Hardest hit, however, will be the states huge agriculture industry. We expect hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the Central Valley to go unplanted, said Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. That will cause severe economic problems in our rural regions -- loss of jobs and economic activity, with all the heartache that entails. Roughly half the nations fresh vegetables are grown in Californias Central Valley, an area that is naturally an arid grassland, and only becomes suitable for most crops we grow there with extensive irrigation. Two comments: 1. Because of cheap transportation and cheap immigrant labor, we largely no longer grow those vegetables in places where the normal weather is sufficient to grow them. Instead, we moved the cultivation to where it was cheap (as long as it rained enough to divert the Colorado River over the mountains), and largely paved over the old farms. 2. Come the fall campaign, I fully expect candidates to be blaming the inflation in food prices on Obamas policies. I further expect they will conveniently leave out the fact its caused by a multi-year drought that has stretched from Texas to California. (Although, if Santorum or Huckabee runs again, we might hear that God is angry at America, with parallels to Old Testament Israel.)
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 15:22:09 +0000
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