual surface water monitoring of Tier 3 farms was to evaluate effects of waste discharge on water quality and beneficial uses; it remains to be seen whether data from such a small subset of growers will adequately achieve this objective. In contrast, the 99% of other growers must report surface receiving water monitoring, either cooperatively or individually. Surface receiving monitoring is conduced on the main stem of a river, rather than near a grower’s fields. For growers, this is a much more attractive scenario: data are reported as an aggregate and pollutants detected from surface receiving water data can rarely be traced back to its source. Additionally, the cost is generally less than the fees associated with the individual surface water discharge Sampling and Analysis Plan and Quality Assurance Project Plan .
Monitoring challenges are exacerbated by the diffuse nature of non-point source pollution. Because agricultural runoff does not enter a stream at a well-defined point, and often occurs episodically , continuous or targeted monitoring are needed to evaluate the rapidly changing and dynamic local environmental conditions. Growers and the cooperative monitoring program are not required to collect data at the same time or even during the same rain event, making it difficult to compare results and establish trends. A nonprofit, the Coastal Watershed Council , has attempted to address this problem by testing several water parameters in watersheds throughout the region during the first rain event, or “First Flush”, in their annual Snapshot Day. By collecting water quality data during the first rainfall, the CWC attempts to capture the most concentrated pollutants washing off the landscape in significant levels at the same time from year to year. The CWC’s Snapshot Day found nutrients and turbidity from agriculture and urban areas to be a major source of regional water contamination. However, the CWC program is volunteer-based and has a limited capacity to carry out high quality comprehensive monitoring.A related complaint by growers is that they will be substantially harmed by the cost of compliance. A 2012 Ag Alert article reported that the regulatory requirements in the 2012 Order amounted to more than $230 million in lost revenue and an estimated 2,500 to 3,300 in lost agricultural jobs . The Growers-Shippers Association of Central California added that the adopted regulations are “over-board and intrusive on grower operations” . Some growers claim that the compliance costs are unwarranted because farm management practices similar to the ones being mandated are already in effect. A representative from the Santa Cruz Farm Bureau voiced the agricultural community’s frustrations, “in general, there has been a lot of concern about the regulations being applied. In particular, the Regional Board did not take into consideration what was already being done on the farm. [The Agricultural Waiver] adds a financial and time burden on growers.” Several growers and agricultural organizations, including seven county Farm Bureaus, put into writing the perceived economic burden in their appeal to the 2012 Ag Order. In their request, agricultural petitioners claimed the cost of compliance would amount to 1.3-2.5%, 0.13-0.3%, and 0.8-1.5 % of gross crop revenues per acre for leaf lettuce, strawberry, and head lettuce, respectively. Some asserted that the methods employed in the agricultural group’s cost analysis were “not credible” and the numbers were “inflated,” and “self-serving” . In its argument against the agricultural industry’s estimated compliance costs, the Regional Board claimed that because the potential costs vary widely from farm to farm it is impossible to estimate the range over all farms. Another example of cost discrepancies was in the estimated monitoring expenditures for the two pesticides regulated in the Ag Waiver, diazinon and chlorpyrifos: the Regional Board estimated the total cost to monitor these two pesticides would be $250 per farm, whereas the agricultural petitioners estimated $7,000 to $11,000 per farm. It is nearly impossible to put a dollar value on the public health and ecological benefits gained from the two Agricultural Waivers, but it is worth mentioning some potential benefits from the Ag Waiver. In their rebuttal to the request for a “stay,” the Regional Board listed several environmental benefits that would result from the 2012 Agricultural Waiver including improved drinking water, overall public health, decreased pollutant loadings in surface and groundwater, reduced threat to sensitive aquatic habitats, and more stabilization of stream banks in riparian areas. Whether these improved societal and environmental conditions outweigh the estimated 0.8- 2.5% of gross crop revenues it would cost to comply will largely depend on who is asked.Issues of equity are at the heart of public policy controversies , and can be used to measure policy effectiveness two ways: fairness or redistribution . Factors that may play a role in measuring equity through the lens of environmental justice include the level of participation among stakeholders and/or distributive outcomes of pollution . These types of concerns harken back to the founder of policy studies, Harold Lasswell , who encouraged policy scholars to ask: “Who benefits? Who gets what, when, and how?” Answers to such questions attempt to uncover the inevitable unequal allocation of resources that result the dynamic relationship of power and bargaining inherent in the making of any set of rules and regulations . In the case of the Central Coast Ag Waiver, three main distributional consequences of compliance have been highlighted as unfair. The first two are contestations among growers themselves. First, Tier 3 growers contend that the three tiered system is imbalanced because it distributes a substantially higher burden on a small number of farms. This assertion represents a classic policy paradox: “equal treatment may require unequal treatment; and the same distribution may be seen as equal or unequal, depending on one’s point of view” .