In the rugged, salt-sprayed hills of Malibu and the sun-drenched valleys of Moorpark, the Golden State loses its luster.
For nearly 80 years, Larry Thorne’s family has watched the Pacific Ocean fog roll over the fields that feed the community, but today the picture is clouded by a different kind of threat: a triple threat of $7-a-gallon diesel, rising electricity rates and a regulatory environment so stifling that local farmers are calling it a “master plan” to drive the working class out of the state.
As the last farm in a city of multimillion-dollar estates, Thorne faces a breaking point where the region’s Mediterranean climate can no longer compensate for the reality of climate change. Sacramento’s energy agenda.
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About a 40-minute drive north of Thorne’s farm is the 3,000-acre Underwood Family Farms, owned and operated by 83-year-old Navy veteran Craig Underwood. He’s coaxed the life out of Ventura County’s soil for more than half a century and lived through market crashes and droughts, but he’s never seen a $70 strawberry flat or the $1,600-per-acre regulatory costs associated with a head of lettuce.
The men represent a vanishing breed of California farmers. They are the calloused hands behind your grocery cart, now being forced to pay nearly $7 per gallon of diesel fuel and being told by a state government to trade in their tractors for an electric transition that the grid may not support.
“As a younger boy…diesel was five cents a gallon,” Thorne remembers. “In the span of three years, between [the] the cost of seed, fertilizer, fuel, labor, everything has increased by at least 25%… Just transporting vegetables to market used to cost me about $60 to fill my pickup. Now it costs almost $200 to fill my pickup trucks… What’s really killing the consumer is the cost of gas to deliver the food around town. It adds a huge amount.”
“California, without a doubt, is almost uncompetitive in how we have to comply with so many different regulations coming out of Sacramento. Our labor costs are high, our fuel costs are higher and there’s a lot of regulation,” Underwood said.
Although the two farms differ greatly in the scale of their operations, the labor of love that goes into the land is evident.. Thorne spent some time examining ripe, red strawberries, fresh from the morning dew, before picking some from the stems; the taste was an explosion of deep, jammy crimson that stained the tongue and filled the senses. Underwood went on a tractor tour and presented the spring festival events as a giant cornhole, followed by endless fields of pick-your-own produce such as cabbage, raspberries, turnips, assorted lettuce, beets, lemons, blackberries and even fresh flowers.
Their passion for their work is undeniable, but the people who feed America warn that the electric grid, costs and regulations are designed for “the very richest people,” leaving the average family and small business owners behind.
“We don’t have the electric grid, and we don’t have the energy sources to make this happen, and at the same time they’re running the oil refineries out of the state. So I mean, it sounds like a master plan to reduce the population in California. From 40 million to 20 million from just the very richest people who can afford the gas prices and the property taxes and everything else,” Thorne said. “It seems to me like a master plan to drive people out of the state.”
“Farmers in Ventura County, across California, are really suffering from low prices and low demand. Our entire export program has been paused,” Underwood noted. “There’s a lot of news about the high cost of food, but the majority of those costs are in transportation, because food moves all over the country. And that includes refrigeration, storage and transportation. For every head of lettuce you buy, it’s not just the cost of growing that head of lettuce, but also getting the head of lettuce from the field, harvesting it and putting it on the shelf.”
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California gas prices are among the highest in the country due to a combination of state and local taxes that add about $1 extra per gallon, a Low Carbon Fuel Standard that requires a “clean-burning” fuel blend, and limited refinery capacity in the state.
The Golden State also recently pushed legislation for a 100% electric future by 2035, but last year the U.S. Senate and President Donald Trump blocked the mandate in a historic vote.
Regulations in California add an estimated $1,600 per acre to the cost of growing lettuce, while margins for farmers are often between $100 and $200, Underwood said. The average age of the American farmer is now between 60 and 67; Costs for modern equipment range from $70,000 to $350,000 per tractor.
Both farmers said it would be more affordable to run their businesses out of state, but neither has considered leaving their generation’s history behind them.
“[It’s] probably 30% cheaper [to operate outside California]… [But] I couldn’t grow what I grew out of state. I can’t do this in Nevada. I can’t grow strawberries in Nevada, avocados, oranges… We have a climate here that almost no one else in the world has,” Thorne explains.
“Farming is one of those businesses. It’s a lifestyle as well as a business, and you have to live it and you better enjoy it because it’s tough,” Underwood agreed. “We’ve been through some really tough times before, so this isn’t something that’s brand new, and I suspect we’ll probably survive this one.”
Thorne and Underwood called for a return to what they described as common sense energy solutions such as refineries and nuclear power, rather than mandatory electrification.
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“We need oil refineries, and we need the state of California to pull out of the energy producers,” Thorne emphasized. “Build refineries and nuclear reactors, and [do] it as quickly as humanly possible.”
“There needs to be a change…I would like the state to represent us more than Edison and PG&E,” Underwood said, “and it seems like Edison and PG&E always have a seat at the table, and the average business or consumer doesn’t.”
