As Californians contemplate shorter showers and browner lawns, the divide between those growing food and those who eat it has been curiously widened by the drought in recent months. News that Governor Brown’s mandatory water restrictions exempted agriculture immediately set off a barrage of blame, the internet flooded with a thousand info-graphics detailing the water required to grow a single almond, steak or head of broccoli.
Calling for “an honest discussion about water,” the head of the state’s Farm Bureau counter-attacked, seeking to discredit the trendiest statistic around—that agriculture gulps down eighty percent of the state’s water—seeking to shed light instead on all the water “dedicated to environmental purposes” and asking us to consider why “the one gallon of water it takes to produce an almond that a person is going to eat is bad, but the thousands of gallons of water dedicated to each fish that feeds no one is OK.”
But as accusations fly back and forth over the hills that separate the coastal masses from the few inland valleys producing the vast majority of fruits, vegetables and nuts for the entire state, country and, in some cases, the world, this whole curious divide increasingly appears as though a rider were fighting with his own horse.
The more interesting question isn’t who should bare the brunt of this drought—twenty million showers skipped in Los Angeles or a million acres of almond trees gone thirsty—nor is it the fight between aqueducts and the endangered Delta Smelt, by far the most politically-charged three-inch fish in history—but rather how that rider and his horse, farmers and eaters, could grow so estranged that upon finally reaching a desert spring they would begin to quarrel over who gets to drink.
Remarkably, today the term “American Agriculture” conjures in the minds of many progressives a knee-jerk animosity, such as when the New York Times claimed recently that “the clearest winners of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement [Obama’s neoliberal and much-contested take on NAFTA] would be American agriculture.” In this case, American Agriculture, as though it were a single entity, is synonymous with the multi-national corporations who profit from unfettered, global free trade. And while it’s true that far too many of today’s farms operate using models akin to those of Starbucks, McDonalds or Coca-Cola, one can more easily boycott soda, big macs and frapaccinnos than they can agriculture. What the Times failed to mention—further entrenching this divide—is that when such “free” trade opens up foreign demand, pressure on water and land grows, further jeopardizing smaller-scale family farmers who will most definitely not win.
One resounding response to this whole disconnect has been the locavore movement and its ever-multiplying myriad of farmers markets, CSAs and farm-to-table eateries. At the current forefront of this good-intentioned food-forward zeitgeist are attempts to bring the source even closer, such as San Francisco’s Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act, providing owners of vacant lots a property tax reduction in exchange for committing their land to urban agricultural use.
A boon for botanical education and community-building, but with several million people all vying for prime real estate, the economics of such “agricultural” endeavors—no matter how many rooftops are retrofitted with gardens—will surely meet the same roadblocks as the rest of the locavore movement: expensive to produce, expensive to buy, nearly impossible to scale up.
A universal truth in real estate, whether house-hunting or seeking farmland, is that the price drops the further from a city center you go. Assuming you can find an open acre in San Francisco, to break even on vegetable production at market rate (even with tax breaks), would require a farmer to sell those veggies at astronomical prices. And even here in Sonoma County, more than an hour’s drive from downtown San Francisco, within days of going on the market, the eight-acre farm of a recently deceased farmer sold for two and a half million dollars. Cash.
Until the urban permaculture ideal suggested by some is achieved, is it not tragically shortsighted to pit ecological systems against agricultural output? To pit farmers against showerers? (For just as farmers also shower, those who shower eat.) Yes, let us reign in the billionaire almond-exporting titans of the central valley desert and reevaluate the systems that empower them. But to truly address the challenges of this drought, we must return farmers to our idea of community and empower them to grow our food in the ways we (and many of them) would prefer.
Calling for “an honest discussion about water,” the head of the state’s Farm Bureau counter-attacked, seeking to discredit the trendiest statistic around—that agriculture gulps down eighty percent of the state’s water—seeking to shed light instead on all the water “dedicated to environmental purposes” and asking us to consider why “the one gallon of water it takes to produce an almond that a person is going to eat is bad, but the thousands of gallons of water dedicated to each fish that feeds no one is OK.”
But as accusations fly back and forth over the hills that separate the coastal masses from the few inland valleys producing the vast majority of fruits, vegetables and nuts for the entire state, country and, in some cases, the world, this whole curious divide increasingly appears as though a rider were fighting with his own horse.
The more interesting question isn’t who should bare the brunt of this drought—twenty million showers skipped in Los Angeles or a million acres of almond trees gone thirsty—nor is it the fight between aqueducts and the endangered Delta Smelt, by far the most politically-charged three-inch fish in history—but rather how that rider and his horse, farmers and eaters, could grow so estranged that upon finally reaching a desert spring they would begin to quarrel over who gets to drink.
Remarkably, today the term “American Agriculture” conjures in the minds of many progressives a knee-jerk animosity, such as when the New York Times claimed recently that “the clearest winners of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement [Obama’s neoliberal and much-contested take on NAFTA] would be American agriculture.” In this case, American Agriculture, as though it were a single entity, is synonymous with the multi-national corporations who profit from unfettered, global free trade. And while it’s true that far too many of today’s farms operate using models akin to those of Starbucks, McDonalds or Coca-Cola, one can more easily boycott soda, big macs and frapaccinnos than they can agriculture. What the Times failed to mention—further entrenching this divide—is that when such “free” trade opens up foreign demand, pressure on water and land grows, further jeopardizing smaller-scale family farmers who will most definitely not win.
One resounding response to this whole disconnect has been the locavore movement and its ever-multiplying myriad of farmers markets, CSAs and farm-to-table eateries. At the current forefront of this good-intentioned food-forward zeitgeist are attempts to bring the source even closer, such as San Francisco’s Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act, providing owners of vacant lots a property tax reduction in exchange for committing their land to urban agricultural use.
A boon for botanical education and community-building, but with several million people all vying for prime real estate, the economics of such “agricultural” endeavors—no matter how many rooftops are retrofitted with gardens—will surely meet the same roadblocks as the rest of the locavore movement: expensive to produce, expensive to buy, nearly impossible to scale up.
A universal truth in real estate, whether house-hunting or seeking farmland, is that the price drops the further from a city center you go. Assuming you can find an open acre in San Francisco, to break even on vegetable production at market rate (even with tax breaks), would require a farmer to sell those veggies at astronomical prices. And even here in Sonoma County, more than an hour’s drive from downtown San Francisco, within days of going on the market, the eight-acre farm of a recently deceased farmer sold for two and a half million dollars. Cash.
Until the urban permaculture ideal suggested by some is achieved, is it not tragically shortsighted to pit ecological systems against agricultural output? To pit farmers against showerers? (For just as farmers also shower, those who shower eat.) Yes, let us reign in the billionaire almond-exporting titans of the central valley desert and reevaluate the systems that empower them. But to truly address the challenges of this drought, we must return farmers to our idea of community and empower them to grow our food in the ways we (and many of them) would prefer.
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