Yolo Land Trust Executive Director
Thank you Anne Ternus-Bellamy for coverage of the report by Yolo County Agricultural Commissioner John Young to the Yolo County Board of Supervisors on the 2018 Agricultural Crop Report. The story highlights the importance of agriculture in our county. As reported, the value of the county’s agricultural production increased in 2018 about 6.2 percent, to $676 million.
Yolo County has 250,695 acres of prime farmland, which is by far the most prime farmland of the counties in our region. For comparison, Sacramento County only has 93,918 acres of prime farmland. The City of Sacramento is known as the “Farm-to-Fork” capital, but Yolo County is the farming center of the capital region.
We cannot take farms or farmers for granted. Irrigated farmland in California decreased between 2010 and 2012 by more than 91 square miles (58,587 acres). Prime farmland comprised 81 percent of the loss. Yolo County experienced a 9.61 % growth in population between 2010 and 2019, making it one of the ten fastest-growing counties in California. Yolo County will lose productive acres if new housing and infrastructure to meet the next ten years of growth are built on farmland.
We are very fortunate that Yolo County has strong policies protecting our productive farmland from development. Each resident of Yolo County has the opportunity to support these policies so that agriculture remains here and continues to thrive. Besides the economic benefit, there are many intangible benefits from a strong agricultural sector in our midst, such as local food for our farmers markets and local grocery stores; amazing places to bike within a short distance from our cities; open space for species such as the threatened Swainson’s hawk; and magnificent vistas filled with almond blossoms, sunflowers, wheat, corn, rice and tomatoes.
The Yolo Land Trust is the only nonprofit organization whose sole mission is conserving productive farmland in Yolo County. We have been doing this for 30 years, and look forward to working with the Yolo community and its elected officials for another 30 years and beyond because these are our lands, our future.
