Thanks, Andy, for once again showing the idiotic and destructive agencies that are crippling our state and local farmlands. Not an encouraging picture for the future.
We see the impacts of FAILED agriculture and immigration policies when our streets are taken over by unhinged, angry flash mobs flying Mexican and other Central American flags and rubbing it in our noses!
I suspect none of the regulatory boards have any members with experience in farming. They certainly have no financial interest in agriculture. Can the board of supervisors be bought or have they already been bought?
Who funds the Community Environmental Center and their high profile operation on State Street? Is this part of the Bidenomics green boondoggles use to "train" anti-agricultural activists? When they talk, assume local media and BOS listens.
That's what's driving all the mayhem in the world - they want land for megaregion cities - one big concrete jungle from Redding to San Diego. From SF to east of Reno. LA to Vegas. Vegas to Phoenix. Vegas to Denver, Seattle to Portland. Same people tied to that 53,000 acre land grab in Solano County. They demonize farmers, livestock, meat, dairy, eggs because they want the land - make more tax revenue per acre with condos than with farmland
Santa Paula - the Heritage Valley and the largest citrus producer in the US -- is also coming under the same pressures in Ventura County. Enjoy your drives through their citrus orchards in full bloom while you can.
Their land and water rights are also seen as more valuable for housing, than continued agriculture. Upside, California will no longer be known as the Land of Fruits and Nuts. Just for the sprawl of soulless suburbs and Tang.
Being just a backyard gardener I honestly do not know how any large farms can even begin to produce commercially without far more extreme measures for pest control. I am overwhelmed by the need for daily inspection, or else wake up the next day to see plants decimated overnight - and we are "organic" which is perhaps the cause. I also don't know anyone in the business who wants to intentionally destroy their productive land.
Easier to do when just going with small plots of land, and non-commercial production but global food production does need to have different crop management resources at their disposal. I can cut them some slack. Plus who can really say that Mexican night soil is not "organic" so thus we now must treat our purchases with chemicals to make sure they are safe.
Good to raise all these issues. The old debate between being a nation of agrarian values (Thomas Jefferson) versus a nation with a more centralized power structure (John Adams).
Onwards to US Anniversary Year 250. I would welcome a return to more agrarian values myself, and the dissembling of inner city urban malaise - a new homesteading program perhaps?
I challenge anyone to inspect the back side of local restaurants and check the ID of the dishwashers and food prep employees. As ICE soon will. California has always depended upon an underground economy, an underclass now called the "undocumented" who do the grunt work on building sites and stand at the lines to be hired for casual labor. For many of them this is merely Mexico Norte, and they have traversed back and forth across the border with impunity. They fill the emergency rooms for free care and their children fill the schools, and they file for EBT and other handouts while citizen elderly squeak by on meager Social Security payments. Everyone knows this.
A crash of our economy looms, as the debt incurred by the inflation of the previous administration and the money-laundering scheme of the Ukraine war come home to each tax payer. And the cheap ultra-processed food enervates the public until they can't think, and the price of eggs continues to rise and yet another gas refinery goes under.
Let me count the ways.
Farmland owned by Bill Gates and the CCP can go fallow, returning to nature, and we can eat cricket protein. The dystopian future so long predicted seems to be upon us, the End Times of the American Dream, while the Elite keep us focused on Race War. It is a Class War, and we here in our Land of Climate Shangri La are the observers on the edge. But no doubt about it, the wave is coming for the entire country.
Geography should give us an opportunity, as if we were an island, a reasonable amount of land to manage and prosper. But alas, we are part of California and subject to the whims of the Sacramento overlords.
Those who work for the Government and Education systems will always vote to sustain their pension systems, and the DOGE challenge is to winnow through the useless and get the rest to work. No time to waste.
So sad and so true, Andy! Great research and article! The City of Santa Maria is attempting to annex more farmland on the east side ot 101 freeway. Carpinteria's flower growers have almost all converted to the cannabis industry; ironically it is considered more of a manufacturing process than an agricultural process. Granted, flowers are not generally considered an edible product, but the Columbian flower imports are akin to the manufacturing dominance by China.
Paradigm shifts are in fact products of organic farming. Let's all fertilize them with word and deed. We could set up a booth at the Farmers Market selling organic "Paradigm Shifts". I kid you not.
Thank you for sharing your perspective Andy. I do feel badly for our local farmers and ranchers…but only so far. It would seem the vast majority of those in agriculture have used undocumented immigrants for generations in order to pick and harvest their crops. Good for them, not necessarily good for society at large. Needless to say, the presence of extended families of the undocumented has negatively affected our education, healthcare and criminal justice system, all while providing cheap labor for THEM. Yes, I understand the argument “Americans simply won’t do that kind of work,” but why can’t we have a program similar to that of then Governor Reagan’s “Bracero” program? Workers come during harvest/planting season and then LEAVE!
Also Andy, you failed to mention the impacts of environmental extremists such as the Sierra Club and EDC who typically make food production more expensive based on frivolous lawsuits. Further, the selling of huge swaths of land by local farmers to environmental groups as “land trusts” in order to lessen impacts of THEIR capital gains, does us the taxpayers, no favors by removing them from the tax roles.
Yes, we may face large corporate farms owned by companies such as Google and Amazon whereby they control all aspects of food production from farm to table.
Lastly, we could be entering an era where AI and robotics plays a larger role in once was very labor intensive roles done by migrants.
Not necessarily. Many large farms require year round maintenance, and provide stable worker housing, not just a transient labor force which is more likely to operate under the table.
In retrospect, the old Bracero program for seasonal and non-permanent workforce was a good model for all concerned. Time to reassess the forces that shut that former program down.
Not unlike the transitory labor needs for the Alaska Pipeline or the shale oil industry in North Dakota - money to be made short term, without all the dislocation the current open border free for all has created.
Farmers often go into land trusts & conservation easements because they've been taxed & regulated into financial ruin & it's either enter a land trust to stay on their land or sell their land to pay bills accumulated from the higher taxes & costs of regulations compliance. That being said - land trusts & conservation easements are a con job that further victimize farmers with restrictive rules & regulations like an HOA on steroids - they're told they can keep farming as they always have - but then told there's an endangered species found & they can no longer farm, grazing or horseback ride on their property & nearby neighbors are also at risk of litigation if their own property conducts any activities that are deemed 'harmful' to any endangered species on the nearby farm that has a conservation easement.
Also it's easier to hire under the table - more money into workers pockets vs Uncle Sam's takeout, workman's comp where farmer pays govt as much as pay farm worker. Labor board making it really difficult for farmers to get & keep H2A workers. Have to pay $3,000 ahead of time while waiting for govt approval, travel & sometimes as soon as H2A worker gets in US - they take off & run, then labor board calls farmer wanting to know why there's no check stubs for his new H2A worker. Farmer has to fill out 36 pages of paperwork per H2A employee every month. Provide housing that's inspected regularly, provide food, transportation, phone & pay for airtime for phone calls back home. Well tested 2x year. One farmer fined $10,000 because worker's bed was 5" too close to the ground - even though the worker is very short & prefers the bed to be lower. Another farmer fined because cows ate the hay his worker was feeding to sheep & govt says worker only supposed to feed sheep because he was hired as a sheep herder. Now, since the sheep & cows are in the same pasture together & the worker throws a flake of hay to the sheep & then the much bigger cow comes along & pushes the sheep out of the way to eat the hay - how would that be deemed as working an employee outside of his job description? And the rancher got fined for a horse's water trough being too close (12ft) to the sheep camp.
I read this farm article titled "Reliving the Grapes of Wrath; The Central Coast Sequel"
by Andy Caldwell and I quote from one phrase as follows;
"Santa Barbara County Production Being Shut Down"
Piling on to our farmers and other resource providers are various laws and regulatory agencies that are tying up land and water in red tape while threatening them with ruinous regulations.
I recommend a follow-on title "They are Reforming the US Government and hope it reaches the
CALI and SB Government.
I grew up in a farm and did not want to leave, the animals, cows, horses, cats and dogs are always your friends. You just have to treat them right. Unfortunately, that is not happening in Santa Barbara and California by the So-Called-Leaders. They have failed their Citizens.
Thank you for so succinctly expressing what I feel when I visit “home” (where I was raised since 1958) and observe the hardships of growers, ranchers, producers. The San Fernando Valley is an apt “nightmare” vision. Wherever and whenever wisdom might prevail, government hubris stomps in. I grieve for all the families whose ancestors worked the land. Surely this was not their California dream. For the rest of us it remains a gossamer memory of black cows on gold ridges and fruit trees laden with orange, lemon, plum and peach. 💔💔💔
The land is becoming unhealthy with too much fertilizer use. As a wholesale purchasor of groceries for a retail store. I learnt the following:
We were looking to change our produce supplier. To a prospective new source I jokingly said "how trustworthy is the Mexican organic label?" The response was
It is not the Mexicans you need to worry about, they are truthfull, it is the conventional Californian grown produce I would be more wary of. The land is covered in plastic sheet with pesticide to kill all known life, then planted, forced fertilizered and then cropped, this runs three times before the killer pesticides and plastic are needed once more. The strong advice was to avoid conventional grown Californian fruit produce.
We need to review farming, the state subsidies for specific crops, nationally and internationally. Why the heck do we grow food and then put it in our gas tank?
It is madness to mono crop the land. If it were an investment portfolio your advisor would recomend diversity, the same is true for tilling the land.
What about regenerative farming?
We need to value and encourage small familly farming. Big agriculture, big equity, pesticides, fertilizer, all need reviewing. Perhaps New Zealand is the path to explore. It will be painfull to chnage, I am in complete agreement that change is required.
You're broad brushing farmers with stereotypes that don't apply to most farmers & confusing big farms with big corporations that buy from farmers & sell to grocers. 98% of farms are family owned. 2% non-family owned. 49% of farmland acreage is occupied by small family farms, 21% acreage medium family farms, 19% acreage large family farms, 11% acreage non-family farms, "Big ag" - as in corporations like Tyson, Cargill, Perdue are the problem.
Thanks, Andy, for once again showing the idiotic and destructive agencies that are crippling our state and local farmlands. Not an encouraging picture for the future.
Andy, I want to stand up & cheer!
The power to Tax is the power to destroy.
Limited government is the best choice.
Unity - not diversity. E pluribus unum.
Diversity is communism is slavery.
Personal accountability, duty and shared values are also critical to make things work.
Great article Andy...telling it like it is! Sad
We see the impacts of FAILED agriculture and immigration policies when our streets are taken over by unhinged, angry flash mobs flying Mexican and other Central American flags and rubbing it in our noses!
I suspect none of the regulatory boards have any members with experience in farming. They certainly have no financial interest in agriculture. Can the board of supervisors be bought or have they already been bought?
Who funds the Community Environmental Center and their high profile operation on State Street? Is this part of the Bidenomics green boondoggles use to "train" anti-agricultural activists? When they talk, assume local media and BOS listens.
When are the people gonna wake up and see what is being done? I’m starting to get the feeling even if they do it won’t be soon enough to save it.
Cue Joni Mitchell's BIG YELLOW TAXI..."you pave Paradise and put up a parking lot..."
That's what's driving all the mayhem in the world - they want land for megaregion cities - one big concrete jungle from Redding to San Diego. From SF to east of Reno. LA to Vegas. Vegas to Phoenix. Vegas to Denver, Seattle to Portland. Same people tied to that 53,000 acre land grab in Solano County. They demonize farmers, livestock, meat, dairy, eggs because they want the land - make more tax revenue per acre with condos than with farmland
Santa Paula - the Heritage Valley and the largest citrus producer in the US -- is also coming under the same pressures in Ventura County. Enjoy your drives through their citrus orchards in full bloom while you can.
Their land and water rights are also seen as more valuable for housing, than continued agriculture. Upside, California will no longer be known as the Land of Fruits and Nuts. Just for the sprawl of soulless suburbs and Tang.
Being just a backyard gardener I honestly do not know how any large farms can even begin to produce commercially without far more extreme measures for pest control. I am overwhelmed by the need for daily inspection, or else wake up the next day to see plants decimated overnight - and we are "organic" which is perhaps the cause. I also don't know anyone in the business who wants to intentionally destroy their productive land.
Easier to do when just going with small plots of land, and non-commercial production but global food production does need to have different crop management resources at their disposal. I can cut them some slack. Plus who can really say that Mexican night soil is not "organic" so thus we now must treat our purchases with chemicals to make sure they are safe.
Good to raise all these issues. The old debate between being a nation of agrarian values (Thomas Jefferson) versus a nation with a more centralized power structure (John Adams).
Onwards to US Anniversary Year 250. I would welcome a return to more agrarian values myself, and the dissembling of inner city urban malaise - a new homesteading program perhaps?
I challenge anyone to inspect the back side of local restaurants and check the ID of the dishwashers and food prep employees. As ICE soon will. California has always depended upon an underground economy, an underclass now called the "undocumented" who do the grunt work on building sites and stand at the lines to be hired for casual labor. For many of them this is merely Mexico Norte, and they have traversed back and forth across the border with impunity. They fill the emergency rooms for free care and their children fill the schools, and they file for EBT and other handouts while citizen elderly squeak by on meager Social Security payments. Everyone knows this.
A crash of our economy looms, as the debt incurred by the inflation of the previous administration and the money-laundering scheme of the Ukraine war come home to each tax payer. And the cheap ultra-processed food enervates the public until they can't think, and the price of eggs continues to rise and yet another gas refinery goes under.
Let me count the ways.
Farmland owned by Bill Gates and the CCP can go fallow, returning to nature, and we can eat cricket protein. The dystopian future so long predicted seems to be upon us, the End Times of the American Dream, while the Elite keep us focused on Race War. It is a Class War, and we here in our Land of Climate Shangri La are the observers on the edge. But no doubt about it, the wave is coming for the entire country.
Geography should give us an opportunity, as if we were an island, a reasonable amount of land to manage and prosper. But alas, we are part of California and subject to the whims of the Sacramento overlords.
Those who work for the Government and Education systems will always vote to sustain their pension systems, and the DOGE challenge is to winnow through the useless and get the rest to work. No time to waste.
Sacramento Overlords = Senator Monique Limon and Assemblyman Gregg Hart.
Credit, where credit is due.
Great!!
Well thought out! Thanks Andy!
So sad and so true, Andy! Great research and article! The City of Santa Maria is attempting to annex more farmland on the east side ot 101 freeway. Carpinteria's flower growers have almost all converted to the cannabis industry; ironically it is considered more of a manufacturing process than an agricultural process. Granted, flowers are not generally considered an edible product, but the Columbian flower imports are akin to the manufacturing dominance by China.
We need paradigm shifts at so many levels.
John Richards
Paradigm shifts are in fact products of organic farming. Let's all fertilize them with word and deed. We could set up a booth at the Farmers Market selling organic "Paradigm Shifts". I kid you not.
Thank you for sharing your perspective Andy. I do feel badly for our local farmers and ranchers…but only so far. It would seem the vast majority of those in agriculture have used undocumented immigrants for generations in order to pick and harvest their crops. Good for them, not necessarily good for society at large. Needless to say, the presence of extended families of the undocumented has negatively affected our education, healthcare and criminal justice system, all while providing cheap labor for THEM. Yes, I understand the argument “Americans simply won’t do that kind of work,” but why can’t we have a program similar to that of then Governor Reagan’s “Bracero” program? Workers come during harvest/planting season and then LEAVE!
Also Andy, you failed to mention the impacts of environmental extremists such as the Sierra Club and EDC who typically make food production more expensive based on frivolous lawsuits. Further, the selling of huge swaths of land by local farmers to environmental groups as “land trusts” in order to lessen impacts of THEIR capital gains, does us the taxpayers, no favors by removing them from the tax roles.
Yes, we may face large corporate farms owned by companies such as Google and Amazon whereby they control all aspects of food production from farm to table.
Lastly, we could be entering an era where AI and robotics plays a larger role in once was very labor intensive roles done by migrants.
Not necessarily. Many large farms require year round maintenance, and provide stable worker housing, not just a transient labor force which is more likely to operate under the table.
In retrospect, the old Bracero program for seasonal and non-permanent workforce was a good model for all concerned. Time to reassess the forces that shut that former program down.
Not unlike the transitory labor needs for the Alaska Pipeline or the shale oil industry in North Dakota - money to be made short term, without all the dislocation the current open border free for all has created.
Farmers often go into land trusts & conservation easements because they've been taxed & regulated into financial ruin & it's either enter a land trust to stay on their land or sell their land to pay bills accumulated from the higher taxes & costs of regulations compliance. That being said - land trusts & conservation easements are a con job that further victimize farmers with restrictive rules & regulations like an HOA on steroids - they're told they can keep farming as they always have - but then told there's an endangered species found & they can no longer farm, grazing or horseback ride on their property & nearby neighbors are also at risk of litigation if their own property conducts any activities that are deemed 'harmful' to any endangered species on the nearby farm that has a conservation easement.
Also it's easier to hire under the table - more money into workers pockets vs Uncle Sam's takeout, workman's comp where farmer pays govt as much as pay farm worker. Labor board making it really difficult for farmers to get & keep H2A workers. Have to pay $3,000 ahead of time while waiting for govt approval, travel & sometimes as soon as H2A worker gets in US - they take off & run, then labor board calls farmer wanting to know why there's no check stubs for his new H2A worker. Farmer has to fill out 36 pages of paperwork per H2A employee every month. Provide housing that's inspected regularly, provide food, transportation, phone & pay for airtime for phone calls back home. Well tested 2x year. One farmer fined $10,000 because worker's bed was 5" too close to the ground - even though the worker is very short & prefers the bed to be lower. Another farmer fined because cows ate the hay his worker was feeding to sheep & govt says worker only supposed to feed sheep because he was hired as a sheep herder. Now, since the sheep & cows are in the same pasture together & the worker throws a flake of hay to the sheep & then the much bigger cow comes along & pushes the sheep out of the way to eat the hay - how would that be deemed as working an employee outside of his job description? And the rancher got fined for a horse's water trough being too close (12ft) to the sheep camp.
I read this farm article titled "Reliving the Grapes of Wrath; The Central Coast Sequel"
by Andy Caldwell and I quote from one phrase as follows;
"Santa Barbara County Production Being Shut Down"
Piling on to our farmers and other resource providers are various laws and regulatory agencies that are tying up land and water in red tape while threatening them with ruinous regulations.
I recommend a follow-on title "They are Reforming the US Government and hope it reaches the
CALI and SB Government.
I grew up in a farm and did not want to leave, the animals, cows, horses, cats and dogs are always your friends. You just have to treat them right. Unfortunately, that is not happening in Santa Barbara and California by the So-Called-Leaders. They have failed their Citizens.
Time to leave and find that "Farm Life" again.
Howard Walther, Member of a Military Family
Thank you for so succinctly expressing what I feel when I visit “home” (where I was raised since 1958) and observe the hardships of growers, ranchers, producers. The San Fernando Valley is an apt “nightmare” vision. Wherever and whenever wisdom might prevail, government hubris stomps in. I grieve for all the families whose ancestors worked the land. Surely this was not their California dream. For the rest of us it remains a gossamer memory of black cows on gold ridges and fruit trees laden with orange, lemon, plum and peach. 💔💔💔
But wait there is more.
The land is becoming unhealthy with too much fertilizer use. As a wholesale purchasor of groceries for a retail store. I learnt the following:
We were looking to change our produce supplier. To a prospective new source I jokingly said "how trustworthy is the Mexican organic label?" The response was
It is not the Mexicans you need to worry about, they are truthfull, it is the conventional Californian grown produce I would be more wary of. The land is covered in plastic sheet with pesticide to kill all known life, then planted, forced fertilizered and then cropped, this runs three times before the killer pesticides and plastic are needed once more. The strong advice was to avoid conventional grown Californian fruit produce.
We need to review farming, the state subsidies for specific crops, nationally and internationally. Why the heck do we grow food and then put it in our gas tank?
It is madness to mono crop the land. If it were an investment portfolio your advisor would recomend diversity, the same is true for tilling the land.
What about regenerative farming?
We need to value and encourage small familly farming. Big agriculture, big equity, pesticides, fertilizer, all need reviewing. Perhaps New Zealand is the path to explore. It will be painfull to chnage, I am in complete agreement that change is required.
Why the heck do we grow food and then put it in our gas tank?
Those States also have two Senators.
You're broad brushing farmers with stereotypes that don't apply to most farmers & confusing big farms with big corporations that buy from farmers & sell to grocers. 98% of farms are family owned. 2% non-family owned. 49% of farmland acreage is occupied by small family farms, 21% acreage medium family farms, 19% acreage large family farms, 11% acreage non-family farms, "Big ag" - as in corporations like Tyson, Cargill, Perdue are the problem.