Outlook Casts Big Shadow Over Farmers

Your recent piece on the apparent prosperity in the Tulare Lake Basin brought on by improved conditions for (some) farmers (“A Golden Harvest for State’s Farmers,” Nov. 7) was a pretty piece of fiction -- unfortunately, the same kind of story we like to tell about ourselves here.

Whether farmer prosperity contributes to real community development and well-being depends on the size and tenure of farms. Those growers benefiting from the “improved” markets are the larger growers who survived the recent shakedown in almost every commodity grown in the valley; these better prices came at great expense to smaller growers, whose losses are still being felt in our towns.

Unfortunately, the truth is that the future for growers even the size of Fred Lagomarsino’s farm is not bright unless we reverse current trends of concentration of the food supply in hands the size of Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Philip Morris.

But to call the land development schemes like Plaza Del Lago “progress” -- paving over land that can grow anything, rapid urbanization on the best land in this modern Tigris-Euphrates valley -- without telling the stories of those who have been hung on the cross in the process is not journalism but propaganda.

And the prospect that our basin will someday look just like your basin, probably within my lifetime, is not progress; it’s a travesty.

Trudy Wischemann

Lindsay, Calif.