How red is my valley

Red in the old-fashioned sense

I frequently refer to my old stomping grounds in Central California as the reddest part of the state. By this I mean, of course, that Californians in the Central Valley love to cast right-wing votes and support conservative causes.

Now, to my great surprise, I have uncovered a red brigade calling for collective action and government interference in free enterprise. It's really quite shocking. The conspirators are naturally rather coy about portraying themselves as advocates of statism and a planned economy, but they cannot help but give it away.

One clue lies in their name. Just as countries in the Soviet bloc used to glory in misleading names—“People's Republic,” “Democratic Republic”—the red threat in the San Joaquin Valley marches under the banner of “Families Protecting the Valley.” Sounds nice and harmless, doesn't it? But check out this excerpt from their manifesto:

Current attacks on the Valley’s water take two forms. One is the view that water is nothing but a commodity and must be sold to the highest bidder. This is a foolhardy concept which, if followed, will condemn the United States to depend upon foreign sources with unreliable health protections for its food supply.

There it is, folks. They oppose capitalism. They want intervention in the free market economy of California.

I agree with them, of course, but then I was long ago accused by a certain family member of being a socialist. We socialists love planned economies, you know.

Or perhaps I just see a role for the public sector in setting policy that might forestall the abuses of unfettered capitalism. Remember the robber barons? (They're back, by the way.) If the highest bidder always wins, we fall instantly into a plutocracy. It appears that the members of Families Protecting the Valley have awakened to this stark reality. Perhaps too late.

If the principles of the free market are applied too rigorously to California's water resources, Central Valley agriculture is doomed. People living in the San Joaquin's burgeoning towns and cities will almost certainly pay lip service to the notion that farming is a crucial industry that deserves their support, but don't expect that lip service to turn into votes for growth limits and municipal water rationing. Farm families are hugely outnumbered by the city and town dwellers, and the latter will balk at anything that reduces the flow of water from their faucets (or forces them to drain their swimming pools).

Absent a strong government policy establishing a water allocation program to preserve agriculture in California's arid Central Valley, that agriculture will fall prey to competing demands from the growing urban regions. While many of the townies are in farm-related enterprises, most of the people in Bakersfield, Visalia, Tulare, and Fresno don't think of themselves as farmers. It's not a majority bloc.

Furthermore, the water in the Central Valley is diverted from sources in Northern California. Diversions from the Delta damages those wetlands and blights the fishing industry in the Bay Area. These are legitimate competing interests for California's water (and they had the water first, too). Valley farmers who sneer at fisheries and declare that the fishes should die to preserve farm crops are conveniently forgetting that they're really talking about killing the livelihood of fishermen. The competition is keen and the supplies are short. It's not a pretty picture. 

In a more enlightened age, the state legislature promulgated the California Land Conservation Act of 1965. It was an example of singling out agriculture for special treatment because it was deemed a key state interest (and not just a majoritarian concern). The handiwork of Assemblyman John Williamson, the “Williamson Act” provided tax benefits to agricultural landholders who agreed to preserve their farmlands from commercial development for a period of ten years. Recently the state saw fit to strengthen the Williamson Act with an infusion of money to allow it to continue in operation and to fund tax breaks for more ten-year moritoriums on farmland development.

The Williamson Act is a survivor of the time when the state enacted formal policies to maintain the viability of California agriculture. Now it has gotten all but impossible to act in concert this way. The rugged individualists in California farming who regarded subsidized water as their birthright apparently assumed the situation was sustainable. Naturally and understandably wary of government control, they preferred to pretend to stand alone. In many cases, unfortunately, the lack of sufficiently strong policies to protect family farms meant that they were swallowed up by corporate interests. Agricultural land is now concentrated in the hands of a few large agribusiness companies. Individual family farms continue to dwindle in number and those that survive are perched on the edge of commercial nonviability. While farmers carp and complain about federal programs like the Endangered Species Act, they should have been looking for some similar protection for themselves.

It was the partnership of government and family farms that made the valley bloom. State and federal subsidies for huge water projects irrigated the San Joaquin at bargain prices—once. Today California's urban population is larger and thirstier than the state's farms. By the numbers, they win and farms lose. Clearly, Families Protecting the Valley does not want that to happen, but signs demanding that the governor simply “turn the pumps back on” demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of reality in a drought-stricken state. A slow-motion tragedy is unfolding before us while the victims rail at the only entity that can preserve them—at least some of them.

Ironically, Families Protecting the Valley had a prominent place at the big Tea Party event at the Tulare International Agri-Center last July, where banners denounced big government and extolled unfettered free markets. Yet no one objected to the presence of these anti-capitalist interventionists.

Can I get you some water for your tea? Sorry. Fresh out.

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Now hear this!

Trust Dr. Rock Star

Farm life is not necessarily a bucolic idyll accompanied by the soulful lowing of cattle and the melodic twittering of songbirds. The roaring of tractors and other farm equipment may imprint you with less restful souvenirs—like a ringing in the ears.

During my childhood, no one on the farm wore ear protection during long hours in the field, driving tractors to and fro with equipment in tow. Some of the farm gear was unpowered and relatively quiet: discs, harrows, plows, and rakes. The diesel engines of the tractors provided most of the noise. Other devices raised a ruckus of their own, powered devices like balers, whirling choppers, reciprocating scythes, and stalk cutters. Then there were odd devices like the cultipacker, an unpowered farm tool that consisted of a big cylindrical axle festooned with toothed steel rings, which clashed against each other as they rolled across the field. It sounded like a continuous explosion in a cymbal factory.

One legacy of my life as a farm kid is tinnitus—a continual ringing in my ears. It's a mild case, usually easily ignored, but it varies from time to time and I wish it would go away. I unknowingly did my best to avoid it, always letting my brother volunteer for farm tasks that he would happily do while I would regard them as infringing on my reading time. Despite my shirking, the damage was done.

Naturally my ears pricked up when I heard a radio advertisement for a new remedy. Although my doctor had told me there was no useful treatment for tinnitus, hope springs eternal. Had there been a recent breakthrough? The pitchman on the radio cheerfully reported that Quietus would safely provide relief from the ringing, humming, or squealing in the ears that characterizes various forms of tinnitus. Sounded good to me.

Now you can alleviate the ringing with all-natural Quietus, a proprietary formula that helps support healthier cochlear auditory nerve function in the inner ear, to relieve that annoying internal noise.

Oops! I hear buzzwords. Do you hear buzzwords? “All natural”? “Helps support”?

I also smell something. Like a rat.

The male voice of the pitchman gave way to the female voice of a supposed satisfied customer of Quietus:

I like it that it's homeopathic and doesn't require a prescription.

Okay. Got it. Quietus is a bogus nostrum with no medical value (unless you count the placebo effect). Out of curiosity, I visited the Quietus website. That where I discovered that Quietus was “discovered by a drummer.”

Sounds like someone was inspired by Airborne, the supremely successful fraud perpetrated “by a school teacher.” Who wouldn't trust a remedy invented by a rock star? (They're way more credible than mere doctors and researchers.)

The only good part of the Quietus website was the fine, fine (really fine) print at the bottom of the page (complete with the product name misspelled!):

Queitus™ Advanced Homeopathic Medicine. **These results not typical. Individual results will vary. These real testimonials do not represent the typical or ordinary experience of users. They are for demonstration purposes only and do not accurately capture the actual results you will experience. Your results may vary and you may need to use the product for a longer or shorter period of time. Each person’s experience with Quietus is different, which cannot be determined from these testimonials.

It's a lovely bit of cover-your-ass prose, which approximately 99% of visitors to the website will not read (or perhaps even see).

We tinnitus sufferers will have to continue to wait for a genuine remedy from real scientists—perhaps something along the lines of current research, which has succeeded in regrowing cochlear hair cells in mice. In the meantime, one can find a consumer-alert message about Quietus on YouTube (although I must warn you that it has an irritatingly noisy soundtrack!). I'd rather direct you to this trenchant commentary by Dara Ó Briain, who thinks we should “bag” homeopathy. But please don't clap too loudly. My ears are delicate.

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A Christmas list

Checked more than twice

In a twenty-four-hour period from the afternoon of Christmas Eve to the afternoon of Christmas Day, I collected the following deep insights and observations from my parents:

Dad: “Why are all women on welfare so fat? They sure don't look like they ever go hungry!”

It's probably because he watches Fox News all the time, where I'm sure there's a rule against showing skinny welfare recipients. This year Dad forgot to mention that the women are always black, too, and many of them drive Cadillacs. (We know about the Cadillacs because Ronald Reagan told us about them years ago.)

Dad: “Her husband certainly isn't much to look at. You'd think she could have done better for herself. Well, I guess ugly people want to get married, too.”

One of our distant cousins was at Christmas Eve mass with her new husband. In the spirit of the holiday, Dad shared his view that the boy wasn't pretty enough for marriage. At least this time he wasn't bad-mouthing the spouse of his most recently married granddaughter. Since the grandson-in-law just helped Dad fix his car, it may be that he has become better looking in Dad's eyes.

Even if I do say so myself, my family is full of lovely people. With rare exceptions, the women are all dark-eyed beauties. The men tend to be presentable and reasonably proportioned. This has become a kind of fetish for Dad, who purports to find ugliness all around him, but I refrain from pointing out that he's not the movie-star-handsome man of his youth anymore. And handsome is as handsome does.

Mom: “Sean Hannity was in Fresno to help the farmers. He did a special show on it.”

Yeah, I know about that. But why point out that Hannity was there merely to exploit an opportunity? He pandered to the depressed agricultural sector of the Central Valley because its most visible rivals for California's reduced water resources are the Marxist environmentalists of the heavily Democratic Bay Area. (It doesn't take much to be a Marxist these days.) Apparently all of the water in Northern California actually belongs to the farmers and dairymen of the Central Valley. (How clumsy of God to have delivered the water to the wrong part of the state.) The residents of the San Francisco Bay Delta fear that water diversion will allow salt-water intrusion to destroy their ecosystem and fisherman in the Bay Area see their livelihoods threatened by water shortages. But it's nervy of them to want water to preserve their occupations.

MediaWatch: Correcting Sean Hannity from Bruce Tokars on Vimeo.

Dad: “If the EPA isn't controlled, it's going to destroy agriculture in California.”

Environmental standards are terrible. Good thing the Environmental Protection Agency didn't exist in the days when the Kesterson reservoir was being poisoned and Tulare Lake was being sucked dry.

Dad: “Good thing global warming kicked in and saved us from a cold winter!”

Everyone knows that a single winter of exceptional snow and cold suffices to disprove the existence of a long-term warming trend. Dad gets upset when I point out that the climatologists he cites as counterweights to Al Gore (presumably the only source of pro-AGW information; the former vice president holds the IPCC in thrall, you see) agree that the globe is warming. Tim Ball and John Christy accept the existence of the warming trend; they simply argue that it cannot be significantly affected by human activities. (Ball is one of the most prominent scientists with actual credentials featured in Dad's cherished copy of The Great Global Warming Swindle.) No doubt the data indicating that 2009 will be one of the hottest years on record is fraudulent stuff ginned up by the communists in NASA and the UN.

Dad: “Scientists have discovered an extract from tomatoes that can clean cholesterol out of your arteries. It's available in pill form.”

Normally I get my doses of medical woo and pseudoscience from Mom. Nice to see that Dad is pitching in. He gave me a print-out from the Internet promoting a “bioactive, patented extract from ripe tomato that helps the blood flow smoothly.”

They lost me at “bioactive” and “patented.”

By the way, the product's website says that daily consumption of the product is required to maintain its efficacy. Big surprise.

I learn so much on my visits to my parents. Bless you, Mom & Dad, for always being willing to share, but your eldest son has a good reason for the stunned expression on his face.

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Counting cows

Accidentally in glut

People have been bringing a recent New York Times article to my attention: “From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little Profit.” (If the New York Times is behind a subscription wall for you, try the News & Observer's reprint here.) Just when milk prices crash and dairy farmers are taking it on the chin, science has foolishly tampered with nature and created more cows! As reporter William Neuman explains,

Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country—and the timing could hardly be worse.

There's less to this story than meets the eye.

It's true, of course, that any dairy farmer who invested in sex-selection technology wasted his money. Money he almost certainly cannot afford in these straitened times. The extra heifers are of no benefit, since he certainly does not need more milk cattle while the market for fluid milk is glutted. Dairy farmers are now receiving about $11 per hundred-weight, while a year ago it was over $19. The dairymen who went into debt to expand their herds at the price peak are now losing those herds at the low point. (My brother, who is a dairy farmer, knows of two men who got out of the business the hard way: one used a rope and the other used a gun.) It's a disaster out there, as depicted recently on ABC World News (“Dairy Farms Disappear”).

The problem, therefore, is real. The sex-selection technology, however, is the merest blip. It might be a significant boon in the future, supposing that there is a recovery in the dairy industry, but in the short run it has minimal impact. You see, each milk cow needs to give birth in order to start lactating. You may remember that fact from basic biology. Perhaps at some point we will overcome that limitation, but for now it still holds true.

This basic law of milk production means that each cow in a milking herd is a mother, implying the existence of a calf. The number of calves isn't going to change. In the past, you had a fifty-fifty split in the number of heifers (female calves) and bull calves (male calves). As reported in the New York Times,

The male calves are usually sold for little money to be raised as meat, and the females are raised as milk producers.

All too true. The occasionally bull calf may be raised to adulthood for stud services, but most of the boys go right to the auction block (along with an excess girl or two).


Such a waste of breeding time and effort, producing all those useless males!

It looked for a moment like the problem of excess males had been fixed. Unhappily, under current circumstances, the fix merely means that we have begun producing useless females—in a one-to-one substitution for the useless males. The excess heifers will be sold off instead of being bred and joining the milk herd. The unneeded heifers will command the same meagre meat-product prices as the unneeded bull calves. The girls will, unfortunately, have cost more than the boys used to because of the investment in sex-sorted semen for artificial breeding purposes, but they won't be adding a single drop to the milk glut.

They'll never be milked.

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The thirsty valley

Dry counties

“I lost another well.”

This is not good news.

“That's four of them gone now. One of them was drilled just last year.”

“Wow! That's not nearly enough time to get a return on your investment.”

“Not even close. I might have to go to the well again, in a manner of speaking. But everyone is drilling new wells and we're all going deeper, chasing after the water table. It's not good.”

My brother has about a dozen wells on his dairy farm. Four have gone dry. Both his dairy and his farm are water-intensive operations. The dairy is completely well-dependent. The farm gets an allocation of irrigation water from the extensive system of dams and canals that stores and routes runoff from the Sierra Nevada to the thirsty counties of the San Joaquin, California's great central valley.

If you drive down either I-5 or US-99, the two major north-south freeways that run through the valley, you'll see green fields and herds of dairy cattle on both sides of you. If it weren't for water projects, subsidized by state and federal governments, you'd see long stretches of desert instead. The canals are the Central Valley's circulatory system. They are the life blood of my brother's business.

The dry wells are omens of possible disaster. The ongoing California drought has reduced the supply of irrigation water and farmers resort to more pumping to make up the difference. But that resource is not infinite, and more people are competing for the shrinking supply. My brother prays for rain, but he knows there won't be any for at least a couple of months. His livelihood depends on the wells, and more are likely to go dry. Depending on which ones start spewing dust, it will be either an inconvenience or a disaster.

No one can predict which it will be.

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