Farm Land in Fresno County: Friant Dam & the River Restoration Settlement

Friant Dam and the Friant Division's contract system

Friant Dam, completed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on the San Joaquin River in the early 1940s, diverts nearly the entire river's flow into the Friant-Kern Canal running south and the Madera Canal running north -- together the Central Valley Project's Friant Division, which has historically irrigated well over a million acres across Fresno, Madera, Tulare, and Kern counties. Water contractors within the Friant Division hold either Class 1 (higher-priority, more reliable) or Class 2 (lower-priority, more variable) contract rights, a distinction that has always mattered to how much water a given parcel's irrigation district can reliably count on in a dry year.

A dry riverbed, a lawsuit, and a landmark 2006 settlement

Because Friant Dam diverted nearly all the San Joaquin River's flow into the two canals, a roughly 60-mile stretch of the river below the dam ran dry for most of the year for decades, eliminating the river's salmon runs in that reach. That situation became the subject of long-running federal litigation, beginning with a 1988 lawsuit generally referenced as NRDC v. Rodgers, brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other parties against the Bureau of Reclamation. After roughly two decades of litigation, the parties reached a landmark settlement in 2006 -- the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement -- under which the federal government agreed to restore year-round flows below Friant Dam and to work toward reestablishing self-sustaining salmon runs, while also addressing water-supply impacts to Friant Division contractors. Congress subsequently gave the settlement statutory force through the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act, part of a broader 2009 federal water bill.

This is genuinely durable, load-bearing history for anyone evaluating Fresno County farmland served by the Friant Division: the settlement changed how much water is available for agricultural delivery versus river restoration, and its implementation (channel capacity constraints, recapture-and-recirculation provisions to help offset water returned to the river, and the ongoing restoration timeline) has continued to evolve since 2009 in ways that affect water reliability for Friant-served land.

What to actually confirm before buying Friant-served farmland

If you're evaluating farmland on the east side of Fresno County served by the Friant-Kern Canal or another Friant Division facility, confirm directly with the relevant local irrigation or water district (and, for larger transactions, the Friant Water Authority) what class of contract right applies to the parcel, what its recent actual delivery history has looked like, and how San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement implementation has affected recent allocations. This is meaningfully more specific and more consequential information than a general 'irrigated farmland' listing will typically disclose, and it directly affects both what the land can reliably grow and what it's worth.

Separately, confirm the parcel's groundwater picture under SGMA, since many Friant-served growers also rely on groundwater pumping to supplement surface-water deliveries in drier years, and that pumping is subject to its own, separately administered set of Groundwater Sustainability Agency rules.