AUDIO: California’s Kawamura says ag needs to speak up

SACRAMENTO
May 7, 2009 12:04am

California Secretary of Agriculture A.G. Kawamura says the state’s farmers and ranchers are losing the battle for their image in the eyes of the public.

Speaking at the annual Great Valley Center conference in Sacramento on Wednesday, Mr. Kawamura says with so few people engaged in farming and ranching, the true picture of the industry is clouded.

Mr. Kawamura says just 2 percent of the American public is engaged directly in agriculture, and that is causing an image problem for the industry.

“When [the other] 98 percent of the people are eating and chewing, the noise sometimes drowns out the voice of agriculture,” he says.

He says the public chooses to “remember the myths of agriculture” and not see it for what it has become.

One myth, says the ag secretary, is how much water California farmers and ranchers are using.

He says water use has dropped to 41 percent for agricultural use. Protecting the environment takes 48 percent, he says, while 11 percent goes to the urban centers.

In the last 40 years, California has had an increase in actual irrigated acreage, he says, but agriculture’s use of irrigation water has declined by 14 percent, he says.

(Listen to Mr. Kawamura’s remarks by clicking on the link below. Left-click to listen now or right-click to download the MP3 audio file to your computer or media device.)

“We’re not the Midwest. We are California. We have to either define ourselves in agriculture with the help of many, or we’ll be defined into the future,” Mr. Kawamura says.

“This ‘muted voice’ of agriculture, this inability for agriculture to really describe itself in 21st Century terms has a lot of problems,” Mr. Kawamura says.