\u201cThat sandy ground, when you put the water on it, it percolates into the groundwater and it recharges,\u201d said Jeevan Muhar, chief executive officer of Arvin-Edison Water Storage District. \u201cSo it\u2019s underneath us. We can see that water come up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The irrigation district tracks groundwater levels. In dry times, when it needs to tap into stored water, it uses dozens of wells to pump it out and send it flowing to farms. <\/p>\n
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The Tejon Spreading Works is part of a network the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District uses to recharge groundwater. <\/p>\n
A new scientific study cites Arvin-Edison as one of dozens of areas where local efforts have managed to halt declines in water levels and allow aquifers to come back up. <\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, groundwater is being depleted rapidly in many areas. However, groundwater depletion can be solved,\u201d said Scott Jasechko, a UC Santa Barbara professor of water resources who authored the study<\/a> in the journal Science.<\/p>\n Jaseshko examined 67 cases of groundwater recovery around the world, where water levels rose after prolonged decline. It happened three main ways: policy changes, tapping alternative water sources and replenishing aquifers.<\/p>\n In most cases, getting river water was key. In California, groundwater has rebounded in areas that obtained more water from canals or pipelines decades ago, including Santa Clara Valley, Livermore-Amador Valley, South Yuba Basin, Yucca Valley and parts of Los Angeles. <\/p>\n Arvin-Edison Water Storage District\u2019s South Canal flows through farmland in Kern County.<\/p>\n Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, near Bakersfield, started building levees and digging basins for imported water in the 1960s. As the water sank into the soil, it helped raise groundwater levels in the following decades.<\/p>\n If it weren\u2019t for these efforts over the years, Muhar said, levels would have dropped several hundred feet.<\/p>\n Still, he said the last 15 years have been particularly challenging. The agency has received less imported water during severe droughts, and average groundwater levels have gone down again.<\/p>\n He said some areas in Arvin-Edison\u2019s 132,000-acre territory require more work to stabilize the aquifer because it is declining.<\/p>\n A spillway regulates the water level in Arvin-Edison Water Storage District\u2019s South Canal, sending water into a pond in Kern County. <\/p>\n Muhar walked beside a pond at the Tejon Spreading Works, where ducks bobbed in the shallow water.<\/p>\n \u201cYou want to take advantage of the wet years, grab that water before it\u2019s lost to the ocean or other locations, and bring it into these types of areas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 2023, which was extremely wet, the agency took in that abundant water and banked it underground. This year, by contrast, Muhar said Arvin-Edison will pump out more than it deposits underground.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s managing the extremes of California water,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When that saved water is pumped from wells, it flows via canals and pipes to the fields of about 120 growers, irrigating onions, peaches, almonds, pistachios, potatoes, tomatoes and other crops.<\/p>\n Other agencies are recharging aquifers at dozens of sites<\/a> across California and are building more facilities to replenish groundwater. <\/p>\n Some projects in the San Joaquin Valley are successful and well-known enough that water managers and researchers have visited from other parts of the world, including China and Ukraine, to see how agencies are doing it, Muhar said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is the water banking capital of the world,\u201d he said, \u201cand we\u2019ve been doing it for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n Share via Close extra sharing options <\/p>\n Arvin-Edison is doing a good job managing groundwater together with river water, said Bridget Scanlon, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin\u2019s Jackson School of Geosciences, who was not involved in the latest study.<\/p>\n It takes a sophisticated approach, she said, while keeping the system going through wet periods and droughts.<\/p>\n The study also examined different cases in where it was a policy change that helped groundwater levels rise.<\/p>\n In Tokyo, regulations imposed limits on pumping. In Lima, Peru, well-drilling was banned in some areas. And in Bangkok, higher pumping fees helped water levels rebound. <\/p>\n In farming areas of Saudi Arabia, groundwater levels have risen since the country began phasing out water-intensive alfalfa and other hay crops.<\/p>\n Fast-growing urban areas in the western United States have found ways to raise groundwater levels by tapping river water and channeling it underground.<\/p>\n Las Vegas injects Colorado River water directly into the aquifer using special wells, and has done so since the late 1980s.<\/p>\n In Arizona, parts of the Phoenix and Tucson areas have boosted groundwater<\/a> by routing Colorado River water to basins carved into the desert, where it sinks underground.<\/p>\n The Colorado River, however, is overtapped and increasingly vulnerable<\/a> to cutbacks as global warming drives longer and more intense drought<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a 2025 study<\/a>, Scanlon and other researchers wrote that cuts in Colorado River water will \u201cdecrease critical replenishment of the aquifers\u201d in central Arizona in the coming years, and could lead to further groundwater declines.<\/p>\n In California, the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act<\/a> set requirements for local agencies to curb overpumping and stabilize aquifer levels by 2040.<\/p>\n The Tejon Spreading Works was built in the 1960s along the alluvial fan of Tejon Creek to take in water from a canal and store it underground in the aquifer. <\/p>\n The farmers in Arvin-Edison are better positioned than those in other areas that depend entirely on groundwater<\/a>. Researchers have calculated that large portions of California\u2019s irrigated cropland will need to be permanently left dry<\/a> in the coming years.<\/p>\n To reduce water use and comply with the groundwater law, Arvin-Edison is starting to buy some farmland and leave the fields fallow. <\/p>\n Muhar said the agency recently transformed 350 acres into more ponds to replenish groundwater, and it plans to buy and retire more farmland. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ARVIN, Calif.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0In the southern San Joaquin Valley, where roads cut through thousands of acres of orange groves, grapevines…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[34856,14854,240839,2356,76057,192,36388,240838,240841,240840,5496,240837,79,5497,240842,282,2394],"class_list":["post-537267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-aquifer","tag-area","tag-arvin-edison","tag-california","tag-dozen","tag-environment","tag-groundwater","tag-groundwater-level","tag-irrigation-agency","tag-jeevan-muhar","tag-researcher","tag-river-water","tag-science","tag-study","tag-underground-water-level","tag-water","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Arvin-Edison](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1774121680_168_.jpeg\")
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