“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over,” beloved
American novelist Mark Twain is said to have once wrote. Having
grown up in California's central valley, I witnessed first-hand
the severity of drought, the debate over water transfers and the
strain on water supplies as what was once “ag country”
increasingly became the now cliché “ag-urban interface.”  For
those outside agriculture, it would seem antithetical for the ag
industry to address such critical issues as water quality and
quantity in a vacuum. But as some would attest, there are many
issues and many segments of the industry working every day,
often independently, to address them. Fortunately, as
agriculture becomes more and more isolated in the golden state's
political and business scheme, a common sense approach is
beginning to blossom. The California Water Quality Coalition
(CWQC) is a case in point.  In 1999, legislation was passed,
giving California's Regional Water Quality Control Board the
daunting deadline for reviewing waste dis