But this is Chico, too

Santa Rosa was supposed to become the next San Jose. “Just wait. In another 20 years, it will be just as big,” my parents told us the summer we moved from the San Jose suburb of Campbell to Santa Rosa.

But this was 1964 and for now Santa Rosa, with barely 40,000 people, was the largest city in Sonoma County, which had less than 200,000 people at a time when the San Jose area already had a million people. To us, Santa Rosa seemed like a small town.

A job transfer for my dad enabled us to move, but the underlying motivation was to escape the sprawl of the future Silicon Valley, which had reached our backyard fence. A couple of years before we moved, the orchard behind our house had been torn up and replaced with a ticky-tacky housing development called Crestfield.

Another family prophecy from those years was that someday all the land along Highway 101 between Salinas and Cloverdale would be entirely built up.

Forty-three years later, the Sonoma County part of the prediction is close to coming true. Today there is so little farmland — pastures in the south and vineyards in the north — separating Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Windsor and Healdsbrug that these cities will coalesce in less than 10 years. For now, Cloverdale, which is several miles up the road from Healdsburg, remains out of reach of the sprawl.

What’s happening is a shame. This is incredibly beautiful country. Rugged mountains, redwood forests, chaparral woodland, rocky and sandy ocean beaches, the Russian River resort area and the fabled Wine Country all lie within a half-hour drive of Santa Rosa.

But unlike Napa and Marin counties, Sonoma County got a late start in taking steps to protect its farmland. Today, the county has almost 460,000 people. Santa Rosa’s share of that is 156,000. Just about everyone lives within a few miles of Highway 101. The county has allowed a sprawling suburban strip to cut through its heart.

This is what will happen in Butte County if strict farmland protections aren’t put in place. We will see a city snaking its way along Highway 99 from the county’s north to south borders. And, of course, such growth won’t respect county boundaries. It’s not hard to imagine a continuously built up landscape extending from Los Molinos in Tehama County to Yuba City in Sutter County.

Posted by Steve Brown at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A guiding principle of the Butte County General Plan 2030, which is now being put together, is that agriculture will be “protected, maintained, promoted and enhanced.”

Notice that it doesn’t say “destroyed.”

In a state that paves over farmland with reckless abandon that’s a step in the right direction.

Butte County sits on what must be one of the largest remaining tracts of contiguous farmland in California. According to one of the documents planners have prepared as part of the general plan revision process, the county has 440,000 acres of farmland.

That’s a lot of real estate. I presume there will still be a lot left over after the planners, public and elected officials have determined where the additional 100,000 residents expected by 2030 will settle.

Still, I wonder how it will all end.

The population of the world is expected to level off at about 9 billion by 2050 and then start dropping. But nobody is making those kinds of predictions for California, which has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since the Gold Rush started. It seems destined to keep growing until half of the world lives here.

How do you preserve agriculture in a place like this? In California, if the land isn’t too hilly and has access to water, it’s considered fair game for development.

Butte County residents would do well to keep an eye on how Ventura County in Southern California is doing in its efforts to preserve its farmland. About 10 years ago, as the county’s citrus and avocado groves were about to be swallowed up by Greater Los Angeles, voters approved a series of measures that placed urban boundaries around its cities.

One of the areas residents are trying to protect from the bulldozer is the Santa Clara River Valley, which stretches from Santa Paula to Newhall. In his book “Ecology of Fear,” social commentator and urban theorist Mike Davis describes the idyllic qualities of this area: “More than a generation after the last fruit trees were bulldozed to make way for tract houses in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, the Santa Clara River Valley still looks much as it did before 1940. Here, the formal order of the orchards offsets the wild angularity of the sedimentary hlls. The citrus towns of Piru, Fillmore and Santa Pual initially strike the hyperreality-hardened visitor as movie sets or nostalgic theme parks with all the hackneyed charm of Norman Rockwell painintgs. There are no minimalls or fast-food strips, just quiet main streets with old-fashioned stores ... It’s shocking to realize that these are, in fact, real towns.”

The valley is as much a cultural as an agricultural resource because it’s one of the last remnants of a way of life that has disappeared everywhere else in Southern California. But its preservation is far from assured. Just because you pass ballot measures and create zoning to protect farmland doesn’t guarantee that farming will remain viable.

A recent story in the Los Angeles Times notes that Ventura County has defied predictions of a “death knell” to its farm industry by replacing some of the citrus groves with more lucrative crops, such as strawberries, pomelos, jujubes and other fruits and vegetables LA foodies have embraced.

Ventura County has, in fact, jumped to number 8 in county rankings in the value of its agricultural crops. Its farmers took in $1.5 billion last year. That’s quite a trick for a county that has more than 800,000 people. Butte County’s ranking is about 20.

If farming can remain alive and well in Ventura County, the same thing can easily happen in Butte County, which as far fewer people and is growing much more slowly.

Posted by Steve Brown at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)