WALTER A. SHUBIN: Different look at farm, water issues

Twenty years ago, I testified before the House Committee on Agriculture that federal farm policy was driving family farmers off the land, enriching commodities traders and large food processing corporations and undermining America's ability to produce healthy food.

Time, sad to say, has proven me right. Since I testified, a half-million American farmers have vanished.

While national agriculture policy continues to destroy the family farm, the biggest problem in the San Joaquin Valley -- world capital of farming -- is not water, as many believe, but continuing low prices due to surpluses.

Does anyone seriously believe another 100,000 acres of almonds or another 50 mega-dairies are going to help almond farmers or dairymen?

As a raisin farmer the past half-century, I remember a few years back when we were getting only $400 a ton, lower than the cost of production. Many raisin farmers went under. Our Valley raisin industry pulled out 100,000 acres of vines, and today the price is back up to $1,300 a ton.

The Valley's dairy industry went through a painful government buyout program in the late 1980s because of low prices and, lo and behold, it is going through the same thing now with plans to kill tens of thousands of milk cows to lower production and bring the price back up.

Of course, this will drive prices down for the beef industry for flooding the market with cheap milk cow meat.

Valley peach, plum and apricot producers, according to a recent article in The Bee, are also pulling up orchards because of overproduction, foreign competition and resulting low prices, not lack of water.

The Valley's cotton industry, even with massive government aid the last few decades, has dropped from a million acres 15 years ago to 100,000 acres today.

If we idled half the land in this Valley, prices for all commodities would jump dramatically and there would be plenty of water. We could even sell some of our water to our friends in Los Angeles and use the profits to modernize our irrigation systems. Flood irrigation in a desert, which is still widespread in this Valley, is no longer defensible.

The other long-term problem affecting the health of our Valley's family farms is the influx of non-farming people -- doctors, lawyers, business investors -- who hire "custom farming" companies to operate their ranchlands, often as tax shelters.

The Wall Street Journal two years ago reported on how outside non-farmer investors in the Valley's almond industry had driven prices down from near $4 a pound to $2 a pound. Today's prices are a little over $1 a pound.

Our Valley congressmen keep trying to get California taxpayers or American taxpayers to spend another $20 billion for dams and a Peripheral Canal around the Delta, but what they really ought to do is propose new farm policies that will actually keep family farmers on the land, discourage investor farming, stabilize the wild fluctuations in prices due to surplus and slow or reverse the increasing corporatization of the Valley's premier industry.

Two years ago, Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick, who already owns 150,00 acres of farmland in Kern County and controls vast amounts of water in that county, bought the 12,000-acre Columbia Ranch in Madera County with gold-plated water rights (the so-called Exchange Contractors). He's planting -- you guessed it -- almonds and pomegranates.

If Delta water supplies are permanently cut back, he can demand San Joaquin River water. East-side growers need to also start worrying about guys like Resnick, instead of the Delta smelt.