Local Agriculture Faces Challenges of World Changes

Farmers in California--and particularly in Ventura County--are approaching rocky ground.

Our “specialty crop” agriculture, long driven by its domination of the domestic market and its unparalleled success in exporting to the Pacific Rim, is having to contend with new rules. These rules are being made by forces beyond local control, by global forces of free trade and market consolidation.

These new rules are creating a changing world for our farms and ranches, one in which the past is no guide to the future.

Other countries can now produce the same crops that have long been our mainstays. With the benefit of U. S. technology, limited or lax environmental regulation and low labor costs, other countries are now fierce competitors for markets we have spent decades and countless dollars developing.

For example, Australian oranges are now entering the United States in direct competition with locally produced oranges.

And though vigorously contested by local growers on serious pest and disease issues, the U. S. Department of Agriculture recently ignored science in favor of trade and granted Argentina permission to export lemons into the United States. These lemons, because of Southern Hemisphere seasonality, will compete directly with our local lemons, closing a marketing window that has benefited Ventura County since the inception of the industry 70 years ago.

As a result, our once-insulated specialty crops are beginning to behave like commodity crops such as corn, wheat, soybeans, sugar and beef, which have long been at the mercy of global production levels and government subsidies.

What will be the effect of this new competitive environment on local agriculture? Can we imagine our landscape without citrus groves?

There is much discussion these days about reducing pesticide use, minimizing various environmental impacts, efficiently using irrigation water, growing even safer farm produce and improving conditions for our vital farm-worker community.

All are laudable goals, supported by agriculture, aimed at making agriculture more socially responsible and a better urban neighbor. And all carry various levels of cost, which give local agriculturalists pause as they try to balance their operations’ social responsibilities with their need to make a profit and stay in business.

Risk is an inherent part of farming. We’ve all read the stories of crop loss due to too little rain, too much rain, freezes, hot spells, and pest and disease plagues. But risk today in agriculture has taken on a whole new meaning as we ponder the impacts of globalized crop production and buyer consolidation.

For example, it has been reported that in just a few years, only five to eight grocery chains will survive globally, most of them based in other countries. Already, just five chains command more than 45% of the U. S. grocery market.

These powerful chains (Wal-Mart is one of the few U. S. entries) can and do impose stringent requirements on the food producer. They wish to buy from fewer suppliers who can guarantee abundant year-round deliveries of top-quality produce at level prices contracted for in advance.

Sound like a tall order for a family farmer? California’s agriculture (and Ventura County’s) has long been based on the entrepreneurial family farmer.

Thomas Jefferson would have smiled as these numerous individualists made crop production and marketing decisions that gained them a profit and contributed greatly to local economies and the general welfare.

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Given the changes facing agriculture today, this historic formula under which agriculture has prospered is gravely threatened.

Reflecting the changes in the marketplace, many family farms will face the need to consolidate, to sell out to larger entities or to move into the noneconomic sphere of being lifestyle farms or expansive home sites for the wealthy.

So while it may be good to focus on making local agriculture a better urban neighbor, the longer-term competitive threats, which are here today, beg the question of how our family-based agriculture is going to prosper or survive as we know it.

Agriculture has always had a vital economic role in Ventura County and recently it has also been tasked with the significant social responsibility of inexpensively providing the verdant open space that contributes so much to our quality of life. As we consider how to make agriculture more sustainable and environmentally responsible, we need to consider how these changes might affect farmers and ranchers.

For agriculture to survive, it must have the ability and flexibility to respond to world market forces and overseas competition. To overly fetter the hands of our growers is to risk putting them out of business.

The issue is not preserving our farms and ranches; that implies a museum quality of the past. It is about conserving agriculture’s ability to be competitive, which is about the future.

So while farmers and ranchers are being asked to farm ever more socially responsibly, which we all strive to do, we are also facing large lifestyle-changing risks imposed by global forces beyond our control. Our ability to meet these simultaneous tests is in question, and the family farm structure that has served us so well is in serious jeopardy.

Thomas Jefferson would not be smiling any more; he would be looking for a solution.