A Long History of Pro-Farmer Bias

Today’s Signal LTE from the troika of VeCo Farming Interests deserves special recognition for its brashness and arrogance:

The residents of Ventura County are tremendously disappointed by the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District board’s July 27 vote to postpone a decision on sewer-rate increases. Without these increases, as board members are well aware, the Sanitation District will be unable to upgrade its treatment facilities so the people of Santa Clarita can stop polluting the Santa Clara River with salt.

We are even more disappointed by the tenor of the public discussion that has engulfed this issue over the past few months. Egged on by grandstanding elected officials — who appear to possess neither the political will nor the ethical integrity to take unpopular but necessary action — many of the residents of Santa Clarita have demonized and attacked their downstream neighbors in the Santa Clara River Valley.

The hard-working men and women who cultivate that valley to produce a bounty of affordable, nutritious food have been described as rich, selfish land barons making unreasonable demands on the working-class families of Santa Clarita.

As long as there has been civilization, mankind has argued over how best to use, manipulate, store, and transport water. So in a real sense, this is a very old issue we’re having here in the SCV with our neighbors to the west.

But something else, something uniquely American, emerges too. I read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert book a few years ago, and one of the things that jumped out at me from that book is how deferent we’ve been in the United States (and in particularly the west) to farmers and farming interests.

If you read the book, you’ll see just how much resources have been spent and how many massive, earth-changing projects have been undertaken to make farmers happy, even in places that Mother Nature never intended for large-scale, profitable agriculture. The history of the western US, in a very real sense, is a history of dam building, irrigation and water management primarily for farmers.

Cities, in contrast, were never given primary thought by the bureaucrats in Washington or Sacramento, both of whom proved to be easily seduced by the romantic ideal of the small family farmer, making a go of it in inhospitable land, subsisting, just like the Pilgrims did.  The BLM, the Army Corps of Engineers- they practically existed to serve these small, family farming interests in the last century. (In contrast, our cities, where people actually live, were left to build water infrastructure for themselves, like William Mulholland did for Los Angeles).

But something else happened. Subsidized by the taxpayer, those small farms found loopholes and rapidly aggregated the land, becoming large, profitable ag empires in the process. And they continued to consolidate throughout much of the last century.

Zoom forward today, these same ag interests still control the debate. They get to determine, for example, that strawberries and avocados are more valuable than our economic vitality in the SCV. You may think that if the water is too salty, perhaps the farmers should find something else to grow. There’s your first mistake! We can’t impose on the farmers, we must accommodate all their wishes, no matter how unreasonable they are, just like we did in the last century.

They do not have to adapt to the environment, we have to adapt the environment to them.

There many be many many more of us in the SCV than there of them in Ventura County, but the courts, the law, and the American tradition allows them to determine what the highest and best use for water is. And it is up to us to meet their requirements, even if it’s bad for our economy.

A raw deal no doubt, but one that goes back far in the history of the west.

CADILLAC DESERT VIDEO