Keep Farmers Farming With Cheaper Water

I have a photograph of West Covina when it was still a tiny urban island in an ocean of citrus trees. The picture was taken in 1955.

West Covina a farm town? In the 1950s?

Here is a better illustration of relentless California metamorphosis: In the late 1940s, Los Angeles County finally relinquished its title as the top-earning agricultural county in the United States. Orange County was close behind. How many new residents of Newport Beach ever wonder why their county is called “Orange?”

At the same time as the Southland was morphing from orchards to suburbs, David Packard and William Hewlett were a pair of tinkerers working out of Hewlett’s Palo Alto garage. Silicon Valley didn’t exist, but the Santa Clara Valley was a world-famous swath of fruit orchards flowing for miles from San Mateo past San Jose. Today, greater San Jose has 30 times more people than at the start of World War II, and nearly all the farms are gone.

Urban sprawl and its habit of devouring prime California farmland was, with significant local exceptions, a nonissue in the recent election. When I asked one political observer why that was so, she answered, “As issues go, it lacks immediacy. It’s sort of like the depletion of oil.”

But the problem with prized farmland is that, like oil, when it’s gone it’s gone. Our descendants aren’t going to bulldoze suburbs in order to plant orchards again. According to the American Farmland Trust, the Central Valley alone may lose a million acres of first-class agricultural land during the next half-century.

How valuable is California farmland? State farm revenue, which amounted to $25 billion last year, is greater than the GNPs of most of the world’s countries. But that’s only money. Unlike an Iowa cornfield about to be swallowed by Des Moines, prime California farmland can’t really be replaced. We are one of only five regions on Earth with Mediterranean weather, where short, mild winters and warm, dry summers permit the cultivation of more than 250 varieties of crops. A number of them--artichokes, navel oranges, asparagus and almonds, to name just a few--are grown almost nowhere else in North America.

There isn’t much a free society can do to stop population influx or births; that means California is certain to have 50 million residents in another generation or so. But there are things we can do to discourage developers from wasting world-class farmland as they accommodate and profit from growth. Development can be guided toward more marginal land and more compact and efficient patterns of development can also be encouraged.

But Americans aren’t that comfortable with planning and regulation. We detest sprawl, which has huge social and environmental costs, but we aren’t willing to pass strong measures to control it.

The American Farmland Trust, among others, advocates better incentives for farmers near urban areas to continue farming and not develop their land. Thoughtfully conceived incentive programs can serve as an important complement to agricultural zoning measures. And in California, where long summer droughts make most farmers abjectly dependent on irrigation, there may be no better incentive than a more reliable or affordable water supply.

Irrigation water in California, especially water from federal projects built with taxpayer money, has historically been underpriced. (Cheap water encourages superfluous use, which is not what you want to promote in a semi-arid state whose aquatic ecosystems have been plundered.)

But the price and reliability of farm water have changed dramatically in recent years. Many farmers who depend on the federal Central Valley Project have seen their water rates increase tenfold since 1992. And many CVP farmers can now expect to receive only 65% of their “paper” water entitlement because of federal reform legislation passed in 1992 that reallocates a big part of CVP water to salmon rivers and wildlife refuges. In one sense, the reforms were necessary and good. But a lot of CVP farmers say that unreliable water, more than anything, now makes them think about selling out.

And not just Central Valley farmers. In northern San Diego County, one of the last agricultural enclaves along the South Coast, avocados may yield to more subdivisions because the growers of even this exceptionally lucrative crop can barely afford water at $600 per acre-foot. That’s about 60 times more than the government charges hay growers in the Imperial Valley, whose water is extravagantly subsidized.

Why not offer farmers, mainly those on prime lands threatened by urban encroachment, better reliability or cheaper water if they’re willing to sign long-term protection agreements? Since they would be forfeiting the opportunity to become instant millionaires, they deserve such reward--especially when you consider what’s being saved.