How times have changed in California

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Why exactly is (California) farmland so insanely priced, when canal water is nonexistent and the water table is dropping several feet each month — as tens of thousands of farmers tap their savings to deepen their wells to grab what they can of the shrinking aquifer?

The answer is complex. One, the growth of India, China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific as consumers of California specialty crops coincides with steady inflation here at home in the price of food. In such a perfect storm, farming has never been more lucrative. It is almost as if the more regulations, taxes, and rules that are put on farming, the more food becomes precious.

Prices to almond growers have reached $3 and more a pound. Some mature nut varieties bring $8,000 to $10,000 in profits per acre. As farmers swarm to plant crops like almonds or pistachios, they abandon old marginally profitable produce like grapes and stone fruit — and such reductions in those acreages have likewise revitalized the fresh and dried fruit markets. In a word, price-wise everything in California is now good, and water wise everything is lousy.

The last thirty years saw the final destruction of the long-ailing California family farmer and his parochial world of agrarianism. The family farm was not a business, but a proverbial way of life that revolved around seasonal rhythms, local rural get-togethers, and a shame culture where farmers sought to raise kids that would not embarrass a 100-year family reputation. All that is over here, as their small tesserae are now recombined into larger mosaics of corporate farms. Economy of scale, mechanization, and efficiency leave no room for quaint ideas of raising kids to learn the value of hard, dirty monotonous work, or to neither romanticize nor to harm nature, or to remember to treat the rich and poor man the same, or to remember to match your lofty words with mundane deeds of living what you profess.

As I see the well rigs fly by, the for-sale signs spring up, and the investors scour the countryside, I think of all these small farms whose owners are now dead, whose children long ago moved away with the bad prices, and the now rougher rural communities (illegal immigration, meth labs, and the destruction of manufacturing jobs were not kind to rural California).

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