With every geographic region in California coping with severe or extreme drought, water is top of mind for the state’s dairy farmers.

Due to the lack of rain across the state in the last three years, every single dairy farmer is suffering, said Anja Raudabaugh, executive director of Western United Dairies.

Even California’s North Coast, which has been unscathed in previous droughts, is affected. And farmers there don’t even have access to groundwater and won’t have water for their livestock starting in May, she said during the latest “Dairy Download” podcast.

“So this is a severe crisis. It, of course, has larger ramifications on the feed cost,” she said.

Last year, WUD designated a new sustainability role beyond environmental and regulatory standards around air quality, water quality and methane reduction, she said.

It became apparent to WUD “that we could not have any efforts in sustainability if we didn’t have water and access to resources that would get us either paid for the loss of water or paid to access more expensive water transfers,” she said.

WUD decided as an organization that sustainability meant water certainty and brought in a new director of sustainability to address the issues, she said.

“So essentially the two things that we’re looking at are how do we find drought resources for farmers to keep them in business during this hard time, which will hopefully offset some of their higher feed prices. And then the second thing we started to see we needed help with is something called land flexation,” she said.

Farmers are being forced to fallow ground with no payments and no consideration for the bank notes that are on those properties, she said.

“We set out on a policy side to make sure that a farmer’s water rights were attached legally to his land ownership and mineral rights,” she said.

WUD was successful at establishing a statewide policy that groundwater throughout the Central Valley, which is the majority of the state’s milkshed, shall go for no less than $750 an acre-foot, she said.

Under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the state will pay farmers in a designated critically overdraft basin for water saved — not pumped and kept in the ground for local communities, she said.

That has been a huge effort WUD has lifted because farmers were being told to just fallow, and they weren’t being compensated for it, she said.

The water issue in California is broader than the drought, she said.

“The regulatory policy, which is to remove water rights from the system away from people that have had them for centuries, is very much in play,’ she said.

But generally, the state’s water system was built to supply 21 million people and there are now 39 million people in the state. And over the last 20 years, courts have redirected about half of the water supply toward environmental purposes, she said.

In addition, irrigable acres have doubled over the last three decades due to demand and the state’s strategic position in the Pacific Rim. But that growth has come with no additional water supply. There hasn’t been a new reservoir built in the state since 1969, she said.

“So you add these things together … we don’t have enough water, ever,” she said.