Letters to the Editor: Don’t let mega warehouses turn Bakersfield into another Riverside

To the editor: So now some farms around Bakersfield may soon become warehouses. Great.

Due to our topography, Kern County already has some of the worst air quality in the nation, and now we’re poised to become a bigger Riverside, paving over fertile soil as in Joni Mitchell’s song about putting in a parking lot.

Years ago, high land prices encouraged dairies in Chino to move north, bringing their cows and smart lawyers with them. They used a legislative loophole to expand into mega dairies, and you can imagine what happened to our air and water.

If that warehousing cycle continues, where will our agriculture and dairy farms go? The San Francisco Bay Area has already colonized Manteca, near Stockton, and it is heading south.

Matthew Clinton Jett, Bakersfield

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To the editor: Reading that Kern County may be replacing many farms with warehouses, I couldn’t have been the only Californian hoping that their Fresno County neighbors might replace the massive cattle feedlot off the 5 Freeway near Harris Ranch with some warehouses.

The stench can be sickening a couple of miles from the place, and it hurts to think of people having to live downwind, almost as much as it does to contemplate the sorrowful bovine residents packed in there awaiting their slaughterhouse fate.

While concerns about air pollution from trucks at warehouses are surely valid, a 2005 Times article told us that cows had overtaken cars as the worst polluters in the San Joaquin Valley, and that in Fresno, the capital of the dairy industry, one in six kids carried an inhaler to school.

Not only is the stench from factory farms quite literally breathtaking, but the methane released has a greater climate heating capacity than carbon dioxide, and the damage to our waterways from overflowing animal excrement is unconscionable.

The faster we see warehouses replace factory farms and feedlots, the better off California will be.

Karen Dawn, Santa Barbara

The writer is executive director of the animal advocacy nonprofit DawnWatch.

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To the editor: If we pave over enough farmland, those warehouses that replace it will need extra storage capacity to handle all the imported food we’ll need as a result.

Alan B. Posner, Santa Barbara