Who needs farms anyway!

On Losing and Gaining Agricultural Land- an excerpt from a comment

posted 2 years ago on our blog

“Yesterday morning I had a meeting in Indio (40 miles away, south toward Palm Springs on State Highway 62, and then east on the I-10 toward Phoenix, from where we live in Morongo Valley) at 9, and then nothing else I had to do until 1 p.m. So when I was finished soon after 10, I took the opportunity to drive around Indio.

I was amazed at how many citrus groves and specialty crops there are growing there. Field after field of strawberries, artichokes, bush beans, celery, onions, garlic, cauliflower, and the Bush 41-hated broccoli. There are so many family farms, with the big farmhouses on knolls specially created in the middle of otherwise flat land, so the farmers can see the crops from home.

I was also struck by how much land there is besides that being used for anything. Miles and miles of vacant land. Often these vacant parcels are in between the fields. And Indio has polo grounds and has long been a date grove area as well, so there are many horse ranches and huge stands of date palm trees visible from far away. It’s a beautiful time of year. The stifling heat of summer, which would do I don’t know what to all my views, is a distant memory. I think with Colorado River irrigation water, different crops grow here even in the summer, but I have not looked around or checked before, so I don’t really know.

I was enjoying noticing how busy the many roadside produce stands I saw were. One man had his old pickup truck backed up to tables with umbrellas where he had cut flowers for sale, and he had fresh unhusked corn spilling out of a large overturned trash can in the middle of the truckbed, surrounded by the flowers, spilling out onto the tables. Other produce stands were the more typical sheds at the side of the road, and one was so big it looked like a small grocery store, similar to the wonderful fruit store we have here in Morongo Valley, but with less parking, so it did not appear so prosperous, but it was busy, as our store is on Saturday morning.

Then—unusually for me, for with 35 years of being involved with real estate, one way or another, I notice what is for sale before I notice anything else—I saw how many for sale signs there were. Many of those vacant huge 50-100-acre size lots are listed with Coldwell Banker or other commercial real estate companies. I saw two subdivisions of houses right next to orange groves. “Four to Five Bedroom Houses in the Low 100’s.” They were named things in Spanish that referred to the agricultural nature of the area, Las Flores and Rancho Des Arbores, that kind of thing. But the fact that they were there meant the agricultural land would disappear right before our eyes. I could almost see the orange groves as mirages already. It is only a matter of time, and not much at that. When we moved to the desert five years ago, Palm Desert and LaQuinta looked very similar to what I was driving around seeing yesterday in Indio. Then it looked like there was enough land there to last forever. Now those towns are so developed that the Arts Foundation is selling its land to developers. The Arts Foundation! People think nonprofits and farmers will always be there, but clearly, they sell for the highest dollar and move farther away, or retire or go into some other business with the money.

As to the farmers, I could have been depressed. Or I could have thought where has Jerry Brown—who got coastal and agricultural land conservation passed in the state in the 70’s—gone? I could have thought now we surely do need a moonbeam–what they called him for his unusual, they said impractical, ways of thinking.

But instead, I thought those houses don’t really take up much space. (They really don’t. 4-5 bedrooms in 1500 square feet, and since each house is two stories, the ground taken up is so small, less than 800 square feet, so developers can build 40 houses in a 43,560 square foot acre. Maybe in Indio the land will be cheap enough for awhile that they will build “only” 20 or so per acre, with bigger yards. Competition has made them figure out how to make really small houses seem roomy, so what used to be a 2-bedroom house goes as a 4-5 bedroom one, and people think they are getting more.) If we can educate people to follow their natural tendencies to grow their own food, each of those families can more than replace the agricultural land lost, by growing their own food intensively and sustainably.

Even in postage-stamp size yards that such developments feature, less than 500 square feet, each family will have control over its own food supply, so it will be free of wondering if there will be food when there is a grocery store strike or an earthquake. Vines, climbing bushes, and trees can grow up over garages and houses, so the space of the building can be used twice. Each family will know it grew its food without pesticides, so it does not have to worry if truckloads of DDT-laced food get through the post-NAFTA food chain each day. Each family can grow the foods it likes, not just the type that looks perfect on a shelf. People will know again what a juicy tomato or peach is, or have avocados so abundant frozen guacamole will be available all year long, and asparagus and artichokes will be staples for those who like them, not a rare expensive treat. Each family can grow foods that don’t ship well or survive being stored in cold storage warehouses for weeks and sometimes months before getting to the consumer. Each family can participate in the chain of life and see how nutrients are saved or lost by how food is processed, and do the work with modern methods that make it fun and educational, not drudgery. Growing food on arbors and with edible privacy hedges, they can have shade and nice living situations as well, and more food variety and production per square foot than factory farms, and even family monocultural farms, ever did. With permaculture and natural farming methods, the inborn tendency to care more about your own food than just a job, and recycling treated graywater, by each growing on a small scale, these families can use less total water and total work, for more food, with greater variety, nutritional value, and local food security, than we ever had.”

If agricultural land is being lost to the built environment the time is riper than ever for growing food at home!


This post was first published on Home Grown Food Network’s website
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