Ostensibly environmental regulations restricting water diversion and use have “killed” farming in California, historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, explained in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
Marlow asked about California’s stultified agricultural potential while speaking with Hanson at the latter’s almond farm in Selma, CA. The golden state was “the farming Mecca of the world,” he said. “Environmentalism regulation changed that.”
Hanson explained, “The big thing that killed us here is water. California used to have 20 million people, say, in 1978, and they had a beautiful system called the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project — which was federal — and they had all of these dams, and water, and aqueducts.”
The water table deepens about 40 feet per mile as one travels west from his farm, Hanson stated, driving up the costs of agricultural irrigation. Farming was only made financially viable with the California Water Project and Central Valley Project.
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