[Sabatier]

The big picture is that the US farms are hurting due to competition from the Chinese, who are taking over the export market in agriculture as well as everything else:

ttp://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/2001-08-08-chinese_fruits.asp


Markets Dry Up for California Grower

As the operator of California's second-largest farm and
processing operation, Tanimura & Antle must contend with land
prices as high as $35,000 an acre, skyrocketing energy,
fertilizer and water costs and a work force of 2,700 whose
lowest-paid harvesters average $12 an hour plus benefits.
Though much of China's tilling and harvesting are done by hand,
the average worker makes less than $2 a day, and energy and
water costs are a fraction of those in the U.S.

[hedgetrimmer]

land prices as high as $35,000 an acre,

Land prices are high because of the restrictive land use policies in place in Monterey and Santa Cruz county. The county and city governments are taking much land out of production, the latest and most famous, Coast dairies, and forcing sales to land trusts who let the land go to ruin ecologically. With less and less arable land available for leasing and owning, of course the cost goes up. Take a drive up to the Elkhorn slough native plant nursery in Monterey. Beautifully stewarded strawberry fields taken out of production by Julie Packard and Husband Mark Stephens and put into a "sanctuary" land trust. It is now a wasteland of weeds and erosion. They even planted an "organic" strawberry fields there. You cannot see the strawberry plants for all the weeds, and the only way you can tell where the field is, compared to the rest of the wasteland, is that it is a weedy field with a big deer fence around it. The rest of the place is just a bunch of noxious weeds.