Farm Aid

The W$J has a silly article about the struggling "locally grown" movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's silly because the concern expressed - that development in the area has meant a reduction in arable land will reduce the amount of locally grown produce available to urban dwellers - is non-existent: Fewer Farms to Feed "Local" Appetite

Pocket-size farms have sprung up in cities around the Bay Area in recent years, part of a movement to bring consumers closer to the sources of food they buy.

But even as these small farms show up in urban neighborhoods, bringing with them a sense of a local agricultural revival, the continuing decline in the availability of farmland in the Bay Area's traditional growing areas threatens to leave consumers further away than ever from where their food is cultivated.

In recent years, the region has lost large tracts of farmland to housing and commercial development.

Anyone reading the W$J would come away convinced that the Bay Area is choking on pollution and "development." Hah! Drive 20 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge and you will see farmland, including the all-important cows and barnyards. Go a little further and you will be in Sonoma and/or Napa, again prime (not to mention world famous) farmland. Go south of San Jose and you will be in Monterey County, still a breadbasket decades after John Steinbeck chronicled its teeming ranks of migrant workers. Etc.

In fact, spend enough time in Northern California and you will realize that the urbanized Bay Area is the anomaly; virtually all of the available land is either wilderness or farmland. Not only that, there is this recent transportation innovation known as the "truck" on which area farmers rely to deliver produce to hungry city dwellers. These miracle inventions travel along "highways," which allow for easy access to urban markets. And, no patch of urban re-development is complete without its accompanying "farmer's market" where office workers can buy carrots with the dirt still on it. Organic!

The truth is that, even in the "developed" Bay Area there is still a ton of undeveloped land. A lot of it (literally millions of acres) has been set aside as protected wilderness, meaning you can't build anything there - nary a subdivision, nor a beet farm. Go to the suburbs around San Jose, and you can still find places where working farms nestle uncomfortably next to McMansions and office parks. Are there farms in San Francisco? Of course not! It's a city of 750,000 souls in an area of approximately 49 square miles! Where the hell are we going to put farms? Next to the "green tech" windmills?

Now, the article does depict something that is true: there are plenty of neurotic urban progressives who have become convinced that it is only by eating food grown next door, or down the street, that you can have a truly healthy lifestyle. That, of course, flies in the face of centuries of urbanization, followed by decades of suburbanization. Not only is "locally grown" impractical, it is absolutely at odds with the way people live. Not that this matters. Urban activists have one thing the rest of us lack: the ability to get major media publications to publish uncritical stories about their "movements" in the hopes that statist policy makers will adopt their cause. It worked with climate change. It can certainly work with "locally grown" food. Look for demands for funding of urban gardens and set asides for suburban farmland, not to mention new zoning rules (imagine: mixed-use residential, retail, arbor) in the coming years.