For a more expansive posting of businesses leaving California, check out Joseph Vranich’s The Business Relocation Coach blog. It reads like a Forbes list and ought to serve as a criminal indictment of California’s inept Legislature.
So why do farmers continue to support politicians who regularly vote to cut their water supplies, take their land, and regulate their ability to do business because some well-paid whiner claims that growing the food that feeds the nation isn’t as important as some bug, fish, mammal or reptile?
Today the California Farm Bureau Federation announced its support for Carly Fiorina for US Senate to replace Barbara Boxer.
Why isn’t downtown Tulare a center for commerce and social activities the other 364 days a year? Instead, it’s a veritable ghost town for well over 300 days of the year. If it weren’t for the banks and the mortgage companies there’d almost be no reason for anyone to venture downtown at all. Certainly nothing continues to be done with the old Linder building, despite reported inquiries.
In the grand scheme of things, the Central Valley of California has benefitted over the past year or so in an ironic sort of way with respect to water and politics. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have highlighted the water issues impacting California’s Central Valley, and our own Congressman here in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has been eager to give voice to a region of the United States that is disappointingly ignored in both the state and US capitol buildings.
Discussions are under way in Tulare County, California to force farmers between the cities of Tulare and Visalia to sell prime agricultural land for a $3 million fiasco that will further erode our ability to be agriculturally self-sustaining in America. Worse yet for local officials, taking this land for public use forever removes the property tax income collected from that private property and forces county supervisors into further budget cuts on necessary public safety needs such as fire and law enforcement.
Take for example the farm groups that consistently gives money to Democrats thinking that maybe someday these Democratic lawmakers might, kind of, maybe see things their way and stop writing laws that take their water, land and livelihoods.
Farmers have long been innovators in many ways. In fact farmers from around the world will gather next week at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA to consider the purchase of new technologies that will further make them more efficient. They’ve had to be more efficient.
While farmers have worked to educate themselves, have made strides in becoming more efficient in their practices, and have even joined forces to lobby their elected representatives, they’ve done little at best to educate their customers — the American public — about just what it is they do, how they do it, and why what they do is so important.
So to put it bluntly, Rep. George Miller, D-CA, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and others including Rep. Jim Costa, D-CA, are directly to blame for millions of tons of top soil that became airborne in places like Mendota and Firebaugh and brought traffic to a stand-still on a major interstate.
