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New report paints bleak picture for California agriculture

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 15, 2008 at 6:23 am

From the Western Farm Press:

One of the advantages of living a fairly long time is that one remembers what things used to be like way back when. Belonging to the leading edge of the post-World War II baby boom and growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s is a perfect case in point.

My family bought a house in a new subdivision in Norwalk in the early 1950s as the steady encroachment of urbanization pushed out dairies, farm fields and tree orchards. In fact, the only exposure I had to agriculture before I took this job was the few short years that my cousins and I played in the pasture behind my house throwing cow pies at each other in smelly games of tag. The dairy owner eventually had to bend to the onslaught of civilization and move away — an exodus literally sparked by errant neighborhood teenagers setting his haystacks ablaze while smoking in his lofts.

For those of us who grew up in Southern California in the 1950s we watched the last remaining vestiges of production agriculture forced out of the region as valuable ag land was gobbled up by developers who replaced it with freeways, businesses and homes. As recently as 1960, L.A. led the nation in total farm production. Fact is, there are no orange orchards in Orange County anymore. Today you can drive 100 miles from L.A. to San Diego without seeing any vacant land except that surrounding Camp Pendleton — which brings me to the point of this column — the rapid elimination of California’s valuable farmland.

It just boggles the mind to contemplate the consequences of paving over our nation’s “breadbasket.” In the years ahead, I believe, the entire state will go the way of Los Angeles as California’s population continues to grow by as many as a half-million new residents each year and Central Valley farm fields continue to vanish at an alarming pace.

To back up my concerns I point to Paving Paradise: A New Perspective of California Farmland Conversion, a report released late last year by the American Farmland Trust, written by AFT California Director Edward Thompson, Jr. The report is bleak: About one-sixth of all land developed since the Gold Rush was lost between 1990 and 2004. That amounts to about a half million acres, nearly two-thirds of it agricultural land, Thompson notes.

Read the rest of this story from the Western Farm Press by clicking here.

May 15, 2008 · Filed Under Agriculture

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