The Great Thirst

In Ireland they don’t call it the famine – those years in the mid-19^th century when English landlords exported huge quantities of grain and beef while a million Irish people were dying of starvation and a million more were leaving their homeland. They call it “the great hunger” because the blackened blight of the potato, the lone food on which peasant lives depended, caused massive suffering in the midst of agricultural plenty. It wasn’t a famine. It was a policy. So we read now of California, whose farmers produce most of America's fresh food, consume four-fifths of the state’s vanishing water, and are exempt from Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandatory water restrictions. California, where almonds, the most lucrative export, use 1.1 trillion gallons a year, where it takes 872 gallons of water to make a gallon of wine, 1,847 gallons for a pound of beef, and 4.9 gallons for a single walnut.

The drought is real in California, its end is nowhere in sight. And while farmers didn’t stop the rain, longstanding agricultural policies and practices exacerbated the long-predicted crisis.                                                              

The San Joaquin Valley didn’t become “the nation’s salad bowl” on its 15 inches of annual rain. It took massive irrigation projects and the diverted waters of the Colorado River to make the southwestern desert bloom. And it is one more testament to what Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, deemed “the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.”

Against the Odds

Since well before Thomas Jefferson, Americans have idealized small farmers. Distrustful of cities, they placed inordinate political power in rural districts until the Supreme Court upheld “one person, one vote” 50 years ago. Long before that, however, small farms had been in decline, the victims of public policy, mechanization and the power of corporate agriculture. To learn more about the state of the small farmer in New England, which is a tough place to farm, I visited Fred Dabney, a nurseryman in Westport, Massachusetts, with whom I squandered countless nights playing pool at college. Long active in state and local agriculture, Fred served as chairman of the Massachusetts Agricultural Board, until he was “booted” for publicly objecting to its politicization.

Threats to the sustainability of local farming come from the ever-expanding reach of federal regulations, which inundate small farmers with bureaucratic overload and compliance costs. They come also from Massachusetts’s famed political cronyism – “You’re supposed to do what they tell you to do,” Fred said of his firing, “and not ask any questions.”

But the biggest threats to the small farmer are (1) the corporate farmer, whose thousands of acres planted in a single crop, protected by Monsanto’s wondrous chemicals, massive machinery and Congressional committee rooms, long ago blurred the line between industry and agriculture; and (2) the real-estate developer who continues to devour prime farmland.

Yet against such odds, Massachusetts’ agriculture is growing, building on a steady campaign that locally produced food is tastier, healthier and safer than its corporate competitors.