Victor Davis Hanson on How Environmental Regulations 'Killed' Farming in California

Ostensibly environmental regulations restricting water diversion and use have “killed” farming in California, historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, explained in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.

Marlow asked about California’s stultified agricultural potential while speaking with Hanson at the latter’s almond farm in Selma, CA. The golden state was “the farming Mecca of the world,” he said. “Environmentalism regulation changed that.”

Hanson explained, “The big thing that killed us here is water. California used to have 20 million people, say, in 1978, and they had a beautiful system called the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project — which was federal — and they had all of these dams,  and water, and aqueducts.”

The water table deepens about 40 feet per mile as one travels west from his farm, Hanson stated, driving up the costs of agricultural irrigation. Farming was only made financially viable with the California Water Project and Central Valley Project.

The dried and cracked soil in an irrigation ditch next to a corn field is seen on a farm in Fresno, California, July 24, 2021. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty)

“For the people west of where we are, the water table, every mile drops by about 40 feet from the Sierra [Nevada],” Hanson remarked, noting that wells around his farm are about 80 feet deep.

He added, “That water for agriculture was diverted, and then the environmentalists came and said, ‘Well, let’s not just divert the water to the municipals — San Jose, Santa Barbara, L.A. — we want 19th century aboriginal streams and rivers — the Sacramento [and] San Joaquin Rivers — so they started letting the water go out to the [Sacramento-San Joaquin River] Delta. So the biggest problem right now is this is not a sustainable area where we are.”

A sign promotes the building of more dams to help provide more irrigation water for the Central Valley’s drought-stricken farmers, near Corcoran, California, July 23, 2021. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

He warned, “In my life time, if they don’t change, you will not see farming five miles from here for the next 50 miles — about four million acres north and south —  it won’t exist. It will not exist because the amount of money to go down 1,500 feet [is] a million dollars a well, and the electric bill to pump it up, and the water is brackish, and there’s no surface water. They’re not building anymore reservoirs, no more aqueducts, the water they do have is designed for a state of 20 million people, and that water is going to municipal areas. Environmentalists are letting the snow melt [go] to the ocean.”

“That’s by design,” he concluded, “and this area where we are will last because of the water table for eons [coming] from the nearby Sierra [Nevada]. So the snow melted, and we’ve got a huge aquifer here.”

Watch Marlow’s entire interview with Hanson here.

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