The Woman Who Would Save Farms

To drive across the San Joaquin Valley is to doubt the premise that prime farmland is disappearing under the developers’ bulldozers. Cotton fields, fruit orchards and vines run unbroken for mile after monotonous mile. Back roads are clogged with trucks hauling tomatoes and hay. Makeshift fruit stands can be found at every rural corner. No, a whole lot of farming still goes on in this valley and, at a glance anyway, it seems as though it ought to last forever.

Elizabeth Scott-Graham doesn’t see it that way. It is her contention that any sense of agricultural permanence is an illusion, that farming’s hold on the land is fragile. Imagine, she tells Rotarians and Lions, city councils and county boards. Imagine what your grandparents would have experienced 60 years ago driving from San Francisco to San Diego. They would have seen the Santa Clara Valley, so lush with orchards. And Los Angeles County, then the nation’s richest agricultural producer. And Orange County, one long-running grove.

“Could they, in their wildest imaginations,” she then asks, “ever have conceived of the urbanization that would take place in that corridor over the next 60 years? I mean, it goes on for hundreds of miles, and it’s all filled up now.”

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Elizabeth Scott-Graham, 50, is a newcomer to the valley. She grew up on Long Island, where her only brush with agriculture was a childhood job herding ducks. “I knew more about the Gobi Desert than the Central Valley,” she concedes today. She taught school in New England and later moved to California’s Central Coast, where she earned a law degree and opened a small practice. Two years ago, single again, her two children raised, Scott-Graham quit the law and came here to save the croplands.

More specifically, she went to work for the American Farmland Trust, an organization composed mainly of farmers concerned with the loss of prime farmland to urban growth. As the AFT’s sole San Joaquin Valley field representative, Scott-Graham roams from Bakersfield to Merced, performing a role she describes as “a cross between a policy analyst and a revival preacher.” Part of her job is to prod local governments toward new agricultural preservation policies. And part of it is to convince valley people not to take agriculture for granted.

“Everywhere I go, people say it can’t happen here,” she says. “Well, it can. If we keep developing this valley . . . there is no question we are going to fill it up. In another 60 years, it will be like L.A. To put a house on an acre of prime soil is insane. This is a precious resource. We aren’t going to go down to Kmart and get some more of it.”

Still, the forces that make this valley both the world’s most prolific farm belt and one of the nation’s fastest-growing urban regions are deep-rooted, complex and not simple to reverse. The more a town grows, the more it comes to rely on growth to survive. The more farmland is subdivided, the easier it becomes for the next farmer to take the real estate money and run. The more farmers bail, the less the public is likely to rally around the future of their fellow agrarians.

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Scott-Graham concedes that she has “no natural allies.” Farmers are suspicious that she’s an environmentalist do-gooder. Environmentalists wonder if she’s fronting for agribusiness, promoting the next version of subsidies. Developers regard her as a no-growther in farm disguise.

Nonetheless, she remains hopeful, full of confident talk about “bringing all the stakeholders to the table” and “building consensus.” She believes that environmentalists and farmers will come to trust one another, and that city folk will see that agricultural preservation is a quality-of-life issue, and that politicians will recognize an economy built on endless real estate expansion is a long-term loser. Like I said, she’s new to the valley.

To date, she has no great victories to celebrate. She talks of success coming “in baby steps.” Failure, however, might come much the same way, block by subdivided block, today a farm, tomorrow a grid of four-bedroom “ranchettes.” It happens so slowly you never know what’s going until it is gone, and the temptation is to ignore the threat, to disregard the experiences of Los Angeles and Santa Clara, to pretend that by virtue of scale or climate or tradition this valley somehow will be immune from death by growth.

Surely, you tell yourself, they wouldn’t be so dumb as to give away the franchise. Surely, you say, your eyes are not wrong. There still is a lot of farming going on around here, and it ought to last forever. Right?