Making Water Quality Policy more Equitable for California Farmers

In the age of information, it is easy to assume that everyone can conveniently access and react to knowledge relevant to our lives. Our phones light up with flash flood warnings, letting us know to stay indoors. Drivers receive traffic updates and make route changes accordingly. Friends from across the world check in with us about local happenings in our neighborhoods. 

On the other hand, there is information that isn’t easily accessed or acted upon by those who need it. Imagine for a moment you’re an elderly Chinese-speaking farmer who doesn’t use the internet. You receive a letter in English you don’t understand from the State Water Board. You don’t know yet, but the letter is a notice of violation for a missing “Irrigation and Nutrient Management Plan”. But what is that? And how would you know to submit the report online, let alone utilize the required spreadsheet calculations and web-based resources to complete it? What would happen if you didn’t respond in time? Your expertise is tending the land and growing delicious vegetables for your community. This letter and what it’s asking of you is outside of that. 

Delicious sponge gourd (left) and yam leaves (right) cooked from produce gifted by Chinese farmers around the Gilroy region.

This scenario is not fictional. It was something that recently happened to a grower I know, and it clearly demonstrates the discrepancies between regulatory information applying to farmers, how that information is delivered, and what options farmers have for successfully complying with it. In my second GrizzlyCorps year as a Small Farms Fellow at the UC Cooperative Extension, I have been working to directly address and communicate about these regulation challenges as they relate to the Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program. 

The Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program (ILRP) is a state-wide water quality policy that affects all commercial agriculture operations in California. This began in 2003, when the State Water Board (alongside the Central Valley Water Board) created the program to regulate farm discharges into public waterways. ILRP regulates water quality aspects like nitrate concentration, pesticide toxicity, salt content, sediment content, and turbidity (how clear the water is). To meet ILRP objectives, each of the nine regional water boards creates and enforces their own Agricultural Orders that they periodically update. Each region also has their own “third-party coalitions” to assist growers with their region’s Ag Order compliance. 

California’s nine regional water board districts. Source: State Water Resources Control Board

Every Ag Order shares key elements, such as the requirement to submit an Irrigation and Nutrient Management Plan (INMP) as described in the farmer scenario from earlier. In an INMP, farmers are expected to calculate and report data on how much nitrogen they apply (such as fertilizer and compost), how much nitrogen is removed (like through harvest or cover cropping), and how much irrigated water they applied. Other Ag Order requirements may include things like Sediment and Erosion Management Plans (SEMP), ranch maps, and well water testing. The majority of the farmers I help near our San Martin office (80 miles south of San Francisco) are Cantonese or Mandarin speaking vegetable growers who farm within the Central Coast Water Board district (district 3). Here, we have Ag Order 4.0. The third-party coalition our growers enroll in is called Preservation, Inc.

From an outsider’s point of view, it might seem strange that a program created over 20 years ago can still be unfamiliar, confusing, and difficult for many farmers to navigate. When you take into account the nuanced reporting requirements, language barriers, internet access and familiarity, limited technical assistance support, farm operation turnover, and Ag Order updates (Ag Order 4.0 was only adopted in 2021)...it makes much more sense. When I first started researching ILRP three months ago, it took a lot of close policy text reading, digging for context, and visualizing timelines to even begin understanding the policy, its requirements, and how to fulfill them. In addition to understanding ILRP and your region’s Ag Order, I could only imagine how difficult it must be for farmers to carry out the actual documentation, reporting, and other required tasks. This was also the context for why my host site developed all three of my capacity building goals this year to revolve around ILRP.

As timing would have it, I didn’t have to imagine for very long what farmers’ experiences with ILRP were like. Immediately after resuming my fellowship in October, I was thrust into a series of communications with farmers and local enforcement agencies. I had to quickly become somewhat of an expert on ILRP to tackle issues of non-compliance with these partners. As the only Chinese-speaking person in the region working on providing free ILRP assistance (Preservation, Inc. does not have Chinese language capacity), I’ve helped dozens of farmers these past two months: resolving non-compliance issues, submitting reports, collecting soil samples and farm data, creating annotated ranch maps, sediment and erosion management plans, Preservation, Inc. payment support, operation enrollment and termination, delivering a nutrient management presentation, and explaining all of these in Chinese. I witnessed first hand just how complex and involved complying with ILRP is, especially for small-scale Chinese farmers with diversified cropping systems. 

From left to right: Lauren and a farmer having a conversation during a soil sampling farm visit; Lauren drafting a ranch map during a farm visit; Lauren practicing Chinese vocabulary relevant to irrigation, nutrient management, and ILRP

So yes, we cannot assume that everyone can access and react to knowledge relevant to their lives. Furthermore, these real-life ILRP examples reveal the deep importance of why equity matters in environmental policy and enforcement. ILRP was created to improve water quality, which safeguards public and environmental health. That is a great thing! But sustainability needs to be equitable if we’re to create a future for everyone to thrive, not just for those that speak English and have the technological, financial, educational, and time-related capacities for it. It’s necessary that these marginalized realities are made visible and that they inform efforts in environmental policy and enactment. 

That’s why beyond providing technical assistance, I’ll also be using my service term to build my host site and farmers’ capacities for addressing ILRP challenges. Some time-sensitive compliance matters take priority at the moment. Once those are settled however, I’ll be gathering information on farmers’ ILRP challenges with a survey I designed, analyzing farmer interview transcripts, researching literature on ILRP, and continuing conversations with local enforcement agencies. These will culminate in bilingual outreach materials and a white paper on farmers’ challenges that policymakers can reference for future iterations of ILRP. 

Lauren delivering a presentation to Chinese growers on nitrogen and irrigation management strategies for complying with the Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program (ILRP), Dec 9, 2025

Working with this policy and its impact on marginalized farmers has also made me believe I’m in the right place, career-wise. Last year, I kept encountering examples of how policy shapes the sustainable realities of farmers and local agriculture. It became clear that engaging with these policies is necessary for an equitable and sustainable food system. To work towards this, I’d need to challenge myself by pivoting into this unfamiliar policy space. This was my primary motivation for returning as a second year fellow to work on projects related to ILRP. So far, my term has pushed me in completely new ways, but it has also rewarded me with the positive impact I’m seeing on my farming community. I love that I’m contributing to making sustainability more equitable. In my own budding career, I’d like to continue doing this type of work. Thanks to GrizzlyCorps, my host site, and our farmers, I believe I’m setting myself up to do so.