Back in 1987, I asked an appraiser in Pope Valley, “What is land going for these days?”

“Kid, I appraise the water. I reckon they throw the land in for free.”

Anyone who grew up in the country knows not all land has the same amount of water. It is not uncommon for one 40 acre-parcel to sport a gusher, while its neighbor produces nothing. One has enough water to grow grapes. One doesn’t. The market place then fixes the price for each.

Rural people literally live off their wells. (We grew up on a well that produced only three gallons a minute. We would often drain it dry. We’d have to wait a minimum of 24 hours for it to replenish}.

During the last drought, it stopped producing. We had to buy water from a truck, until Laurie Wood witched another spot. Soon we had 20 gallons per minute. Alas, it was rife with silica and stained glasses, toilets, and sinks, brown.

Welcome to the country.

You get what Mother Nature gives you. Country people understand that. Stained glassware became one of the tradeoffs one made in order to live in Conn Valley.

In the past few years, a powerful minority in Napa Valley has been flexing its muscle. They tried to pass measures O and P. Measures so draconian that one couldn’t cut a tree within a thousand feet of another dwelling. Measures that would prohibit fences, barns, or any clearing within 150 feet of wherever a Benthic Macro invertebrate (read: round worm) called home. It was done in the name of “water” quality and erosion.

The good people of Napa voted those measures down — resoundingly.

Apparently, the “Central Committee” won’t be quieted. They’ve come back with a new “Water Resources Element” of the General Plan.

In other words, if you lose at the ballot box, create a document formulated by “staff.”

Here’s the give-away from their proposed document: “The County shall protect and enhance water shed lands, including the downstream delivery of essential watershed resources and benefits from headwater channels.”

We know what that means. The land is no longer ours. “They” will dictate what you can build, plant, and harvest — all for the benefit of the headwaters, of course.

Apparently, to some In Napa, the ballot counts about as much as Pakistan.

The buzz words that float around are depleted aquifers (not true), conservation and recycling.

There are bad water areas to be sure. The Milliken-Sarco-Tulocay area is one of them. Wells often stop producing. But there is no less water in the ground, or falling from the sky, than there ever was. In fact, with climate change, rainfall is predicted to increase.

Water in Napa is fairly simple. We have homes, vineyards and businesses that use the water which doesn’t wash to the sea or seep into the ground.

At an average rainfall of 33 inches per year, that means we get something like 1.3 to 1.4 million acre feet from Heaven each year. Experts say 90 percent runs off. The rest is either captured above ground, or hangs out under the ground in various “aquifers.”

The county reports that each year around 400,000 acre feet stays under the ground. That number is not going down. That means that roughly a million acre feet escape to the ocean.

An acre foot is 326,000 gallons. We have 40,000 acres of grapes. They use about one third of an acre foot per year, but call it an even acre foot. That’s only 40,000 acre feet of water — in reality much less.

Vineyards are unable to deplete our aquifers. There are not enough of them to put a dent in our underground supplies.

Few homes use one acre foot per year, but say they do. We have around 50,000 homes in Napa County. That means around 50,000 acre feet are needed each year for residential use. Between residences and Ag, we use less than 90,000 acre feet each year!

If in 50 years we add 10,000 acres of vines (unlikely), we need only an additional 10,000 acre feet. The same holds true if the county caves in to pressure and adds (God forbid) 10,000 additional homes.

With 400,000 acre feet underground, we have more than enough to sustain additional plantings.

No one will say it, but the discussion should be about how to mine for more water, and how to capture above ground more of the abundant water that Mother Nature gives us each year.

Milliken reservoir has been overflowing since December. Couldn’t we pump that back into the ground somewhere, or at least raise the dam a few feet?

But the dialogue is not about water development — capturing and drilling — but how to control private wells and private property.

Why is that?

(Warren lives in St. Helena.)