Farmers have survived decades of escalating regulatory costs in California in part by switching to high-value crops that cannot be easily grown elsewhere. But agricultural leaders are warning that new advancements in plant breeding around the globe are threatening the state's market dominance, while production costs are beginning to outweigh the benefits.
The issue rose to the attention of the Legislature last week when the Senate Agriculture Committee hosted an informational hearing covering the latest threats to the industry. The discussion was part of an ongoing set of hearings that have evolved into a routine check-in with agricultural leaders by Senator Melissa Hurtado of Bakersfield, who chairs the committee.
Almond Alliance CEO Aubrey Bettencourt began on a somber note, laying out a few of the many challenges her growers are facing.
"If we don't fix these two things, there's almost no point," Bettencourt told the committee. "And that's going to be the functionality of our market and water."
Along with high costs, almond farmers are dealing with low prices and a high inventory, and are adapting by pulling more acres out of production, she explained.
Aubrey Bettencourt, Almond AllianceBettencourt was more optimistic with water solutions. She believes that farmers can tap into adaptive and innovative practices to steer their fate in a new direction and avoid the omens emanating from the Public Policy Institute of California and other researchers, who have cautioned that up to a million acres of farmland must be fallowed in the San Joaquin Valley to balance aquifers under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
She celebrated the first year of LandFlex, a Department of Water Resources program incentivizing farmers to avoid pumping that could impact vulnerable drinking water wells.
"We lead in solutions," she said. "We have way too much at stake and way too much good to do."
Small farmers were the greatest concern for Bettencourt as well as Jamie Fanous, a policy advocate for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. Fanous dipped into recent findings from USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture to warn that California has been losing more than 1,500 farms per year amid industry consolidation. She lamented that the state's budget crisis is leading to cuts in CDFA programs that prioritize small and disadvantaged farmers.
As president and CEO of the Western Agricultural Processors Association, Roger Isom has been closely engaged in many of the regulatory policies hitting the pocketbooks of those farmers. According to Isom, California's aggressive stance in combating climate change has "put agriculture right in the crosshairs." He worried about the implementation of the Advanced Clean Fleets Rule, which the Air Resources Board passed to ban the sale of diesel-powered trucks by 2036. He warned that another burdensome regulation is in the works that would force processors to convert to zero-emission forklifts.
As he often stresses to lawmakers and state officials, Isom said the state's rural electric grid cannot keep pace with the current infrastructure needs, let alone for electric truck charging stations that would each require 60 megawatts of power. He noted that the electric rates for his processors are twice the national average and "that's before all these increases that are coming."
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Trade groups have spent years pleading with lawmakers to consider the economic impacts that ambitious climate policies pose to rural and agricultural communities. If that message has not landed well in the Legislature, it has elsewhere, according to Bettencourt.
"The rest of the world knows how much almonds have potential for market growth and knows the demand for almonds," she said. "They see the problems and the challenges we face here and they're anticipating how to sell us out."
All of California's prized commodities, she argued, will "chase cheaper water, cheaper labor, cheaper energy, and someone will genetically figure out how to grow these in places that we don't right now." She said that is already happening, with research underway in Australia, Spain and other countries, and shared that growers have reached out to her about producing cheap almonds in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Louie Brown, an attorney at Kahn, Soares & Conway representing a variety of agricultural interests, drove that message further. He described California as the greatest place in the world to grow food, fiber and the flowers handed out at California Ag Day. But he asserted that the problems discussed in the hearing are real and numerous. He urged the lawmakers to continue the conversation, particularly Sen. Dave Cortese of Silicon Valley, who participated in his first hearing in the committee.
"We need to be serious about looking at the issues that are impacting California agriculture—our ability to compete with our neighbors, as well as our international partners," said Brown. "If we're not going to be serious about that, in a few years, the landscape that we're looking at—your districts, the Central Valley—are going to look a whole lot more like the Silicon Valley, unfortunately."
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