Daniel Keppen Water Solutions

California AG today, I'm Mike Stevens, we conclude our conversation with Dan Keppen, Executive Director of the Family Farm Alliance. He explains how partnering with conservation groups could help forest watersheds or the process of doing the same thing with some of the environmental groups to get some dollars for forest health and wildfire protection. Because we have healthy forest of healthy watersheds and right now we don't. And those upper watershed areas, that's where the snow falls and that's really where our ultimate water comes from. If those forests are in good condition or they're overgrown or they're dying, that has a real impact on sort of the water yield that comes out of those areas downstream to serve farmers and cities.

Cooperation, not politics, can solve problems.

Some of the storage projects that were advanced back in twenty sixteen through the Winnecke or California Project Sites Reservoir and then Shasta Re's was in there. And in this package, there's another billion dollars going towards those types of projects. Unfortunately, we saw during the Trump administration is the Trump administration really wanted to advance a bunch of those projects under that legislation and it got political. Unfortunately, I think we could have had some progress made, but the two entities were not really working together. Hopefully we'll see improved coordination there with this administration. There are solutions to California's water problems. We cannot solve California's drought problems if we don't build more storage. We need to have conservation and continued water use technology and sell. It's all of the above approach. They all have to be done with equal priority.