Epoch Times - How Corporations Replacing Family Farms Changed California | Victor Davis Hanson
Aired: 2022-05-01
Duration: 01:52


=== Silicon Valley's Farming Crisis (01:52) ===

[00:00:00]  Can you give us a recap of what's going on with farmers here in California?
[00:00:03]  California, the number of farmers is shrinking and has been for 50 years, but it's down to just a few thousand.
[00:00:10]  Most people I know, or I'm looking out the window now, they've all moved away.
[00:00:14]  All of their land is either corporate farmed or corporate owned.
[00:00:18]  It's a much more efficient way of producing food than before.
[00:00:22]  I'm looking out the window at an almond orchard, they'll probably get 3,200 pounds an acre.
[00:00:27]  of almonds with almost minimum labor.
[00:00:29]  When I was in high school that orchard probably would have got 1200 pounds and it would have had 10 times the labor.
[00:00:34]  People would be walking through the orchard with mallets hitting the limbs with a rubber mallet and then with a canvas dragging it.
[00:00:41]  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.
[00:00:51]  What was the value of these family farms?
[00:00:54]  It was a face-to-face society.
[00:00:56]  These towns were 5,000 to 7,000 people.
[00:00:59]  And so everybody, when they went to town, they either knew somebody or they recognized their face.
[00:01:04]  There was no sense of being a stranger.
[00:01:06]  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.
[00:01:18]  Do you think there is a way for California to have this farming culture back?
[00:01:23]  It's very difficult because land is so scarce and water is so scarce now.
[00:01:28]  And the population is not, when I grew up, it's 40 million.
[00:01:31]  And more importantly, we're run by a Silicon Valley and bi-coastal league.
[00:01:37]  Here in California, $6 trillion in market capitalization in Silicon Valley.
[00:01:41]  So we have an elite that's not subject to any consequences of their ideology.
[00:01:45]  If they want to not build dams or not build roads or put so many regulations on farming, it doesn't affect anybody themselves.