The Los Angeles Times has reported on a shift seen in the Inland Empire surrounding the town of Ontario. Once a powerhouse in the south state’s dairy industry, the Inland Empire is quickly losing its industry and its farmlands to development.

Here’s a familiar story. Around fifty years ago, the dairies that were located in the Los Angeles basin began to relocate to the nearby Inland Empire due to low acreage prices and few complaining neighbors. Farmers at the time were able to sell their L.A. land to developers looking to build suburbs for a fast growing megalopolis. Now the process goes full circle, as developers deluge dairy farmers with offers for their land in order to allow developments for the growing cities of Ontario and Riverside.

It is not as if the new neighbors in the encroaching developments are demanding that the cows move. It is more the case of dairy farmers cashing in on their most valuable asset—the land. It makes business sense for a farmer who can only make so much from the herd’s milk to see the increasing offers on their land by developers and be tempted to throw in the towel. Besides, cattle are odorous, an unpleasant characteristic for an urbanizing area. Also, other forms of agriculture are also leaving the vicinity of dairy farmers, leaving them fewer options in disposing of manure formerly sold as fertilizer.

So, the farmers are leaving. Some are simply retiring, walking away from their family’s agricultural heritage. Others are taking their money and moving somewhere else. Dairy is still a necessary commodity, so there is some money to be made from it. While some of the industry is growing in such far-flung places as New Mexico, a lot of the industry is moving to the San Joaquin Valley. The Dairy industry, as well as agriculture, still has a foothold in the economically stressed (and therefore less developed) Valley.

How long the dairies will remain in the Valley is unforeseeable. However, the Valley is also growing. Dairies will be increasingly squeezed here too, if the Valley isn’t able to get a handle on urban sprawl to prevent what has happened in the Los Angeles area.

Some day, developers from Fresno and Merced may indeed be looking to supplant the dairies in a need for more housing. It has already been seen throughout the Valley, as mostly small family owned dairies have left what are now fully urbanized neighborhoods. Population projections for the Valley forecast millions of new residents to move in over the next 25 years. Looking at how development has occurred over the last 25 years, it could be very possible that much of the dairy business now growing in the San Joaquin Valley will one day be looking for cheaper and less crowded pastures.

________________________________________________
Update: Stockton City Manager Fired

As reported in an earlier ValleyVue article, Stockton’s city officials were under fire after a disastrous concert for the brand-new Stockton Arena. The Neil Diamond concert lost $400,000 for the city. Consequently (or as city council members would claim, in an unrelated move), the council fired City Manager Mark Lewis by on a vote of 6-1. Wile publicly the council expressed problems with a number of incidents involving Lewis during his his tenure in Stockton, it is fairly obvious due to the timing that Lewis’ goose was cooked following the money-losing concert.