Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Along with many others, we've been promoting water-conserving soil and
mulch and sustainable, self-sufficient small farm production for years now.
Industrial monoculture is failing right on schedule along with freshwater
losses, topsoil losses, fertilizer price hikes, and economic contraction.
And again - it's a good time to be a seller of food and not a buyer.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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Idled farm workers 'starving' amid drought
Even the food bank is bare in nation's most productive agricultural area
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28199544/

updated 3:48 p.m. MT, Fri., Dec. 12, 2008

MENDOTA, Calif. - Idled farm workers are searching for food in the nation's
most prolific agricultural region, where a double blow of drought and a
court-ordered cutback of water supplies has caused hundreds of millions of
dollars in losses.

This bedraggled town is struggling with an unemployment rate that city
officials say is 40 percent and rising. This month, 600 farm families
depleted the cupboards of the local food bank, which turned away families
— more than 100 of them — for the first time.

"We're supposed to supply the world," said Mayor Robert Silva, "and people
are starving."

The state's most dire water shortage in three decades is expected to erase
more than 55,000 jobs across the fertile San Joaquin Valley by summer and
drive up food prices across the nation, university economists predict.

"People being thrown out of work are the ones who can least afford it,"
said Richard Howitt, a professor of agriculture economics at the University
of California-Davis, who estimates that $1.6 billion in agriculture-related
wages across the valley will be lost in the coming months because of
dwindling water.

Already the wage losses have hit businesses that are the backbone of the
small farm communities that sustain nearly a quarter of the nation's
agriculture production.

"At lot of problems with this country's economy can't be fixed fast," said
Alan Hansen, whose family-owned hardware store on the main drag is
suffering a 25 percent decline in sales.

'Get the water here'
"But this can be fixed like that," he said, snapping his fingers. "All they
have to do is get the water here."

California's population has ballooned from 10 million to more than 36
million since water began flowing through the state's network of canals in
middle of last century, delivering water from the wet north to the arid
south.

After years of discounting the environmental consequences, court orders
seeking to protect threatened fish such as the Delta smelt have slowed the
flows even as prolonged drought left some reservoirs at just 12 percent of
capacity.

This year federal water deliveries were 35 percent of the normal
allocations, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres fallow and causing $260
million in crop losses statewide. The governor issued a disaster
declaration for the region.

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Now farmers are relying on dwindling groundwater supplies and keeping their
fingers crossed for 10 percent of their water allotments. Last week a
coalition of farmers and urban water filed a lawsuit claiming that state
officials overstepped their authority by approving another round of
potential cuts.

The valley produces 80 percent of the world's almonds. But grower Shawn
Coburn has held off spending $350,000 to fertilize his 1,000 acres this
month because he fears he will not have enough water for a 2009 crop.

"If you like foreign oil, you're going to love foreign food," he scoffed.

Crop loans could be cut

This month, the government could further restrict water deliveries during
the drought — and that would mean crop loans would be harder to get. "I
think that's the next shoe to drop," said Sarah Woolf, spokeswoman for the
Westlands Water District, which encompasses Mendota.

Already the $40 million losses in Fresno County cotton production this fall
permanently closed half a dozen gins. And roughly four square miles of
lettuce fields went unplanted, resulting in $13 million in lost sales.

"Think of all of the tractor drivers, truck drivers and pickers that
processing all of that lettuce would take," said Tom Nyberg, deputy county
agricultural commissioner. "Those jobs were lost, too."

Two hundred more jobs vanished when the Spreckles Sugar plant east of
Mendota closed this fall. A farmers co-op wanted to buy it but could not
find water for their beets.

The local hardware store lost $5,000 a month in sales to Spreckles and had
to lay off one of its nine workers.

Hansen, the store owner, said he understands there is an environmental
balance to be struck and that the Delta smelt are a necessary link in the
food chain.

"But if you follow that chain up," he said, " eventually it leads to us."

Farmworkers at bottom of employment ladder

Farmworkers, who make up the majority of Mendota's 9,600 population, are at
the bottom of the employment ladder.

Rosa Lopez misses her husband, who moved eight hours south to Brawley to
pick lettuce. Luis Suarez, 12, tears up when he talks about his retriever
Bambi, whom the family took to a Fresno shelter when they could not afford
food or shots. Micaela Mendez and Maria Diaz have taken relatives into
their cramped apartments so they can share expenses.

At sunset Wednesday, a dozen residents of a trailer park prepared their
Christmas nativity scene and prayed for rain.

"If we don't have faith, we've lost everything," said Otilia Suarez in
Spanish. "We thank God for the small amount of food that we do have, and we
keep praying for a better tomorrow."