California Governor Gavin Newsom’s “agricultural equity” advisers have a plan to de facto nationalize farmland and redistribute it along largely racial lines.
This is according to a draft document released this summer by the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force. According to the report, 82% of private farmland in California is owned by white producers; a fact authors blame on “inequities in resource distribution.” Their draft plan lists reparation-style recommendations to disrupt this status quo, restoring “stolen wealth” to the committee’s preferred groups.
California lost 1.6 million acres of farming and grazing land between 1984 and 2018—more than 47,000 acres per year or one square mile every five days. To address this crisis, the task force suggests removing prime farmland from the market altogether.
“In order to protect California’s Prime Farmland and Farmland of Statewide Importance, the Legislature should move to safeguard them in the public domain,” the report states.
By stripping owners of their right to freely sell or transfer farmland, the California government would be able to “halt the problem at the root,” the report claims. A state-funded entity could then buy up available farmland and redistribute it to “priority producers or land stewards”—defined as socially disadvantaged or historically excluded farmers.
The report predicts much of this available farmland will come courtesy of a 2014 California law that regulates water use. The controversial Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) shifted control from landowners to local agencies, giving government the power to dictate water use on private property and to impose fees for groundwater pumping. SGMA forces farmers to stop farming near “overdrafted basins,” in some cases calling for pumping reductions of 20-50% or more.
Hellbound and Down 