May 1, 2022 - Epoch Times
01:52
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Can you give us a recap of what's going on with farmers here in California? | |
| California, the number of farmers is shrinking and has been for 50 years, but it's down to just a few thousand. | |
| Most people I know, or I'm looking out the window now, they've all moved away. | |
| All of their land is either corporate farmed or corporate owned. | |
| It's a much more efficient way of producing food than before. | |
| I'm looking out the window at an almond orchard, they'll probably get 3,200 pounds an acre. | |
| of almonds with almost minimum labor. | |
| When I was in high school that orchard probably would have got 1200 pounds and it would have had 10 times the labor. | |
| People would be walking through the orchard with mallets hitting the limbs with a rubber mallet and then with a canvas dragging it. | |
| It's much more efficient but it's a redefinition of farming that an acre of land has one purpose and that is to feed as many people in the world as efficiently as possible. | |
| What was the value of these family farms? | |
| It was a face-to-face society. | |
| These towns were 5,000 to 7,000 people. | |
| And so everybody, when they went to town, they either knew somebody or they recognized their face. | |
| There was no sense of being a stranger. | |
| All the people that I knew had moved away because of crime or the deterioration of the schools or the government became so regulatory and intrusive, it was very hard to make it for me. | |
| Do you think there is a way for California to have this farming culture back? | |
| It's very difficult because land is so scarce and water is so scarce now. | |
| And the population is not, when I grew up, it's 40 million. | |
| And more importantly, we're run by a Silicon Valley and bi-coastal league. | |
| Here in California, $6 trillion in market capitalization in Silicon Valley. | |
| So we have an elite that's not subject to any consequences of their ideology. | |
| If they want to not build dams or not build roads or put so many regulations on farming, it doesn't affect anybody themselves. |
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