When a subsidiary of Harvard University’s investment company bought the North Fork Ranch in the parched high desert of the Cuyama Valley in 2012 and planted 840 acres of wine grapes, the locals were stunned. The 6,565-acre ranch, south of Highway 166 and the Cuyama River and nine miles west of New Cuyama, had been historically used as dry rangeland — but Harvard drilled 16 wells to irrigate its new vineyard, the largest in the valley. The county doesn’t require a zoning permit to grow grapes, but Robbie Jaffe, co-owner of Condor’s Hope Ranch, a five-acre vineyard less than two miles from North Fork, was worried that the pumping for the new vineyard — she didn’t know back then that it belonged to Harvard — would affect her small operation.