Alliance on SOAR More of an Illusion

At first glance, the SOAR campaign to preserve agriculture and control growth appears to represent the perfect union of farmers and environmentalists concerned about the future of the earth.

The truth is different.

Any alliance is more wishful thinking than fact. Most farmers oppose the controversial ballot initiative. And they are suspicious of the sudden courtship of environmentalists who have long been critical of agricultural practices.

“There’s a desire for agricultural land to be preserved, not because they favor agriculture, but because it thwarts development,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau.

“They really don’t care about agriculture. There’s a lot of insincerity and hypocrisy.”

Even environmentalists who are the strongest backers of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiative on the November ballot have had to swallow hard when they make the case for saving farmland. They may run campaign ads urging voters to protect farmland because it helps “maintain an ecological balance to preserve important habitat.”

But that doesn’t change the fact that they still don’t like a lot of things farmers do to the land.

“There are things farmers do that we rather they not do,” said Russ Baggerly of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County. “Do we overlook that? Yeah. It’s kind of the reality of Ventura County. There’s an uneasy acceptance” of distasteful agricultural practices in the name of controlling growth.

As far as environmentalists are concerned, the only thing worse for the land than farming is building malls and subdivisions on it. And that is why environmentalists involved in the SOAR campaign have stopped picking fights with farmers.

“The No. 1 environmental problem is urban sprawl. That becomes a uniting theme,” said Steve Bennett, a Ventura schoolteacher and coauthor of the SOAR measure.

“There’s a conscious effort on a large part of the environmental community to be pragmatic, not extreme. To stop sprawl, you have to be supportive of the agriculture industry and that means not being too extreme about agriculture.”

The battle over SOAR, the most stringent growth-control measure ever proposed in Southern California, shows how difficult it has been for farmers and environmentalists to find a common ground. The conflict, however, obscures the fact that in many places in California there are signs of growing cooperation between growers and environmentalists.

“There’s beginning to be a shift in that historic split between environmentalists and farmers,” said Barbara Boyle, California regional director of the Sierra Club. “Increasingly, we’re finding ways to work together. Farmland preservation is very much an environmental issue.”

It’s taken a long time for the relationship to begin to thaw.

Intensive agriculture practiced since the end of World War II with heavy applications of fertilizer, water, pesticides and herbicides, is extremely hard on the environment, scientists say.

For instance, the Central Valley and large portions of the Oxnard Plain and coastal Los Angeles and Orange counties were lush wetlands teaming with wildlife before they were drained and cleared for farms. California has lost 93% of its wetlands, more than any other state.

Agriculture is the biggest water user in California, consuming 85% of all the state’s developed water resources. Dams and diversions contribute to declining populations of salmon and other species. Benjamin Wong, water resources manager for Oxnard, said one acre of strawberries, the second-largest cash crop in Ventura County, requires about 1.6 million gallons of water annually, enough to meet the water needs of 10 households.

Cropland Adds to Environmental Harm

Farmers applied 5 million pounds of pesticides to crops in Ventura County in 1995, the most recent year for which numbers are available, according to the state Department of Pesticide Regulation.

The chemicals contribute to toxic air contamination and water pollution, cause health problems for field workers and have been implicated in scientific studies as disrupters of the endocrine system, which regulates hormones in people and animals.

Mark Pumford, environmental specialist for the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, said recent measurements in Ventura County reveal agricultural waste water contains six times more heavy metals, twice as much nitrate and substantially more sediments than runoff from residential, commercial and industrial land uses.

“Farming in the past has done atrocious things to the environment and continues to do things that are not helpful,” said Carol Boggs, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.

Because of that, environmentalists have fought farmers for decades over issues ranging from pesticide use to water diversion to endangered species protection.

In the Sierra Nevada, environmentalists and ranchers spar over grazing restrictions. In Riverside County, growers chafe under tilling restrictions to protect the Stephens’ kangaroo rat. Skirmishes flare over aerial malathion spraying for medflies in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Environmentalists forced the closure of Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos, the site of bird deformities caused by pollutants in agricultural waste water. They oppose dams that divert freshwater to Central Valley farms instead of wildlife in the San Francisco Bay Delta.

But now, from Stockton to San Diego to Napa, growers and conservationists are beginning to find themselves on the same side on development issues. Even in Ventura County, aside from SOAR, the two sides are finding a few things they can agree on, rather than fight over.

At bottom, it is a convergence nourished by a love for the land, which both groups profess. Farmers need fields to stay in business and feed a hungry planet; environmentalists see farms as seas of green “mental health belts” that break up the oppression of a concrete-coated landscape.

Ventura County farmers say they care about preserving farm land as much as any environmentalist, they just believe SOAR, with all its restrictions, is the wrong tool.

“It’s one of the few areas where you see close cooperation between agriculture and environmental interests,” said Erik Vink, California policy director for the nonprofit American Farmland Trust, which works to preserve the nation’s most productive farmland.

“When you look at the area where the two communities can work together, land use is at the top of the list. This is where the interests come together. There really has been an evolution,” Vink said.

Forerunner to SOAR Found in Napa County

For instance, the Sierra Club and the California Farm Bureau Federation have filed lawsuits to prevent local governments from nullifying provisions of the 1965 California Land Conservation Act--the state’s primary mechanism for preserving farmland--in San Joaquin and Tuolumne counties, Vink said.

In Napa County, a forerunner to SOAR was crafted by a grape grower and supported by environmentalists.

To make their relationship work, farmers and environmentalists are learning to talk differently. Boyle of the Sierra Club said flooded fields of rice and other crops near Sacramento attract migratory waterfowl. Other birds, including sand hill cranes, raptors and Swainson’s hawk, a threatened species in California, utilize open fields too, she said.

“It may not be as diverse as a wild habitat, but it’s far more useful in terms of wild species than suburban backyards,” Boyle said.

Open land also helps conserve water by capturing rainfall and allowing it to percolate into the soil, recharging aquifers and reducing flood danger from fast-moving storm runoff, Boyle said.

Green acres also enhance the quality of life by offering respite from a seemingly endless expanse of Southern California concrete and steel. Baggerly calls farmland “mental health belts.”

“When you come over the Conejo Grade [from Los Angeles County], your hands relax on the steering wheel and your white knuckles disappear. The calming effect of open space on people’s minds is dramatic,” Baggerly said.

Urbanization too has ecological consequences. Trade-offs occur under any land use, but on balance, farms are probably easier on the environment than cities, environmentalists say.

When it comes to air quality, most pollution comes from vehicles stuck in traffic or making longer and longer commutes as cities spread out across the countryside.

In Ventura County, vehicles produce about 53% of the ozone-forming gases and 65% of the pollutants that directly contribute to haze, said Scott Johnson, planning manager for the county Air Pollution Control District.

Residents of a typical house make seven vehicle trips daily, for groceries, work and picking up kids at school, Boyle said. Servicing those driving habits requires streets, freeways and parking lots, which gobble land and funnel pollutants into the water.

On the other side, growers are advocating practices that allow them to farm while doing less harm to the land.

For instance, Laird said Ventura County farmers are increasingly embracing sustainable agricultural practices.

More of them take steps to reduce erosion and save topsoil by tilling less, composting leaf litter instead of burning or dumping it, and relying more on subsurface irrigation to cut water consumption by up to 40%.

Pesticides used today are less harmful to the environment than agents such as DDT, banned in 1972, and natural predators are increasingly being substituted for pesticides.

Pamela Matson, environmental sciences professor at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies, said farmers have begun to recognize the need to preserve strips of natural land, or hedgerows, near crops. They harbor bees and other insects, which are diminishing because of to parasites, pesticides and colonization by killer bees.

“An alliance between agriculture and environmentalists is not really so surprising when you consider the argument that good, careful, efficient agriculture can save land for nature,” Matson said.

All this doesn’t mean the end of conflicts between farmers and environmentalists.

The proliferation of anti-SOAR ads featuring farmers fearful they won’t be able to build a greenhouse if SOAR passes is proof that suspicions remain.