Clearance through orchards and agricultural corridors

Rule 35 reaches an orchard tree like any other vegetation. GO 95 Table 1 footnote (jjj) moves a plowed or cultivated orchard of fruit, nut or citrus trees from Case 14 to Case 13, 18 inches instead of 48 at 12 kV. In a State Responsibility Area, 14 CCR 1257(a)(2) also exempts it from PRC 4293.

A 12 kV feeder runs the fence line of an almond block in Tehama County. The trees nearest the road are planted 22 feet off the line of poles, and the outside row has grown into the conductor zone. Two questions have to be answered before a saw goes up, and the crop does not answer either one.

The first is which Table 1 case the span sits in. The second is whether the Public Resources Code reaches this ground at all. Both turn on how the orchard floor was farmed, and on what somebody wrote down the day they stood in it.

The footnote that moves an orchard out of Case 14

GO 95 Rule 35 requires the minimum clearances in Table 1, Cases 13 and 14, between line conductors and vegetation. Case 14 governs inside the High Fire-Threat District, which footnote (hhh) defines by reference to Rule 21.2-D. A footnote on the Case 14 row then takes one crop back out:

Clearances in this case shall not apply to orchards of fruit, nut or citrus trees that are plowed or cultivated. In those areas Case 13 clearances shall apply.

That is footnote (jjj), and it is the only place in Table 1 where a crop is named.

The size of the change depends on the column the conductor sits in. Case 14 and Case 13 diverge in three of them.

Conductor	Case 14, High Fire-Threat District	Case 13, under footnote (jjj)
Supply conductors and cables, 750 to 22,500 volts	48 inches	18 inches
Supply conductors and cables, 22.5 to 300 kV	48 inches	1/4 pin spacing shown in Table 2, Case 15
Supply conductors and cables, 300 to 550 kV	120 inches	1/2 pin spacing shown in Table 2, Case 15

On the 12 kV feeder along the fence line, the orchard finding moves from 48 inches to 18. On a 115 kV line crossing the same block, the stated distance disappears and is replaced by a cross reference to a construction dimension. Which column a given conductor belongs in decides how much the footnote is worth on any particular span.

The footnote's reach stops at Case 14 clearances. Rule 35's separate duty on dead, rotten or diseased portions that overhang or lean toward a span survives intact, so the dead tree at the end of the row is the same finding it would be in a forest.

The footnote is also silent on who carries the risk of reading it wrong. That silence stands out against the rule the footnote hangs from. Rule 35's Exception 4 for mature trees says that "the utility shall bear the risk of determining whether this exemption applies," and that the Commission holds final authority over whether it applies in any specific instance.

The Commission has final authority on footnote (jjj) too, through the ordinary route. Somebody has to assert the orchard in the record first.

The Public Resources Code lets the same block out through a different door

PRC 4293 opens on a land cover. It names no crop and no fire-threat district. Its clearance duty attaches to a line held:

upon any mountainous land, or in forest-covered land, brush-covered land, or grass-covered land

It then runs only "during such times and in such areas as are determined to be necessary" by the Director or the agency with primary fire protection responsibility for the area. PRC 4292 opens on the same four land types before it asks for its ten foot firebreak around a subject pole.

An almond block is none of the four on its face. A block with a mowed cover crop between the rows, or with cured resident vegetation standing in September, can be read as grass-covered land, and the Director of CAL FIRE or the local fire protection agency is the reader.

Article 4 of Title 14 answers that from the other side, and the answer is nine words. 14 CCR 1257(a)(2) exempts the PRC 4293 minimum clearances in State Responsibility Areas "On areas described in 14 CCR 1255(c)." 14 CCR 1255(c) then lists eight areas under one condition, "if fire will not propagate thereon," and the sixth is "orchards of fruit, nut or citrus trees that are plowed or cultivated."

What each of the three exits from PRC 4293 costs to hold belongs to that section's own page. What matters on a farm span is that the drafters of Article 4 wrote a farmland exemption at all, which is hard to explain unless they expected farmland to be inside the statute's reach without one.

Three limits ride along with that exemption.

• It is written for State Responsibility Areas. 14 CCR 1252 confines the Director's standing determination to the four land covers "within State Responsibility Areas unless specifically exempted by 14 CCR 1255 and 1257." Whether a block sits in the SRA or the local responsibility area is a prior question, not a detail.

• It reaches the minimum clearance provisions only, so the felling duty in the same statute survives it.

• It carries 1255(c)'s condition with it, and that condition asks how fire would behave on that ground on that day.

The felling duty is the one growers are most often surprised by, because it applies tree by tree inside an exempt block. PRC 4293 requires that four things be "felled, cut, or trimmed so as to remove such hazard":

• dead trees

• old decadent or rotten trees

• trees weakened by decay or disease

• trees, or portions of trees, leaning toward the line

A dead almond in row 14 is a removal in the middle of an orchard that owes the statute no clearance distance at all.

One pole at the irrigation pump shows how many answers a single structure can carry. PRC 4296 is a single sentence: "Sections 4292 and 4293 do not apply if the transmission or distribution line voltage is 750 volts or less."

The service feeding the 175 horsepower pump motor sits outside both statutes on voltage alone if it runs at 750 volts or less. The 12 kV primary above it stays inside them. The transformer on that pole also makes it a subject pole for the ten foot firebreak, which 1255(c) can exempt by area even where the hardware at the pole cannot.

The two carve-outs do not cover the same farmland

GO 95's footnote repeats one line of 1255(c) word for word. The Public Resources Code side takes all eight.

Area named in 14 CCR 1255(c)	PRC 4292 firebreak, SRA	PRC 4293 clearance, SRA	GO 95 inside the High Fire-Threat District
Fields planted to row crops	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14
Plowed or cultivated fields	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14
Producing vineyards that are plowed or cultivated	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14
Fields in nonflammable summer fallow	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14
Irrigated pasture land	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14
Orchards of fruit, nut or citrus trees that are plowed or cultivated	Exempt	Exempt	Case 13, by footnote (jjj)
Christmas tree farms that are plowed or cultivated	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14
Swamp, marsh or bog land	Exempt	Exempt	Case 14

The exemptions in the first two columns are conditional on fire not propagating on the area. Footnote (jjj) carries no such condition, and no State Responsibility Area limit either.

Put that on one road in the Sierra foothills, inside a State Responsibility Area and inside the High Fire-Threat District. A plowed vineyard on the north side is exempt from the statute's four feet and owes Case 14's 48 inches at 12 kV. A cultivated walnut orchard on the south side is exempt from the same four feet and owes 18 inches. Same district, same voltage, same day, and a 30 inch difference that comes entirely from which of the eight areas the block is.

Two further boundaries on the footnote are worth naming, because both get assumed away. A eucalyptus windrow planted along the orchard edge is not an orchard of fruit, nut or citrus trees, and it keeps Case 14 while the block it shelters does not. Windrow species are also the ones that close a clearance fastest. And on a line that falls inside FAC-003's applicability, the federal standard carries no agricultural carve-out at all, so the Minimum Vegetation Clearance Distance sits underneath everything on this page, unmoved.

Plowed or cultivated is a finding about the floor

Neither GO 95 nor Article 4 defines "plowed or cultivated." The phrase was written when clean cultivation was how an orchard floor was kept, and orchard floors have changed since.

The 2024 UC Cooperative Extension cost study for Sacramento Valley almonds sets out the standard program year by year. From the third year on, the row middles are mowed five times, in February, April, May, June and August.

The tree row gets a dormant strip spray in January and spot sprays through the season. A pre-harvest herbicide application goes on "the entire orchard floor (row middles and tree row)" in late July. Tillage appears once in the whole document, at pre-plant, when the ground is ripped to six feet and then "disced and rolled twice to break up clods."

So the ordinary modern almond block is mowed and sprayed rather than plowed, and whether that counts as "cultivated" is a live question. The state pushes in the same direction as the practice. CDFA's Healthy Soils Program, run by its Office of Agricultural Resilience and Sustainability, funds two practice groups that bear on the phrase:

• "Annual Plantings: Cover Crops, Crop Rotations"

• "Decreased Tillage: No-Till, Reduced Tillage"

A grower can hold a state incentive to stop tilling and a utility exemption that reads as though tilling is what makes the block exempt.

That leaves the finding where findings belong, with the person on the ground. A defensible claim is a dated observation of the orchard floor and its condition, taken on the visit: mowed to two inches with green middles on February 11, or mowed residue cured brown on August 12. A crop layer in a GIS that says "almond" is not that observation, and the difference shows up the moment somebody asks whether fire would propagate there on the day the reading was taken.

Where the answer is genuinely ambiguous, say who resolves it. Under GO 95 it is the Commission. Under 14 CCR 1257(a)(2) it is the Director or the agency with primary fire protection responsibility for the area, and their inspector writes the finding on a fire agency form rather than in the utility's system. The two findings travel to different places.

The exemption expires on the farm's calendar

An orchard is a crop with a planned end. The same cost study puts the life of the orchard at planting at 25 years, and sets out what happens when it arrives:

• a custom operator pushes the trees over with a dozer blade

• a front-end loader feeds them to a horizontal grinder

• the ground is ripped to six feet, twice, at an angle

• the site is disced and rolled twice to break up clods

For a distribution line built in 1968 that is the third orchard on the same ground. Each of those transitions changes the answer to the exemption question, and none of them generates a notice to the utility.

• During removal and replant the block is bare dirt and berms. It is as plowed as ground gets, and there is nothing within 20 feet of the conductor.

• Through the first several years the trees are below the primary and the exemption carries no weight at all.

• Somewhere in the second decade the canopy arrives at the conductor zone, which is the year the exemption starts to matter and the year the file is least likely to have been rechecked.

• When the water stops, whether by price, by well or by a groundwater plan, the block stops being farmed before anyone calls it abandoned. The floor then grows what it grows.

An exemption asserted in 2019 and never re-observed is a statement about a block that no longer exists. The re-check interval is the inspection cycle, and what actually sets that cycle is a separate question from what sets the number.

The easement is old and the trees are many

Orchard work is negotiated work, because the vegetation is inventory. The California Farm Bureau Federation put the scale of it on the record in comments filed March 29, 2021 on PG&E's Wildfire Mitigation Plan, in Rulemaking 18-10-007:

Where lines pass near or through crop trees, vegetation management activities can significantly impact farming operations, as multiple trees, sometimes hundreds belonging to a single property owner, can be affected when trimming to maintain clearances around lines.

Hundreds is arithmetic. At 130 trees to the acre, a hundred foot working strip along half a mile of line covers about six acres and roughly 790 trees. At 16 foot in-row spacing, a single 500 foot span parallels 31 trees in the nearest row alone.

The same filing names the other half of the problem: "These easements are in some cases over one hundred years old and in no way were drafted to encompass the type of rules and regulations currently imposed on these landowners." An easement of that vintage was written for a two wire circuit and says nothing about a 12 foot radial specification, and what the recorded instrument actually grants is the starting point for every conversation in the block.

The statute anticipates the refusal and stops there. PRC 4295 excuses a clearing where the person owing it lacks "the legal right to maintain such clearing." The same section leaves entry and damage to another owner's property with the owner's consent.

That shelter is real and narrow. What a refusal has to look like before it answers for a span, and the separate statutory right of access, are each their own subject. In an orchard the refusal is rarely about the tree. It is about yield on a producing asset, and the negotiable part is usually which limbs, and when.

The number the utility chooses is the number it gets audited against

PG&E states publicly that clearances between vegetation and energized conductors "range from 18 to 120 inches based on the voltage." Eighteen inches is the bottom of that range, and in a plowed orchard inside the High Fire-Threat District it is also the top.

The utility's own program can sit well above the rule. PG&E's enhanced vegetation management answer in its 2021 plan, reproduced in the Farm Bureau's filing, reads: "The 12 foot expanded clearance will be obtained regardless of environmental conditions (e.g., wind, soil, elevation, species)." The Farm Bureau's objection is aimed at exactly that gap, arguing that "PG&E appears to be implementing vegetation management clearances as if orchards did create fire risks."

Whoever is right about the risk, the compliance consequence is fixed. A program specification is enforceable against the utility through the plan, and the body that enforces the plan is not the body that enforces the clearance. Two findings follow from that, and they land in different files.

• A span trimmed to 18 inches in a block the plan scoped for 12 feet conforms to Table 1 Case 13 and misses the utility's own commitment.

• A span trimmed to 12 feet in a block the plan did not scope has spent money the plan did not authorize, on trees the grower did not want cut.

Which is why the orchard entry has to name the specification applied and not only the distance achieved.

Working a block: rows, lines underfoot, and a harvest window

The physical corridor in an orchard is 22 feet wide and belongs to the harvest. The middles between rows are the working floor for a shaker, a blower, a sweeper and a pickup machine, and the cost study's harvest runs August through October, with the nuts lying on the ground between operations. Buried main lines, lateral lines and micro-sprinkler emitters run under and along those middles.

Three practical consequences follow for a crew in the block.

• Brush and chips left in a middle are a harvest contaminant. Material that goes through a sweeper ends up at the huller.

• Equipment that can drive a forest road can still crush a lateral line or a riser, and the grower will find it at the next irrigation set rather than on the day.

• The window is narrow at both ends. The floor is prepared for harvest in late July, hives sit in the block at bloom, and winter sanitation runs November through January.

None of that is in a clearance rule. It is in the access conversation that has to happen before a crew arrives, and it is the reason orchard work gets scheduled on the farm's calendar. The one rule that does think about this ground is Table 1 Case 4, which sets vertical clearance "across other areas capable of being traversed by vehicles or agricultural equipment," and the shaker and the bank-out wagon are what that case has in mind.

What the record has to name

A clearance entry in an orchard has to survive two readers who are looking for different things. One is checking a distance against a Table 1 case. The other is checking whether the case applied was the right one, which is a question about the ground under the span.

Six fields carry that weight.

Field	What it settles
Crop, named	Whether footnote (jjj) and 14 CCR 1255(c)(6) are even in play, since neither reaches a vineyard or a windrow
Floor condition, observed and dated	Whether the block was plowed or cultivated, and whether fire would propagate there that day
Responsibility area and fire-threat district	Which of the two exemptions is available, since they have different footprints
Exemption claimed, by citation	Footnote (jjj), 14 CCR 1257(a)(2), or none
Specification applied	The rule's floor, or the program's larger number
Measured clearance, phase and date	The finding itself

An entry that holds up reads like this:

• span 41 to 42, Vina 1102 circuit, 12 kV

• inside the High Fire-Threat District, State Responsibility Area

• block planted to almond on 16 by 22 foot spacing

• floor observed August 12, 2026, middles mowed and tree strip sprayed to bare ground

• footnote (jjj) claimed on that basis, Case 13 applied

• closest approach 24 inches on the west phase after trim

• landowner present, crew and foreman named

Everything in that entry can be checked by someone who was not there. The two elements doing the most work are the dated floor observation and the citation to the footnote, because together they are the only proof that 18 inches was the right number rather than a shortfall against 48.

What a complete clearance record contains and how long each part of it has to be kept are their own subjects. The orchard adds one requirement to both: the reason the smaller number was lawful has to be written down at the time, because nobody can reconstruct an orchard floor from a photograph taken two years later.

Further reading

• Which Table 1 case and column a conductor sits in: Cases 13 and 14 read column by column, and what each voltage band actually owes.

• 14 CCR 1257 and the exemptions to PRC 4293: The three exits from the statutory clearance, including the area exemption this page applies to farmland.

• Right of way width and easement width: What the recorded instrument grants, and why the corridor's width is not a clearance input.

Frequently asked questions

Does GO 95 Rule 35 apply to orchard trees at all?

Yes. Rule 35 requires the minimum clearances in Table 1, Cases 13 and 14, between line conductors and vegetation, and nothing in the rule excludes a crop tree. Table 1 footnote (jjj) changes which case applies to a plowed or cultivated orchard of fruit, nut or citrus trees inside the High Fire-Threat District. It does not remove the orchard from the rule, and it does not touch Rule 35's separate duty on dead, rotten or diseased portions that overhang or lean toward a span.

Does footnote (jjj) cover vineyards, row crops or irrigated pasture?

No. Footnote (jjj) names orchards of fruit, nut or citrus trees that are plowed or cultivated, and nothing else. 14 CCR 1255(c) lists eight farmland types and the Public Resources Code exemptions reach all eight, so a plowed vineyard inside the High Fire-Threat District is exempt from PRC 4293 clearance in a State Responsibility Area and still owes Case 14's 48 inches at 12 kV.

Is a mowed, no-till almond orchard plowed or cultivated?

Neither GO 95 nor 14 CCR Article 4 defines the phrase, so it is a finding about the orchard floor on the day rather than a crop category. The 2024 UC Cooperative Extension cost study for Sacramento Valley almonds budgets mowing the row middles five times a year from year three and strip spraying the tree row, with no tillage of the middles in production years. Under GO 95 the Commission settles the question in the end, and under 14 CCR 1257(a)(2) it is the Director of CAL FIRE or the agency with primary fire protection responsibility.

Does the orchard exemption from PRC 4293 work outside a State Responsibility Area?

14 CCR 1257(a) is written for the minimum clearance provisions of PRC 4293 applicable in State Responsibility Areas. Outside them the statute still reaches on its face, and the determination of the times and areas where it is necessary belongs to the agency which has primary responsibility for fire protection there. The area exemption a file cites in an SRA orchard is not automatically available across the boundary.