VANDER WOUDE DAIRY

Through intensive management practices we have been able to utilize a wide variety of farming practices that enable us to be better stewards of our water and land resources. We employ strip-till, a conservation practice that employs a minimal tillage outlook by disturbing only that soil set to contain the seed row, on much of our acreage. This allows us to be more efficient with our available water while minimizing our greenhouse gases due to the decreased amount of tractor work required in the fields. While much of our land is irrigated through flood irrigation systems, we have begun to increase our use of drip irrigation on a variety of crops with positive results in terms of our yields and water management. Drip irrigation employs the use of tape or tubing that runs parallel to the seed rows so that water can be directly applied to the plants and, as a result, we have seen a 40% decrease in our water usage per acre in comparison to our flood irrigated fields. One other practice we employ to increase our farm, water, and environmental sustainability is the implementation of a complete tailwater return system. This allows us to collect excess water from our flood irrigated fields and return it into our irrigation water flow so that it can be reused in the next field or check over. Every acre we farm is carefully managed so that its nutrients, water usage, and crops are, respectively, balanced, regulated, and chosen to ensure the sustainability of our entire farming system.

We have also recently added a grant project funded through "The Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2014", and a fair amount of our own funds. This is a 30 acre reservoir that will be used to collect flood water as it traverses our ranch nearly every year in Mariposa Creek. This flood water would normally inundate our farm and other farms downstream on it's way to the San Joaquin River and ultimately the ocean. This project will now collect some of that water under an existing water right and utilize this water to irrigate crops over the next month or so. This project has been in the planning phase since nearly the inception of SGMA in California, and we are taking steps on our ranch to lessen our dependence on ground water which is a finite resource.