California plan seeks to redistribute prime farmland in the name of "equity"

California Democrats have a plan to de facto nationalize farmland, redistributing it to "socially disadvantaged" farmers along largely racial lines.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s “agricultural equity” advisers have a plan that would appear 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, which authors blame on “inequities in resource distribution.” The draft plan lists reparation-style recommendations to address “inherited disparities” in land ownership and “help rebuild stolen wealth.”

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. The task force says this “crisis” should be addressed by removing prime farmland from the market.

“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 potentially 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.

The task force predicts much of the state’s farmland will be “fallowed or repurposed” to reduce water demand, as “required” by a 2014 California law that regulates water use. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) forces farmers to stop farming near “overdrafted basins,” in some cases calling for pumping reductions of 20-50% or more. 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.

“Estimates vary on how much land will need to be taken out of production; for example, in the San Joaquin Valley, recent estimates range from around 500,000 acres to 1 million acres,” the report states.

When examining what to do with all this future fallowed land, the task force suggests a state-funded entity could buy it up and redistribute it to “priority producers or land stewards”—defined as socially disadvantaged or historically excluded farmers.

Other recommendations in the report: California should gift large swathes of state-owned land to Native Americans “without restrictions or encumbrances,” give tribal nations “right of first refusal” when public agencies sell land, offer various forms of financial assistance exclusively to minority farmers, and establish a state monitoring system to track land ownership trends.

For the last two years, the task force has been working to develop this set of policy recommendations, reimagining agricultural land access along “equity” lines. By the end of this year, the group will bring their final recommendations to the governor and state legislature. This draft report gives voters a first taste of what is to come.

At the task force’s August 13 meeting, representatives from racial justice groups said the document didn’t go far enough. Several commenters complained there was “no explicit remedy” for Black Americans or descendants of enslaved Africans and wanted these groups named in final recommendations, with designated funds set aside for “land return,” among other remedies.