Northern California’s record-setting rains have eased drought anxieties for now, but maintaining the supply of water vital to Marin and Sonoma County agriculture will require constant vigilance, according to a new report. The dry weather that ravaged the region from 2019 to 2022 underlined the urgency of preparedness in the face of the extreme weather wrought by climate change, a report compiled by more than a dozen local, state and federal agencies and nonprofits found. With the region’s reservoirs, creeks and springs full and flowing, the agricultural community is taking stock of the ways it handled the drought and considering how to soften the blow of future droughts, which could come with greater frequency and severity. The report, released this month by the University of California Cooperative Extension, said that responding to the drought required extensive coordination. No single agency or organization could have addressed the challenge alone. California’s weather has always been subject to extremes, but the fluctuations have become even more dramatic due to climate change, said David Lewis, director of U.C. extension for Marin. “We are no longer facing a one-time, one-off drought paradigm,” he said. “We are always going to be in a state of extremes, and we need to adapt to that and manage water resources accordingly. The agricultural community is now better organized around practices for managing water in response to those extremes.” As the crisis unfolded, agricultural and water management agencies sought ways to preserve, maximize and deliver water to the farms and ranches most in need. They helped farmers enhance their short- and long-term water security by installing or upgrading livestock watering systems, storage tanks, rain-catchment systems, springs and ponds. The costs of such measures were dramatically elevated due to increased demand for materials and supply-chain issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. To ease the inflated costs to farmers, government agencies and nonprofits issued an estimated $47 million in financial assistance to Sonoma and Marin producers between January 2020 and June 2022. “In an industry that operates on notoriously thin margins, finding the money to invest in long-term, adaptive changes to infrastructure or agricultural practice can be all but impossible without help,” said Eric Rubenstahl, an associate director of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. Marin and Sonoma producers play an important role in in the region’s economy, generating nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2021, or about 6 to 7 percent of total revenue. In responding to the crisis, the agricultural community applied lessons learned from the drought that struck the region in 1976 and 1977, said Stefan Parnay, Marin County’s agricultural commissioner. “Ranchers and farmers face constant challenges in providing a consistent food supply for our communities,” Mr. Parnay said. “Responding to them requires incredible collaboration and creative solutions.” The most recent three-year drought was part of one of the driest periods in over 1,200 years. From 2019 to 2022, rainfall totaled just 17 percent to 68 percent of normal levels. As the drought continued into its second and third years, some farmers and ranchers were forced to shut down operations their families had sustained for generations. “We had ranchers and producers calling and saying they might have to go out of business or cut down their herd size and take a big economic hit,” Mr. Rubenstahl said. MALT established a program called DRAWS, for Drought Resiliency and Water Security, to help ranchers with emergency projects, such as installing 5,000-gallon storage tanks. To supplement natural water, the North Marin and Marin Water districts delivered water to those in greatest need. In some cases, Mr. Rubenstahl said, a ranch usually supplied with water by six springs might have been reduced to just one functioning spring during the drought. DRAWS funding enabled them to install pipes, pumps and tanks to move spring water to locations where springs had run dry. Seventy ranches have benefited from the program, which has installed 69 water tanks, 25 water troughs, 25 water pumps and 75,000 feet of water pipes. MALT typically limits its support to ranches over which it holds easements that protect them from development and preserve them as farmland, but the DRAWS program supported ranches outside the MALT network for the first time. In all, the program supported 93 ranches.