The New York Times spotlighted the Center's research findings in a Nov. 13 story on nitrate contamination of drinking water in the Central Valley farm belt.

Reporting from the farmworker community of Seville, Tulare County, The Times said residents living below the poverty line are paying double for their water: "both for the tap water they use only to shower and wash clothes, and for the five-gallon bottles they must buy weekly for drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth." Life in Seville, reporter Patricia Leigh Brown said, "is a life teeming with worry: about children accidentally sipping contaminated water while cooling off with a garden hose, about not having enough clean water for an elderly parent’s medications, about finding a rock while cleaning the feeding tube of a severely disabled daughter, as Lorie Nieto did. She vowed never to use tap water again."

The Center's study, released earlier this year, estimated that 254,000 people in the Tulare Basin and Salinas Valley were at risk for nitrate contamination of their drinking water, the result of livestock wastes and chemical fertilizers infiltrating aquifers that are tapped for faucets. The Times story: http://nyti.ms/RAFj9i. The Center's study: http://groundwaternitrate.ucdavis.edu/