Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [242]
In August of 1981, the California Institute for Rural Studies released a report on property ownership in five water districts within the service area of the State Project. Most of the districts are in Kern County; most of the farms are neighbors of the McCarthy Ranch. Together they accounted for two-thirds of all the entitlement water delivered to the San Joaquin Valley by the project. However, because the Kern County Water Agency, the region’s main water broker, had been receiving a flood of surplus water (1.8 million acre-feet) as well, the five districts had actually received about half of all the water the State Project had delivered throughout the state.
The CIRS report corroborated what the Department of Water Resources had taken unusual pains to point out: that the majority of farmers receiving project water were small farmers. Of 479 identifiable owners in the five water districts, 291, more than half, had farm holdings of 160 acres or less. Nine out of ten worked farms smaller than 1,281 acres. But those farmers owned less than a third of the total acreage; the other two-thirds, which amounted to 227,545 acres, was owned by eight companies.
The largest of the farmers was Chevron USA, the main subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of California. Chevron owned 37,793 acres in the immediate vicinity, in addition to 42,000 acres scattered elsewhere in the valley. In second place, with 35,897 acres, was the Tejon Ranch, one of the great land empires of California—272,516 acres all told. The principal stockholders of the Tejon Ranch are members of the Chandler family, which owns the Los Angeles Times—the strongest voice for water development in California for the past eighty years.
In third and fourth place were two more oil companies, Getty and Shell, which owned 35,384 and 31,995 acres, respectively. The presence of Getty (and Chevron USA) in the service area of the California Water Project again pointed up the architectural brilliance with which the project was conceived. They pay a severance tax to California on oil they pump off Long Beach, which is immediately put into a fund that makes annual interest-free “loans” of $25 million a year to the State Water Project, which delivers doubly subsidized irrigation water to their formerly worthless land.
Fifth place belonged to Prudential’s McCarthy Ranch, whose total acreage was 25,105. (If these numbers are bewildering, it helps to know that a good-size Illinois farm consists of six hundred to a thousand acres.) In sixth place was the Blackwell Land Company, whose 24,663 acres are part of a burgeoning U.S. land empire being assembled by a company of foreign investors, among them S. Pearson and Sons of England, Mitsubishi of Japan, and Les Fils Dreyfus of Switzerland, an offshoot of Lazard Frères.
Tenneco, the huge chemicals and food conglomerate, was seventh among the eight largest owners, with 20,180 acres. A few years before, Tenneco executives had been making some unusually candid statements to the effect that small family farms are the most efficient food-producing units human beings could ever create, and said it might give up farming altogether. When the State Water Project became operational, the company began singing a different tune. In the early 1970s, it bought the old James Ben Ali Haggin-Lloyd Tevis estate, the Kern County Land Company—300,000 acres of prime valley land—and metamorphosed into one of the most ardently competitive agribusiness growers in the world.
In last place, with 16,528 acres—a plot of land that is still considerably larger than Manhattan Island—was the Southern Pacific Railroad, the largest private landowner in California. In 1981, besides owning 700,000 acres of California forest and range land, Southern Pacific