Daniel Keppen Water Projects

California AG today, Mike Stephens, we continue speaking with Daniel Keppen, Executive Director of the Family Farm Alliance. The US Senate recently passed a bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and described how the Family Farm Alliance advocated for a wide spectrum of water projects.

When we advocated for this package. It was sort of an all of the above sort of approach, not only just dams and canals and typical water infrastructure, but we also want to sell and reuse recycling because the urban entities, especially in Southern California, really take advantage of those sorts of programs as opportunities to sort of generate new water using that kind of technology. So we wanted to have the urban on board supporting us, and we did. We got them. And they're supporting some of the products that are important to us as well.

He also described how the loans will be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

And to me, this is like a once in a lifetime set of dollars going to other types of infrastructure. It's really, really tough to get people to talk about water infrastructure in general. Usually when people are talking about infrastructure, its roads and canals and electric cars and airports and railroads, things like that, when they do talk about water, it's usually drinking water, right? Cities, drinking water. It took a very concerted effort by sort of a handful of ag organizations to sort of elevate our knees. And we were able to get these sort of dollars to our types of projects by also aligning and supporting some of the stuff that the urban interests want to do.