With no water being allocated to farms from the California State and Federal Water Projects and an aquifer under stress due to the drought, pumping at greater and greater depths deplete shared groundwater. Increasingly, private family wells are becoming useless as large corporate farmers, who can afford to dig wells even deeper (some over two thousand feet deep), empty the aquifer to levels well below the few hundred feet of the traditional private wells. Since 1994, land used to plant and grow water intensive almond and pistachio groves in parts the Central Valley has tripled. Due to increased global demand, California grows 80% of almonds sold worldwide. These hundreds of thousands of acres of nut groves, owned by global investors, reap huge profits and create million-dollar harvests, and need copious gallons of water.  An acre of almond trees requires 1.3 million gallons of water a year on average. Thus, water is used to irrigate these huge groves adjacent to small family homes in poor communities where the residents don’t even know the names of their big-farmer neighbors. While the government has begun to create a sustainable groundwater plan, currently wells are still not metered and water extraction is still not measured in California; therefore, it is difficult to know who is digging, how deep the wells are going and exactly how much water is being used. The recently signed State Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) sets in place the mechanism for managing water, but does so at an alarmingly slow space. Guidelines for creating the plan have been published by the State Water Board, with expected local planning in place by 2020 and full implementation by 2040.