Disappearing Act

Almost two cities’ worth of agricultural land is being developed each year in California, and—alarmingly—it’s some of the best farmland.

By Sylvia Wright

For Debbie and Peter Hunter, the uncertainty started when they learned that developers were buying options on neighbors’ properties. It became overwhelming at the planning board meeting when Peter saw a map projecting Winters’ future transportation grid: County Road 31 was to be extended right through his family’s prune orchard.

“We always wanted to keep this land in farming. This was where our future was. It was the kind of life we wanted,” explains Debbie ’77 as she and Peter ’71, Ph.D. ’77, talk over coffee in their cozy farmhouse on a rainy day. Their boys, Tadden, 11, and Toby, 9, are busy in their bedrooms. As she speaks, Debbie keeps a wary eye on the flood-prone creek beneath her windows, which is slowly filling with muddy rainwater. “We asked ourselves, could we save our land or would urban encroachment take it from us?”

The Hunters’ dilemma is California’s dilemma. For over 300 years, ambitious and energetic people have flooded into these vast lands, building missions, pueblos, ranchos, presidios, mining camps, seaports, military bases, universities and metropolises. Feeding all these builders were cattle ranchers, dairymen, orchardists, vegetable farmers and grain growers.

At first, the food providers farmed and ranched right alongside the settlements, which were concentrated on the coast and, after the gold rush, around Sacramento. Eventually the booming settlements overran their neighbors, pushing them into the great Central Valley and the southern Inland Empire. Now settlements are claiming those places, too, putting cities and suburbs on top of the state’s finest remaining farmlands at a record, and accelerating, pace.

“We are developing almost 50,000 acres of California farmland every year,” said Al Sokolow, a recently retired UC Davis Cooperative Extension specialist who has studied land-use change in California for 20 years. “That’s roughly equal to creating two new cities the size of Modesto, or seven the size of Davis, annually.”

Sokolow is one of many people in the immediate and extended UC Davis community who have worked to quantify and analyze this “farmland conversion” process. Sokolow and two UC Davis colleagues, Daniel Sumner and Nicolai Kuminoff, summarized some of the issues in a report for the University of California Agricultural Issues Center. Even paving over seven Davises doesn’t make much of a dent in California’s seemingly inexhaustible 27 million acres of pasture, rangeland and irrigated farmland, they said—that’s an annual conversion rate of about three-tenths of 1 percent. “But in the long term, of course, these numbers accumulate and add up to a major impact on the landscape,” Sokolow said.

In the immediate future, what matters more than how much is where the conversion is occurring—on nutritious, friable soil in flat alluvial plains with moderate climates—some of the best places in the world for growing food and fiber.

“This is what is termed ‘prime agricultural land’—a distinct subset of all agricultural land, with the combination of features that makes it the most versatile and productive land there is. Its depth, texture, water-holding capacity and low potential for erosion make it ideal for growing a wide array of crops,” said UC Davis soil and water science graduate Charles Tyson ’82, Ph.D. ’89. He is manager of the California Farmland Conservancy Program, which is part of the California Department of Conservation, a state office dedicated to keeping agricultural land in agriculture.

“Climatic conditions also factor in,” Tyson said. “In Monterey County, for example, the third-richest ag-producing county in the country, there is a narrow swath of farmland in the Salinas Valley that is one of the only places in the U.S. where farmers can grow lettuce and other cool-weather crops in the summer.

“That land generates a lot of revenue per acre. There and in the Central Valley, prime farmland is an irreplaceable resource.”

Why? For starters, as the saying goes, they ain’t making any more of it. Whereas fruit growers in the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”—now Silicon Valley—could pull up stakes in the 1950s and move to the wide-open Central Valley, now there are no similar unplowed valleys on the horizon.

Tyson said it’s not accurate to deliver “a shrill message of fear” that land conversion will make us food insecure—reliant on other nations to feed us. But it may make our food cost more. As houses are built on prime ag land, growers must move to land with more limitations for agricultural use. That makes an acre of tomatoes cost more to produce—more planing, tilling, labor, fertilizer, irrigation—and that translates into higher prices in the produce aisle.

Conversion also reduces the variety of available foods, said Desmond Jolly, director of the UC Davis Small Farm Center and a consumer specialist in agricultural and resource economics. Many of the farmers selling to development have small or medium-sized operations, Jolly said. These farmers have been the source of countless innovations. Arugula, radicchio, Asian pear, spring-mix salad (mesclun), kiwi fruit, new apple varieties and organic produce—all were first cultivated on smaller farms, then adopted by larger producers when stable markets developed.

“These smaller farms are absolutely instrumental in transforming how we grow and what we eat,” he said.

Gail Feenstra ’78 is a UC Davis-based food systems analyst with the University of California’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. She has spent her career helping smaller growers find local markets (farmer’s markets, grocery stores and school-lunch programs) and educating the public about using their food dollars to support the local agricultural community.

“In my mind, this all has to do with a democratic ideal of what agriculture is meant to be—a system in which a lot of people are on the land. There’s more involvement, diversity and engagement in food and agriculture, and more control of the resources,” she said. “I feel that’s a healthier community all around. That’s what is wrong with having mom-and-pop farms convert to Wal-Mart stores.”

There are other amenities supplied by agricultural lands. Erik Vink ’86 is Central Valley program director for the Trust for Public Land, a national, nonprofit land-conservation organization. He ticks off some ancillary benefits: open space, wildlife habitat, groundwater recharge and floodwater retention.

“Americans want to maintain land in agriculture. It’s important in our psychological and sociological history,” Jolly said. “Our country began in rural areas and didn’t enter its big urban phase until maybe 100 years ago. We value the aesthetic aspects of being in contact with the natural systems of farmlands and open spaces.”

One could say that the rural city of Winters was on the verge of its urban phase in the late 1980s, when developers began buying options on agricultural tracts like the Hunters’. To allow time for deliberation, the Winters council enacted a building moratorium, but council meetings still held lots of talk about expanding, Peter Hunter recalls. “That scared me and got a lot of people out here riled up.”

With other area landowners—many of them employees of UC Davis, like both of the Hunters—they formed the Winters General Plan Working Group. Months of discussion, debate and analysis later, the long-term outline for land-use planning and development for the city of Winters put the urban limit at Dry Creek—the eastern boundary of the Hunter farm. “That was our line in the sand. We said, ‘Thou shalt not develop west of it.’ ”

Eventually, in the mid-1990s, because of public processes like Winters’ general-plan development and long-term discussions among the cities, county, farming groups and chambers of commerce, Yolo County ended up with a stewpot of rules and regulations protecting some farmland. For instance, Davis, Woodland and Yolo County agreed to preserve some ag land between the two cities as greenbelts, or “community separators.” Countywide, new agricultural mitigation ordinances required developers to permanently preserve one acre of land in agriculture for every acre urbanized. (Yolo County is one of the very few places in California taking such measures; the city of Brentwood in Contra Costa County has a similar mitigation policy.)

However, the Hunters felt that mitigation protection was vulnerable to changes in political sentiment. Plus, the prune orchards planted in 1960 by Peter’s father were at the end of their productive lives. “We had an old orchard that would take money to rejuvenate,” Peter said, “and this nagging fear of development pressures.”

The Hunters had heard that landowners could sell their development rights while retaining basic ownership of the property. Peter drove one night to a presentation in Woodland by the Yolo Land Trust and learned about the state-run California Farmland Conservancy Program.

Program manager Tyson explains the program this way: Public funds are used to buy a landowner’s legally binding promise that a specific parcel of land currently in agricultural production will never be converted to a nonagricultural use. This legal promise is a recorded document called an agricultural conservation easement. It’s a permanent restriction on the property deed and is binding on all future owners. The easement is administered by a third party—typically, a local nonprofit organization such as the Yolo Land Trust, which currently holds easements on more than 9,000 acres of farmland in Yolo County. The trust has primary responsibility for enforcing the provisions of the easement. The state Farmland Conservancy Program is one of the principal sources of funding, often with matching federal and private sources.

“Our program recognizes that you’re not going to be able to stop growth or conversion, with all the pressures of an urbanizing state. So we’re trying to focus on preserving the most productive farmland in agriculture and encouraging growth onto lesser-quality land,” Tyson said. He noted that urbanization is not always the threat. Increasingly, rural “ranchettes”—home sites on two to 20 acres—are being recognized as having great potential to remove farmland from productive uses. For example, in Stanislaus County, the seventh most agriculturally productive county in the state, over half of the county’s prime farmland is in parcels with two- to 20-acre zoning.

Another option for the Hunters was a contract under the state’s Williamson Act of 1965. As with a conservation easement, such a contract is a legally binding promise that a specific parcel of land currently in agricultural production will not be converted to a nonagricultural use. In this situation, the landowner gets lower property taxes. But the landowner at any one point is obligated for only another 10 years. (There is also a little-used 20-year contract with bigger tax benefits.) Williamson Act contracts currently are in effect for about 16 million of the state’s 27 million ag acres.

Tyson said one common criticism of Williamson Act contracts is that they do not provide permanent protection. “Ten years is not a particularly long time in the planning horizon for development. Urbanization has a long time frame. A developer could receive substantial tax benefits under a Williamson contract, then not renew the contra ct, and go ahead and convert the land.”

So, in 2000, having weighed the options, the Hunters chose the agricultural conservation easement. The next year, they invested some of the easement proceeds into planting new orchards. They realigned the troublesome creek and, in the process, found a Native American grinding stone. “This is what we are preserving—the long ties of the people to the land,” Debbie says today, as the rainy season sets in once again. Adds Peter (now vice president of the Yolo Land Trust board), “We feel the long history of agriculture here—how the land has been used. It’s really important to us that it be preserved. We’ve always considered ourselves tenants—stewards—of the land.”

Debbie sums up: “We’re passing through. We’re just someone else taking care of the land.”

Sylvia Wright writes about the environmental sciences for the campus. Photo by Richard Meisinger Jr., director of the Office of Research’s Interdisciplinary Research Support unit at UC Davis, who has been photographing “troubled” landscapes for over 15 years.