A look at how much it costs to move water—which is free—to an ag field.

There’s no such thing as free water, even when the water itself is free. Unlike a monthly water bill that most of us pay for a home or office, farmers aren’t connected to a Cal Am or an Alco. The catch: They have to build their own infrastructure.

Take Paraiso Vineyards, in the Santa Lucia foothills west of Soledad. Owner Rich Smith crunches the numbers to figure out what it costs him to get groundwater to his vineyards: There’s $80,000 just to drill a 400-foot hole in the ground, plus a casing, a pump and a electrical panel, which adds easily $50,000. Then there’s pipe, which runs about $60 for a 30-foot section, and wages for people to monitor and move the irrigation system around.

When Smith turns on the water, he delivers up to 50 percent more than what the plant can actually use. “If I only put on enough water to keep the plant alive, salts would kill the plant in short order,” he says. “You have to move the water. In ag, you have to pretty much put twice as much on as what the plant actually consumes.”

The cost of the water itself? Free.

Smith takes out an old adding machine to attempt to calculate what he actually spends on water, considering all the capital costs, and his PG&E bills for pumping the water 400 feet up to the surface.

“I'm going to have a hard time getting up to 1 cent a gallon,” he says. “I hesitate to give you that number because I have never really tried to figure it out. Most of my vineyards, it's costing me a tenth of a cent a gallon to deliver it to the field.”