Protecting California’s Wild North Coast and Rivers Since 2004

Huge Crowd Tells Water Board: Stop the Pesticide Poisoning of the Lower Smith River

In Del Norte County on October 8, 2025, more than 70 people attended a meeting of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to tell the state: Enough is enough, stop allowing Smith River easter lily farmers to poison the habitat and the people of the lower Smith River.

The epic meeting began at 6 p.m. and lasted five hours, yet few in the standing-room-only crowd left early. Water Board staff took nearly three hours to report to the four-member Water Board on state efforts to create an agricultural permit that would allow Smith River Easter lily farmers to continue polluting the river’s estuary and impacting local residents. read full article

Will the State of California Finally Protect the Smith River Estuary from Dangerous Pesticides?

Will the State of California Finally Protect the Smith River Estuary from Dangerous Pesticides?

The California North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board has resurrected a long moribund agricultural permit process to allow Easter lily farmers, in Del Norte County, to continue polluting the vital estuary of the Wild and Scenic Smith River and nearby human populations with high concentrations of deadly pesticides. Siskiyou Land Conservancy views this process as largely illusory, and more of a lengthy distraction, given the state’s decades-long refusal to protect the Smith River estuary and prohibit illegal discharges of pollutants into protected waters. Read more.

To read SLC’s comments on the first phase of the resurrected permit process—“Findings”.

Special Report: Forty Years of State Complicity in the Pesticide Poisoning of California’s Wildest River

“It’s a toxic soup in there.”—NMFS fisheries biologist In April 2024, Siskiyou Land Conservancy released a comprehensive report that documents forty years of complicity by the state of California in the pesticide contamination of the Smith River estuary, in the far northwestern corner of California. Pesticide use now threatens the ongoing survival of at least
Read more

State Finds New Evidence of Pesticide Contamination in Smith River Estuary

Despite finding 17 pesticides in estuary waters and 10 instances of contamination, Water Board has no plans to rein in chemical use
In late January, 2018, the state agency charged with enforcing the federal Clean Water Act released a long-awaited report on the results of two years of water quality testing in the Smith River Estuary. The testing detected 17 pesticides in the streams, creeks and ditches that feed the estuary, and 10 instances of contamination of the aquatic food chain. The findings appear to show that Easter lily farmers are in violation of the Clean Water Act, which was passed in 1972 in large part to protect precious aquatic resources such as the West Coast’s dwindling salmon populations.

Easter Lily Pesticides in the News

Just before Easter, the national on-line news magazine TakePart has run a major story about pesticides used on the Smith River Plain to grow Easter lilies. TakePart describes itself as “the digital division of Participant Media,” the company that brought us such films as Academy Award winning Spotlight, as well as An Inconvenient Truth and CITIZENFOUR.

Siskiyou Land Conservancy Hires Local Crew for Smith River Restoration Effort

Working alongside our landowner partners, from 2017-19 Siskiyou Land Conservancy will manage a three-year, $207,000 restoration grant from the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service to restore forest health, and replace failing culverts with a bridge, on the 148-acre South Fork Smith River Property that SLC protects with a conservation easement. Although SLC does not receive
Read more

The four circles represent locations where the California North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, in 2010 and 2013, found “acute (and) chronic reproductive toxicity

The four circles represent where the state Water Board found toxicity in streams feeding the Smith River estuary. The glowing circle is at the mouth of Rowdy Creek, where state scientists discovered “acute reproductive toxicity.”

The four circles represent locations where the California North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, in 2010 and 2013, found “acute (and) chronic reproductive toxicity” in streams feeding the Smith River estuary. The glowing circle is at the mouth of Rowdy Creek, one of the Smith River’s two most important salmon streams, where the state discovered the “acute” toxicity, meaning that invertebrates that make up the basis of the salmonid food chain not only cannot reproduce, but cannot survive in this water.

Siskiyou Land Conservancy