Land conservation, agricultural community, and food quality intersect in this article. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) is a leader in the effort to preserve open agricultural space through the purchase of development rights. Link to MALT's website here.
--Brent W.
“ The “happy cow” advertisements could easily imply that Marin and Sonoma diaries are perhaps more “natural” because cows spend time in the fields and eat grass. “
ReplyDeleteYou cannot watch TV for more than an hour without seeing the happy cow commercials. These commercials seem to be eluding that California dairy is superior then all the other dairy producers in the United States. These commercials try to convince us to buy the milk from there instead of from local dairies here in NY. People however do not know where their milk comes from across the United States. Local dairies have been dying off and are being taken over by large commercials dairies
In California the smaller more locals dairies such as Straus Dairy. They have tried to preserve their way of life and keep your sustainable dairy growing though the ages. Straus Dairy is a key part of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust or MALT. MALT gives farmers the option of giving them their land so that they are able to protect it indefinitely from commercial reality. This allows farmers to make sure that their land is preserved and will continued to be used for the greater good of the world as well as our food system as we know it.
-Catherine s
4) Guthey, Gwin, and Fairfax, “Creative Preservation in California’s Dairy Industry”: “Chino valley dairies are rapidly being converted to suburban housing.” “Although these farms remain profitable, the vast majority of Chino valley operators are confronting increasing environmental and development pressures, as they did fifty years ago, to develop even more efficient, updated dairies on larger parcels of land.”
ReplyDeleteOne of the greatest challenges for writing scholarly articles is the ability to avoid contradictory statements, if there is no third statement that rectifies the contradiction. Guthey, Gwin, and Fairfax fall prey to this mistake with their caption to Figure 3 and their sentence in the preceding paragraph. If Chino Valley dairies are being rapidly converted to suburban housing, which is quite believable, given the tendencies of urban and suburban sprawl in contemporary America, then it is hard to imagine how farmers can be expected to develop more efficient dairies on larger parcels of land. Perhaps the authors intentionally presented the reader with this predicament to make a point, however they do not flesh out this point in the article. Oxymoronic legislation could certainly be problematic to farming development. If in fact the reality of suburban and urban sprawl is conflicting with agricultural expectations, that situation should be addressed in an article praising California’s farmers’ creativity with regard to preserving their land.
בס״ד
Avrohom S.