California agriculture during this period also became a more regulated industry, particularly in the use of pesticides and other chemicals and in its impacts on water quality, as a result of the expanded public interest in environmental and health protection. By now it is a truism in California that the agricultural-urban edge problem is a serious consequence of our continuing urbanization and land use patterns. Along with decrying the urban “paving over” of rich farmland, newspaper accounts frequently document specific examples of edge conflicts between farmers and residential neighbors. In some respects edge conflicts are a more serious California problem than the direct loss of farmland to urban uses. While the farmland conversion rate currently averages about 50,000 acres statewide annually, edge tensions continually affect many times as many agricultural acres. This discussion, however, is largely informed by anecdotes and impressions. It lacks a body of solid and research-derived evidence about problem causes, circumstances, and solutions. We recognize the widespread existence of the edge problem in California, but we don’t understand in a systematic way how it varies in intensity and impacts different communities, farm commodities, urban configurations, and other circumstances. Clearly conflicts and negative impacts are not found in all the places where farming and urban residences are in close proximity; some edges are characterized by a peaceful coexistence between farmers and urban neighbors. This paper is an exploratory examination of the edge problem in California agriculture that is drawn from a variety of sources. Considering the lack of systematic research in California,cultivo de la frambuesa some of these sources are studies carried out in other states.

We review here available information about the extent of urban-farm borders in the state, the nature of impacts on both sides of the edge, variations in the extent of the problem, farm operator adaptations in urban-influenced areas, and policy and private-sector mechanisms for dealing with the problem.Agricultural-urban edges are pervasive throughout California. By one linear measure, in 1998 urban areas throughout the state were bordered by 17,301 kilometers of all kinds of agricultural uses—or 10,726 miles. About two-thirds of this total represented cropland and one-third grazing land. The calculations are based on the digitized maps generated by the Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program of the California Department of Conservation. Combining soil survey information with the results of aerial photographs, the FMMP every two years maps the agricultural and urban land uses of most of the non public lands territory of the state with an emphasis on tracking farmland conversions to urban use. The estimate of 10,726 miles is probably an under count of true extent of the total edge distance, since the FMMP does not map a few agricultural areas of the state where modern soil information is lacking, and the mapping does not capture isolated urban pockets of less than 10 acres . This thin, linear measure does not give us a sense of how many farms or how much agricultural land is actually located adjacent to urban uses in California. It is difficult to translate kilometers and miles into a more meaningful area measure, such as acres, without knowing more about farm sizes in relation to linear borders. A conservative estimate is that about 2.2 million agricultural acres statewide are located adjacent to urban edges, based on the assumption that urbanization affects farm operations up to a third of a mile on the average from urban borders. This represents about 8 percent of California’s 28 million total agricultural acres.The same assumption produces an estimate of 1.5 million cropland acres in edge areas, about 13 percent of all cropland in the state.Cropland edges in California are concentrated in the leading agricultural counties—the counties with the highest farm market values and most of the best cropland defined as prime farmland. Table 1 makes this point in examining the edge circumstances of cropland in the 12 top counties in farm market value, including seven Central Valley and three coastal counties.

All but the bottom two on the list had market values in 2000 of at least $1 billion each. Most of the state’s urban-cropland borders are found in these high value counties—6,465 kilometers in 1998, or about 90 percent of the state’s total. Moreover, they are among the leading counties in prime farmland, 2.6 million acres in 1998, most of the state’s total of about 4.3 million prime acres. Table 1 also notes the large increase in cropland-urban edge borders in the ten years between 1988 and 1998—an average of a 22.9 percent increase in edge kilometers for the 12 counties. This reflects of course the comparable increases in population and urban areas during the approximate or same ten-year periods. However, for several counties—Fresno, Tulare, Monterey, Kern, and San Diego—percentage increases in cropland edge kilometers vastly exceeded the increases in population and acres devoted to urban use.Identifying the extent and location of geographical edges tells us little about the incidence and intensity of the conflicts and the specific issues that arise from the close proximity of farms and urban neighbors. We can speculate that such conflicts are concentrated in a relatively few places throughout the state, while farm-urban relations are generally peaceful in most edge areas. The reasons are that urbanization proceeds at varying rates in different communities, farmers generally adjust their operations to edge realities, and most residential neighbors learn to tolerate some discomfort from nearby agricultural operations as the price to pay for living in the countryside. Still there is substantial anecdotal information about the types of impacts that qualify as edge problems. The common understanding in California’s agricultural areas is that farm operators and residential neighbors are affected in particular ways by their respective behaviors. As duplicated in Table 2, a short list of such issues was included in the summary report of the 1996 conference, California’s Future: Maintaining Viable Agriculture at the Urban Edge, organized by the UC Agricultural Issues Center. Longer lists of edge issues are found in other reports, including those issued in other states.

A New York State guidebook on reducing edge conflicts, for example, identifies 26 different kinds of rural residents’ complaints against farmers, including unsightly farmsteads, trash, inconsiderate behavior by farmers, and wandering livestock . What is clear from Table 2 is that farmers and residents at the edge differ in their interests and views of how they are negatively affected by their interactions. For farmers, the issues largely concern the costs and efficiencies of producing their commodities—largely economic considerations. For residential neighbors, the impacts deal with questions of health and quality of life. This difference in how edge issues are defined bythe respective parties suggests how difficult it may be to resolve such issues when conflicting positions are strongly held.Obviously edge issues are not equal in their distribution and how they are perceived by the parties to these conflicts. We expect the extent and intensity of edge problems to vary from location to location, depending on the characteristics of both the agricultural and urban sides of the boundary. Critical agricultural variables are the types of commodities grown and the farm practices used to produce them. In California,macetas de 10 litros conflicts over the agricultural use of pesticides and herbicides seem to be more visible and widespread than in most other farm states. Our state specializes in tree, vine, and vegetable crops that require extensive cultivation and protection from pests. Much of the production of such crops occurs in edge areas, where high costs for purchasing or renting agricultural land impels operators to grow high value and high yield commodities. What may limit in many localities the extent of neighborhood opposition to farm use of pesticides and other chemicals is the tight regulation of such applications by state and local governments in California. Human health risks and potential water contamination are controversial issues. Regulation takes place primarily through the permitting actions of county agricultural commissioners, the licensing of applicators, and the work of county health departments. Despite these controls, excessive drift from aerial and ground spraying is an ever-present concern. Residents in some agricultural communities, either attributing specific health problems to spray drift or fearing the risk, have organized to protest chemical use and to question the adequacy of the regulatory system . In many other states the most conflictual farm-urban issues increasingly revolve around the location and effects of concentrated animal feeding operations, a type of agricultural activity that now has its own acronym—CAFOs. Reflected here is the growing industrialization of animal agriculture in the nation, marked especially by the trend in southern, eastern, and mid-western states to larger and more specialized hog and poultry raising operations . Local operators typically are integrated via contractual arrangements into the feed, processing, and marketing processes of national firms. From a community and environmental perspective, the most critical feature of these factory farms is the concentration of so much animal waste in such small areas—the “piling up of too much stuff in one place” according to one observer . The threat to surface waters and aquifers is the central issue.

Public agencies are not always aggressive in controlling the citing of such farms and in overseeing their waste disposal processes. CAFOs also generate other negative impacts in their neighborhoods, primarily odor and air pollution.As noted above, this is a major public policy issue in the southern San Joaquin Valley, now the most productive milk shed in the nation. County governments through their planning and land use powers are largely responsible for controlling the location of new or enlarged dairies, while the water quality aspects of dairy operations are in the hands of environmental regulators in state and federal governments.The key variables on the urban side of edge areas are the characteristics of residents and the configurations of their urban neighborhoods. Certainly the negative impacts of living next to certain kinds of intensive farming operations have a clear and objective reality. Nobody likes dust on their backyard laundry, to be awakened at 5 a.m. by the sound of heavy machinery, or to be subject to possible exposure to the drift from chemical applications. Yet, perceptions also determine how people personally regard and react—or don’t—to such conditions. Levels of tolerance to farm operations vary quite a bit, with some urban neighbors more disposed than others to identify specific incidents as more than minor annoyances and more inclined to complain to farmers and government offices. What seem to generate such perceptual differences, according to anecdotal information, are lifestyle backgrounds. The generalization is that newcomers who move to agricultural locations directly from urban areas are less tolerant of the discomforts of living close to farms than longtime residents who have farm or other rural backgrounds . Particularly contributing to the unhappiness of urban newcomers with their new neighborhoods is how the realities of intensive agricultural practices clash with their expectations of pleasant living in the country. Notes the major of Patterson, an expanding small city in western Stanislaus County: “Most of us have grown up with crop-dusters at dawn, but not the new constituents” . Lacking so far systematic research on the topic, this generalization about levels of tolerance is merely a reasonable hypothesis. The configuration of residential neighborhoods in edge areas also likely affects the extent of conflict. The larger the exposure or interface between farm activities and non-farm residences, the more opportunity for problems. By implication, this is an argument for planning and residential design that confines urban development in relatively small blocks, as compared to a pattern of scattered home sites throughout an agricultural area. The difference is between sharp, solid edges separating farms and residences and ill-defined and fragmented edges that blur the distinction. A separate kind of problem is posed by the location in the middle of agricultural areas of schools, churches, and other facilities that concentrate large numbers of people at certain times.As well as immediate impacts, there are also long-term consequences for agricultural operations located in areas of ongoing urbanization. Some writers refer to the “impermanence syndrome,” a term which takes in a variety of meanings, but generally suggests a high degree of uncertainty among farmers about their ability to continue productive operations in areas beset by rapid population increase and land use change.