Lessons Beyond the Bug

The sky is falling on California agriculture, again.

This time the bug is called the sweet potato whitefly. This time the catastrophe is unfolding down in the Imperial Valley. This time the governor who stands before the cameras amid rotting melons is named Wilson.

We have been down this road before. Medflies. Salmonella. Aldicarb. Frost. Drought. Deluge. Chinese cotton. New Zealand mutton. With farmers, it’s always something. Even in rare seasons when everything goes right, they can be found crying in their coffee: A big harvest means oversupply, oversupply means a weak market, and a weak market means no new pickup truck this year.

I came early to an understanding that farmers are a hard bunch to please. As parochial school kids in the San Joaquin Valley, we spent half our time praying for rain and the other half praying for it not to rain. It all depended on what farmers needed at the moment. Sometimes, they needed rain. Sometimes, they needed dry. I never could keep it straight.

Farming anywhere is a perilous venture; one bad day can ruin the whole year. In California, the nation’s biggest farm state, the perils are multiplied.

California has a half-dozen major growing regions. They operate on different seasonal clocks, harvesting hundreds of different crops, each vulnerable to a different set of disasters. The variables make it a safe bet that at any given time some California crop somewhere is threatened--be it by weather, bugs, politics or economic forces.

Winter is the Imperial Valley’s season. Almost all of the nation’s winter produce comes from around here, but not this year. This is the year of the whitefly or, more accurately, the poinsettia strain of the sweet potato whitefly. “Superbug,” the farmers call it. So far, it has destroyed about $90 million in crops, resisting all forms of pesticides and predators. The end is nowhere in sight.

The governor came down last week and officially declared an emergency. No one expected much to come of it, but the attention made the farmers feel a bit less lonely. Curiously, their crisis hasn’t captured California’s full attention--even though, unlike Medflies, it actually has created shortages and price increases. There’s been a smattering of media coverage, a few dutiful lamentations from politicians, but nothing to compare to the circus acts that surrounded the Medfly infestations, or the drought, or even the watermelon scare of a few years back.

Maybe we’re just bugged out, fed up with Chicken Little in coveralls and bad news down on the farm. Maybe, too, this indifference is rooted in something deeper--another indicator of festering resentment toward farmers and their ways.

The Iowa family farm might remain a cherished symbol of American virtue, but in California farmers are regarded as water-wasters and polluters, corporate hypocrites who brag about rugged individuality as they accept federal subsidies. Most Californians don’t understand that it takes 50 gallons of water to grow a single head of lettuce, or that for every rich grower there are many others who are only one bad crop away from bankruptcy.

And most California farmers don’t understand that “Mrs. Housewife,” as they insist on calling consumers, doesn’t give a fig where figs come from, be it California, Kansas or the old country. As long as there are figs. Pushed into a corner, farmers become contemptuous, surly. They paste “Let Them Eat Oil” bumper stickers on their pickups and ring up the real estate developers.

This mutual ignorance didn’t matter much before, but that is changing. As subdivisions cover more and more good cropland, as cities grow covetous of agricultural water, as pesticide residues turn up in wells, and as supermarkets stock more and more foreign-grown produce, California is heading toward a fundamental question: Is the state’s leading industry worth the trouble?

There’s no guarantee how it will turn out. I notice politicians no longer feel obliged to don cowboy hats when they deplane in places like Bakersfield, a bad sign for the farmers. Agriculture never came naturally to this state. Lakes had to be drained, deserts irrigated. Its hold on the land is more tentative than you would think, and the developers’ bulldozers are eager to roll.

For now, I expect the farmers will survive the Superbug. Scientists will develop something to control it, or God will send down enough cold weather to kill it off. As for the rest, optimism comes harder.