California Agribusiness Sows Bitter Fruit

A letter to the editor published in the New York Times from Lloyd. This is from 1996.

Published: June 26, 1996

To the Editor:

A June 20 news article on the conversion of Fresno County, California, "the most fruitful farm county in America," to uncontrolled urban growth is a lament for family farmers, but it leaves out the costs that industrial agribusiness, as practiced in the county's San Joaquin Valley, has extracted from the resource base.

Because of agribusiness, Tulare Lake, the biggest lake west of the Mississippi, has dried up and the rivers that fed it have been diverted for farming of desert lands, many of whose soils are unsuitable for farming.

Migratory bird mutations and deformities are a recurring part of the cost of the disposal of waste water from industrial farming.

Groundwater pollution by agriculture on the east side of the valley, caused by fertilizers and dairy wastes, is a worsening problem, and pesticide contamination of public and private wells is ubiquitous.

Immigrant farm workers still work for little in wages and less in health care. Meanwhile, big cotton growers like J. G. Boswell, who owns 200,000 acres and has rights to enough water for a city of 1.5 million, benefit enormously from huge state and Federal irrigation projects.

For two decades, four million acres have been under cultivation in the San Joaquin Valley. Flood irrigation of that much land requires 90 percent of all the water from the rivers as well as huge amounts of groundwater, which is another constantly dwindling resource because of overdrafting.

We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the natural resource base of the valley, and the long-term costs will dwarf any loss of farmland to urbanization. This is the most fruitful farm county in America all right, but the fruit has been bitter and the environmental and social costs staggering.

LLOYD CARTER Fresno, Calif., June 23, 1996

The writer is president of the California Save Our Streams Council, sponsor of a petition to revive the San Joaquin River.