CLEMENTS, San Joaquin County — When grower Brad Goehring looks across his rows of grapes, he can’t help but see a pool of murky water that breaks the rhythm of his vines, which otherwise stretch steadily into the Sierra foothills.

The pool is relatively small, maybe half an acre, but vital, according to environmental regulators. They say it helps to clean the runoff from Goehring’s fields and provides a home for critters such as marsh birds. And by law, it can’t be disrupted, which is what makes this mini wetland a headache for Goehring.

“I’m paying for this land, but I can’t farm it,” he said on a recent afternoon as he stood in his vineyards about 40 miles southeast of Sacramento where the water chokes back his Pinot Gris. “This land is doing nothing for me.”

Now Goehring is worried about seeing more cropland lost to regulation. He’s among the many California farmers caught in the middle of a tug-of-water between President Trump’s administration and the state over the reach of the federal Clean Water Act.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to rein in the landmark law and halt what it sees as excessive oversight of small marshes, creeks and ponds, like the scores that spill across California’s farm country. State regulators are seeking to maintain and even expand watershed protections. They say too many waterways have been eaten up by human sprawl.

“Our policy makes sure we are doing what we can to protect them,” said Jonathan Bishop, chief deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board, which could put new rules into play as soon as next month.

The stakes are huge. Whatever regulation emerges between the state and federal governments will affect potentially millions of acres — where developers may want to build homes, where cities are eyeing new roads, and where farmers may wish to extend their fields.

Goehring, a fourth-generation grower in the Central Valley town of Clements, sees a rising demand for his Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Sirah. Yet the prospect of growing more grapes, he said, is clouded by uncertainty over where he’ll be allowed to plant.

Such confusion has caused him problems before. When Goehring plowed a field that regulators deemed a protected wetland years ago, federal agents in a black sport utility vehicle showed up at his property with the threat of arrest and $100,000-a-day penalties.

He was cleared of wrongdoing, but only after a lengthy legal battle.

Today, Goehring has a lot of powerful allies. California’s farming and wine industries, the building and construction trades and many cities and chambers of commerce share his apprehension about the looming regulation. On the other side of the equation, a growing roster of scientists and environmental groups has lined up in support of stronger protections.

“Am I tired of the issue? Yeah,” Goehring said. “I would like it fixed so we don’t keep playing games like this. But it doesn’t look like we have hopes of that happening in the near future. We’ll just have to stand and fight.”

The fight over what waterways deserve protection has been brewing for a long time.

A pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions more than a decade ago, stemming from two proposed developments on top of marshes, cast doubts on the scope of the Clean Water Act. The justices agreed that rivers and lakes are subject to oversight, but not necessarily the small and intermittently flowing creeks, ponds and wetlands that feed the larger water bodies.

The Obama administration sought to do away with the ambiguity. Fearing that watersheds were being irreparably harmed, federal officials in 2015 rewrote the rules for what’s covered under the Clean Water Act, known as Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, extending safeguards to the small upstream flows. These channels and basins contain little and sometimes no water, but they make up the majority of the nation’s waterways.

Two years later, the Trump administration began the formal process of undoing President Obama’s rules. The president cited fears about stunting economic growth and said there was simply no need to regulate “nearly every puddle or ditch.” The EPA hasn’t estimated how many places will lose federal protection, but it’s enough to alarm water experts.

Dueling policies over waterways The Trump administration and California are at odds over what water bodies should be protected from new development. Each is pursuing its own regulatory policy. Clean Water Act: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back the number of waterways subject to oversight under the federal Clean Water Act. The reworked rules would continue to protect rivers and lakes but exclude many smaller water bodies, such as intermittently flowing streams, vernal pools and isolated wetlands. California wetlands policy: The California Water Resources Control Board is developing a plan that would expand watershed regulation. The policy would redefine wetlands to broaden their protections and establish new oversight of development on small waterways. If adopted, the state plan is expected to largely insulate California from rollbacks of the Clean Water Act.

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Wetlands and creeks, scientists note, help with flood protection and groundwater recharge in addition to providing habitat for fish and wildlife and filtering pollution. Even one isolated body of water, if tainted, can create widespread problems as its sullied waters soak into the aquifer below or are washed by rain into a nearby river or lake.

“Everything is connected hydrologically,” said Leon Szeptycki, executive director of Stanford University’s Water in the West program. “You can’t just pick arbitrary lines (for protection). The fact that we’ve already destroyed so much wetlands and altered so many streams makes it all the more important that we protect what we have.”

While California regulators have long deferred to the Clean Water Act to decide what water bodies to protect, the constant rejiggering of the federal law prompted them to begin drafting their own watershed policy. The State Water Board started the effort more than 10 years ago with the hope of ensuring adequate oversight as well as being more consistent in its enforcement.

Now, supporters of the state plan see the policy as a way to insulate California from the Trump administration’s rollbacks. The State Water Board is scheduled to take up the matter April 2.

“Once the state gets its act together on this, the policy will be less capricious and more predictable than the Clean Water Act,” said Carol Witham, a botanist who runs an environmental consulting firm in Sacramento. “And yes, it will be more restrictive.”

The state plan reaches farther across the watershed than the federal statute. By broadening the legal definition of a wetland, for example, it would protect areas that don’t necessarily have vegetation, such as playas. The plan also sets up a new system for reviewing and permitting development along smaller waterways, ensuring oversight of seasonal and rain-dependent streams and ponds.

Witham can point to numerous places in California where she said property owners have had too much wiggle room to disrupt small water bodies, resulting in harm to the entire landscape.

“You look in one direction, and you see grasslands and rolling hills,” she said. “You turn around and look in the other direction (where the flow of water has stopped), and there’s maybe two or three trees left.”

Anxieties over the regulation are escalating as next month’s meeting of the State Water Board nears.

The California Department of Transportation has expressed concern that the state policy could drive up the cost of building new highways and bridges. The High Speed Rail Authority has said it might delay the laydown of train tracks. The California Building Industry Association fears regulatory “burdens” for private developers.

“It’s going to affect everybody, big projects to mom-and-pop projects,” said Jody Gallaway, who runs an environmental consulting business in Chico that works with public works departments.

One of Gallaway’s biggest fears is that state regulation could hamper rebuilding of such wildfire-ravaged areas as Butte County, where last year’s Camp Fire wiped out the town of Paradise. Just installing a new culvert beneath a road, she said, will become more cumbersome.

“The state’s really been hammered recently,” she said. “You think you’d be getting to a point where you’d be getting regulatory relief.”

Supporters of the state plan say watersheds have borne the brunt of one type of development or another for too long. Ninety percent of wetlands and countless streams have been plowed or paved over, according to the state.

The Endangered Habitats League in Los Angeles wrote a letter supporting the policy, noting the important role that wetlands play in buffering communities from rising seas. Russian Riverkeeper in Healdsburg backs the regulations as a way to prevent more human activity from hurting the rivers and creeks of California’s North Coast. Defenders of Wildlife in Washington, D.C., says the plan will keep ecosystems intact.

“It’s not just academic,” said Erica Maharg, managing attorney for San Francisco Baykeeper, another supporter of watershed protections. “There are proposals to develop right along the shoreline (of San Francisco Bay). The last thing that we need to be doing right now is developing and paving over wetlands.”

Meanwhile, Goehring is waiting to see what happens. He said his plans for vineyard expansion depend on whatever regulation shakes out. While neither the state nor federal proposals are likely to affect his existing vines, he fears the stricter state policy will limit his options for planting new grapes.

Under the state proposal, he could seek permits to farm on top of protected areas, but he worries this will be prohibitively expensive. Additionally, it could require him to offset the loss of any pond or creek with watershed improvements elsewhere.

Goehring also wonders whether his land will be subject to an inspection for sensitive wetlands if he makes changes to the property, even simply swapping out one variety of grape for another.

“My home is here, my land is here,” Goehring said. “I don’t want to have to farm where they tell me to.”