by Susan Stewart

Every minute of every day, America loses two acres of agricultural land to urban, commercial or residential development.1 In California, roughly 50,000 acres of farmland is developed every year.2 If patterns continue, another 2 million acres of California land will be paved over by 2050.3 As farmers are increasingly pressured to convert fertile land into non-farm developments, the lyrical warning from 1970 – that we will “pave paradise to put up a parking lot” – is now an all too imminent threat. Will our desire to raise our children in a pristine rural setting, be suddenly unattainable? Will we one day wake up to find that our dreams of peaceful country living have just slipped out of reach?

I saw the well-illustrated article on the Annual Crop Report, and was shocked - shocked to see all the words about Strawberries and Carrots, but not a word in the main article about Broccoli! Why not? It's the number 2 crop - $78 million - that's more than all the Lettuce, Carrots and Cabbage combined! (Your chart showed it up $14 million from 2006, although when I checked the crop report's 'raw numbers' they showed a revised number for last year, so the increase was only $5 million - yes, I checked the 'raw numbers'.)

Nevertheless, I suspect there has been a media bias against broccoli ever since George H.W. Bush came out against it, and it's not fair! In fact, when I googled this site for 'broccoli' (http://www.google.com/search?q=broccoli+site%3Asanluisobispo.com), the first result was a restaurant reviewer saying "I would have preferred a bit less broccoli -- I have a love-hate relationship with the vegetable -- but the cheese blend was yummy enough". I rest my case.