CSU, Chico Study: High-tech Septic Systems Can Help Save Agricultural Land
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 25, 2003
Joe Wills
530-898-4143
CSU, Chico Study: High-tech Septic Systems Can Help Save Agricultural Land
New technologies in treating wastewater can preserve Central Valley agricultural land by permitting residential development on once-unusable land, according to a new California State University, Chico report.
CSU, Chico’s California Wastewater Training and Research Center has released a 166-page study titled “On-site Wastewater Treatment Technology and the Preservation of Agricultural Land in California’s Central Valley.”
The report details how over the past 20 years there have been significant advances in on-site wastewater technology. The new technologies provide more thorough wastewater treatment to protect public health and water quality. These treatment systems can be installed on land with poor soil quality or sloping grades-property that now cannot be developed with the traditional septic tank and drain field. This can reduce the pressure on high-quality land now in agricultural use to be converted to residential use.
The new treatment technologies also allow greater housing density in rural areas by using cluster development, protecting more agricultural land and open space. The higher level of treatment also allows for re-utilization of the wastewater for beneficial uses, such as subsurface drip irrigation.
Booming population and agricultural production increasingly compete in the state’s 450-mile-long Central Valley. Valley farms produce more than $16 billion a year in various commodities, while the population of 5.5 million residents is expected to double within the next 40 years.
“The effort to preserve agricultural land has looked to large-lot zoning, conservation easements and the Williamson Act for help,” said CSU, Chico political science professor Irv Schiffman, one of the authors of the report.
“Another way to save ag land can be to use non-ag land, such as marginal land, for the new residential development,” Schiffman said.
The report included the results of a survey that asked county planners and environmental health directors if restrictions on lot sizes and densities in their area were based, in part, on septic system limitations. Sixty-two percent of the health directors, and 86 percent of the planners, said yes.
Along with survey data and analyses of wastewater systems, the report includes a model ordinance for new wastewater treatment regulations.
The other authors of the report are CSU, Chico agriculture professor Mitchell Johns and Tibor Banathy, director of the university’s Wastewater Training and Research Center.
More than 200 copies of the report are being distributed to planners and environmental health directors. The report is also available on the Web site of the California Wastewater Training and Research Center.
Support for the study came from the CSU Agricultural Research Initiative and the National Decentralized Water Resources Capacity Development Project, which was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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