USDA Intervenes in PG&E’s Planned Decommissioning of the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project
Secretary Rollins: ‘California’s war on agriculture has gone unchecked to the detriment of us all’
By Megan Barth, December 23, 2025 3:46 pm
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has intervened in the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project proceedings currently being considering by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
“This action will allow USDA to ensure that the interests of the National Forest Service, local farmers, ranchers, agricultural producers, communities, and other stakeholders are represented,” the USDA said in a press release.
“If this plan goes through as proposed, it will devastate hundreds of family farms and wipe out more than a century of agricultural tradition in Potter Valley,” said USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins. “Water is the lifeblood of farming. Without it, crops fail, businesses close, and rural communities crumble. For generations, farmers here have put this water to good, productive use. But under California’s radical leadership, the needs of hardworking families are being ignored while the needs of fish are treated as more important. That’s simply wrong. This plan would put countless USDA investments at risk and leave families even more vulnerable to drought and wildfire. This is why I’m intervening in the FERC proceedings and urging them to reject the pending application.”
Secretary Rollins also filed comments urging the FERC to reject PG&E’s current application to surrender its FERC license for the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project. She also urged the FERC to reject PG&E’s application unless significant deficiencies are addressed.
“Her notice of intervention guarantees USDA’s ability to actively participate in the proceedings, protect its programs, and advocate for the farmers and communities who depend on the project’s reliable water flows,” the agency announced.
For background, as reported by The Globe, “California Farmers are Being Left Out to Dry.”
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the state’s largest utility, has filed plans with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to decommission the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project. That project includes Scott Dam, which forms Lake Pillsbury, and Cape Horn Dam, waterways that divert water through a tunnel into Potter Valley. If those dams are removed, the lake will disappear and more than 600,000 northern California residents, including hundreds of family farms, will lose a century-old water supply.
State policymakers support these efforts. The Governor has openly boasted about removing dams across California to please environmental activists. Similarly, the Governor-appointed board of the California Public Utilities Commission(CPUC), which regulates PG&E, is eager to comply. Their justification is salmon and steelhead restoration. The effect they are not acknowledging is the devastation for the farmers and ranchers who provide food and jobs in Mendocino, Sonoma, and Lake counties.
The Potter Valley Irrigation District is the lifeblood for many family farms that produce and raise crops and livestock, including pears, wine grapes, cattle, and lamb. Many of these operations have been passed down through generations of families for over 150 years. Although these farms depend on this irrigation system for survival, they have no voice in whether it continues to operate — even though their livelihoods are directly tied to its waters. Without ample water, these farms will collapse. Earlier this summer, PG&E secured permission from FERC to cut already low water flows from Lake Pillsbury, just two months before harvest season.
In a letter from the USDA to the FERC (see below), the USDA highlights the severe impact to the revenue and the generational devastation the decommissioning would cause in the Central Valley:
According to the last census of agriculture the counties of Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma, Humboldt, and Marin have a combined total of over $1.4 billion in sales of agricultural products. That’s well over $4.2 billion in extra economic activity due to agriculture if you assume a standard multiplier of $3 to $1 which is standard in the nearby Central Valley…
If the decommissioning is approved, hundreds of legacy farms and this area’s rich agricultural heritage will be lost.
In a December 12 op-ed published in The Mendocino Voice entitled, “Water is Life,” Rollings wrote:
The heavy hand of California’s state government has gone unchecked for decades. The results? Burned-out cities and landscapes. Manmade water crises. A widening socioeconomic divide.
It breaks my heart that our nation’s largest food-producing state has chosen special interests and political ambition over its farmers, ranchers and rural communities time and time again…
A government by the people should be for the people. California’s war on agriculture has gone unchecked to the detriment of us all.
Under the Trump administration, that war ends now.
This week, The Globe reported on the land seizure scheme written by California Democrats and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom:
Gavin Newsom created a task force to address “the agricultural land equity crisis.”
What agricultural land equity crisis?
The report the Equity Task Force recently released recommending a land grab from white farmers reads like a “How To” Marxism 101 manual at UC Berkeley.
One of their primary grievances is that “demographic trends in landownership differ greatly from those of agricultural labor in California;” i.e. not enough farm workers own the land on which they work.
By that logic, not enough teachers own the schools where they teach, or not enough dockworkers own the ships they load and unload.
Gavin Newsom is concocting new ways to drive up food inflation by handing over land and natural resources to California Native American tribes, minority groups and who they deem as generally aggrieved.
The report even recommends the development of local ordinances to restrict citizens from purchasing land unless they are part of a certain minority group.
According to Marxists, destroying agricultural land, destroying jobs, and destroying families is “equity.”
If Governor Newsom and his radical leftist allies remain obsessed with demolishing dams and sacrificing prime agricultural land, the perpetually aggrieved minority activists and Native American tribes they claim to champion won’t inherit thriving farms—they’ll be left fighting like vultures over the last pathetic drops of water in a parched wasteland, after they’ve destroyed the lifeblood that sustained generations of hardworking American families.
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