A gadget capable of extracting evaporation from tomato pulp is
producing 120,000 gallons a day of “new water” clean enough to
drink in Los Banos in Merced County. The “water harvesting”
unit was developed by Australian company Botanical Water
Technologies, which moved to the United States around five
years ago. The Ingomar Packing Company in Los Banos processes
tomato products such as tomato paste and diced tomatoes. …
Greg Pruett, Ingomar CEO, says in a promotional video about the
program that the company had a large volume of condensate water
from the tomatoes that was “…not being used in a valuable way.”
So when it learned about Botanical and its work extracting and
purifying such water, it was a good fit.
The holiday season in the Kaweah subbasin got a little more
jolly thanks to its formal removal from the state’s groundwater
enforcement process on Tuesday. The state Water Resources
Control Board passed a resolution at its Dec. 2 meeting that
officially ended the threat of state intervention for the
Kaweah subbasin, which covers the northern part of Tulare
County’s flatlands and a portion of Kings County. It will
continue to work under Department of Water Resources oversight
to implement plans to reduce excessive groundwater pumping.
The San Joaquin Basin faces significant water management
challenges due to decades of groundwater overdraft and severe
floods. According to the Department of Water Resources, their
newly released San Joaquin Basin Flood-MAR Watershed Studies
highlight strategies to address these issues across several
watersheds, including Calaveras, Stanislaus and
Tuolumne. The studies emphasize capturing and storing
floodwater underground, known as Flood-Managed Aquifer
Recharge, as a key strategy. This approach aims to transform
extreme weather events into opportunities to replenish
groundwater and support ecosystems.
The invasive pest spotlight focuses on emerging or potential
invasive pests in California. In this issue we are covering
nutria. The nutria is a large semi-aquatic rodent
introduced to California in the early 1900s to be farmed for
their fur. … Nutria have since spread into waterways
within the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Central
Valley. … Nutria severely damage the environment,
roads, levees, and crops. They burrow into banks of waterways,
weakening or collapsing them. As they feed, they damage the
native plant communities and soil structure of wetlands. Nutria
feeding and burrowing damage both increase the risk of erosion
and flooding.
The year’s first allocation from California’s massive water
storage and delivery system has been set at just 10 percent of
requested supplies, officials with the state Department of
Water Resources announced Monday. DWR operates the
State Water Project, which delivers water to
29 public water agencies that serve an estimated 27 million
people and 750,000 acres of farmland throughout the
state. DWR is required to set its initial annual water
allocation by Dec. 1 every year and the size of the allocation
is typically fairly small at first. As the rainy season
develops, however, if the state sees an increase in rain and
snowfall totals, water allocations could potentially increase
every month.
Governor Gavin Newsom has made significant strides in securing
and enhancing water supplies, including improving the state’s
ability to capture stormwater. Fortified by state investment to
strengthen and expand California’s local water infrastructure,
eight major, state-funded projects completed or broke ground
across California this fall—including water recycling,
wastewater treatment and desalination facilities—that benefit
over 1 million people. Collectively, the projects add about 2.9
billion gallons annually to the state’s water supplies, enough
water for roughly 20,000 homes per year.
The Trump administration plans to weaken environmental
protections for threatened fish in California’s
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and pump
more water to Central Valley farmlands, according to letters
obtained by the Los Angeles Times. … The U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation recently notified California agencies that it plans
to pump more water out of the delta into the southbound
aqueducts of the federally operated Central Valley Project. …
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife wrote that it is
concerned about weakened protections for winter-run and
spring-run chinook salmon, steelhead trout, delta smelt and
longfin smelt.
… Iran’s escalating water and environmental problems are the
predictable outcome of decades of treating the region’s finite
water resources as if they were limitless. … Iran has
relied heavily on water-intensive irrigation to grow food in
dry landscapes and subsidized water and energy use, resulting
in overpumping from aquifers and falling groundwater supplies.
… The country needs to start to decouple its economy
from water consumption by investing in sectors that generate
value and employment opportunities with minimal water
use. Agricultural water consumption can be reduced by
producing higher-value, less water-intensive crops, taking into
account food security, labor market and cultural
considerations.
A major November deadline for Colorado River negotiations
passed without resolution, though hope remains for an agreement
to avoid federal intervention. … What’s being negotiated are
the future operating guidelines for the two large storage
reservoirs. The guidelines must be realistic and resilient and
not allow one reservoir to be drained to shore up the other, as
has happened in recent years. Both reservoirs have hovered near
critical levels for a few years. These talks are critical for
Colorado Springs. Half of the city’s water comes from the
Colorado River Basin through trans-basin diversions that cross
the Continental Divide.
Today on Giving Tuesday, a global day of philanthropy, you can
support impartial education and informed decision-making on
water resources in California and the West by making a
tax-deductible
donation to the Water Education Foundation. Your
support ensures that our legacy of producing in-depth news,
educational workshops and accessible and reliable information
on water reaches new heights in 2026. In 2025, your gifts
helped make many WEF projects possible, including
Project WET
workshops, our Water Leaders programs, the
online magazine Western
Waterand more. Please donate
today to help us make an even greater impact in
2026.
The Paso Robles Area Groundwater Authority needs help funding
its operating costs next year. On Monday, the agency’s Board of
Directors approved a budget of $944,952 for fiscal year 2025-26
— with a $300,000 shortfall for costs planned for January to
June of next year. The agency’s Board of Directors was
forced to abandon water use fees after a majority of property
owners objected to them this year. Now, the agency is looking
for other ways to cover its operating costs. … On
Monday, the board voted unanimously to ask the four
participating Groundwater Sustainability Agencies to contribute
a combined total of $300,000 to bridge the funding gap.
A Trump administration proposal to reduce the scope of the
Clean Water Act would exclude more waters than
at any other point in the past 50 years. But it also left open
the possibility of going even further. Administration officials
last week unveiled their plan to define “waters of the U.S.,” a
frequently litigated term that delineates which waters and
wetlands are regulated by the 1972 law. … [The proposal]
suggests including only rivers, streams and other waterways
that flow at least for the duration of the “wet season.” The
proposal also floats an alternative approach: exclusively
regulating perennial waters and wetlands.
… The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is
forecasting La Niña conditions for this winter, possibly
switching to neutral midway through. … When we look at the
consequences for snow, La Niña does tend to mean more snow in
the Pacific Northwest and less in the Southwest. … This
winter’s forecast isn’t extreme at this point, so the impact on
the year’s water supplies is a pretty big question mark. …
The West’s water infrastructure system was built assuming there
would be a natural reservoir of snow in the mountains.
California relies on the snowpack for about a third of
its annual water supply. However, rising temperatures
are leading to earlier snowmelt in some areas.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
On November 19, 2025, the Klamath Tribes filed a motion to
amend their petition in the Circuit Court of Klamath County.
The amended petition seeks to reverse recent illegal orders
that replaced a long-time administrative law judge in the
Klamath Basin Adjudication (KBA) on the heels of a secret deal
cut between the Oregon State Office of Administrative Hearings
and certain water users in the Upper Klamath Basin.
… The KBA is a several-decades-old lawsuit pending in
the Circuit Court of Klamath County. It is quantifying the
federal reserved water rights of the Klamath Tribes in the
Klamath River Basin.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has unveiled
preliminary flood maps for Butte County and the City of Chico,
highlighting revised flood hazards along various sources in the
region. These maps aim to assist building officials,
contractors and homeowners in making informed mitigation
decisions, fostering safer and more disaster-resilient
communities. Before the new Flood Insurance Rate Maps
(FIRMs) take effect, a 90-day appeal period will run from Dec.
3, 2025, to March 3, 2026. During this time, residents or
businesses with technical and scientific data, such as detailed
hydraulic or hydrologic information, can challenge the flood
risk details on the preliminary maps.
Deep in the heart of the Tijuana River Valley is a small
commune of growers who thrive despite being in an area that has
been described as “an environmental disaster.” The site is
known as the Tijuana River Valley Community Garden, which is
owned by the County of San Diego and managed by a private
contractor. … One concern is whether the food grown by
[grower Ed] Whited and the others is safe for consumption,
considering the amount of contamination in the area, especially
with the heavily-polluted Tijuana River next door. “Our worst
problem here is the flooding,” he said. “The river runs right
by here; if a plant is touched by water or potentially touched
by water, it’s no longer edible or considered edible and it’s a
complete loss.”
Many thousands of fall-run Chinook salmon migrated beneath the
Golden Gate Bridge into the upper Sacramento River to spawn
this fall. About 100 of the adult fish carried small tags that
signaled their location as they went. A monitoring network
tracked the fish, showing their progress online in real time as
part of a joint project by scientists at NOAA Fisheries and UC
Santa Cruz. They followed adult salmon through the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta into
Central Valley Rivers and their tributaries. … The
research is funded by California’s State Water Board to learn
more about how water temperatures influence the salmon that
support valuable commercial and recreational fisheries.
… A 2024 federal report found that U.S. data centers consume
17 billion gallons of water a year, but that’s a drop in the
bucket compared to industries like mining or farming, which use
billions of gallons every day. But demand from data centers is
expected to double or even quadruple soon, according to that
report. … By 2027, AI is expected to account for
28% of the global data center market, according to Goldman
Sachs. … This data center boom is not just happening in
northern Nevada. Across the West, including Colorado,
Wyoming and Arizona, states have rolled out major tax
incentives to attract data centers, but rising concern over
their water use is fueling public pushback.
University of Arizona researchers are testing natural plant
additives called biostimulants to help lettuce farms in Yuma
grow more crops with less water during the peak growing season.
The research comes as drought threatens the Colorado
River, Arizona’s primary water source. Yuma County
supplies about 90% of the leafy greens Americans eat from
November through March. … [Assistant Professor Ali] Mohammed
found that pairing biostimulants with smart irrigation sensors
and organic farming techniques significantly boosted crop
yields. He estimates this combination could allow Yuma’s
organic farms to skip a few watering cycles during the growing
season, potentially saving 1 to 2 inches of water per
acre.
The Department of Water Resources said Monday the State Water
Project will supply 10% of the water that local agencies
requested for the new water year. The initial number is based
on current weather and water conditions, how much water is
stored in reservoirs and the assumption that the rest of the
year could be drier than normal, the state agency said. The
allocation is then adjusted month-to-month based on new data,
with a final number typically set in May or June. … In
Monday’s statement, the agency added that the
reservoirs statewide are slightly above
normal, at 114% of average typical for this time of
year.
