Campaign to Preserve Land Brings Out Many Enemies

MODESTO â€”  Larry Hooker’s van idles at a red light at the corner of Coffee Road and Briggsmore Avenue, a downtown intersection in this fast-growing city of 165,000.

On the northeast corner sprawls Memorial Medical Center; across the street, Calvary Temple Christian School. There are houses, a gas station--nothing out of the ordinary for a Central Valley county seat. Unless you’ve been farming here for 40 years.

“In my memory, this was all farmland,� Hooker says as he muses and cruises the city. “I planted almond trees down on Coffee Road when I was in high school that are houses now. . . . Modesto has been exploding from the inside out, has been expanding out and out and out.�

Hooker has spent the past 20 years trying to stem that tide, to bring some sense to urbanization in Stanislaus County. He has chaired land-use committees and attended hundreds of conferences, spearheaded zoning changes and fought to get his county into the Williamson Act, a state program that gives tax breaks to farmers if they continue to farm.

“What I’ve been trying to do all this time is protect farmers’ rights to continue farming if they so desire and get the best price they can if they decide to sell,� Hooker said. “But those are in conflict.�

The conflict has never been clearer than in the past two years, when Hooker has served as the local farm bureau’s representative on a committee that drew up a draft Agricultural Element to the Stanislaus County General Plan.

For his efforts--and they have been considerable--he has been smeared in letters to the editor and vilified by his fellow farmers, called a sellout and everything short of a traitor to the industry.

What the agricultural element would do is designate 285,000 acres of the county’s best farmland to be set aside in an agriculture-only zone and direct development to outlying areas where the soil is marginal and more difficult to farm.

Those who oppose it say it is an affront to a farmer’s property rights, stealing self-determination and a retirement nest egg out from under men and women whose only asset is the land that they cultivate.

But Hooker knows firsthand what it’s like to farm on marginal soil--difficult and expensive--and that has solidified his belief that the county’s best land should be preserved. Hooker and his son Loren farm 3,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills near a town called Hickman on the eastern edge of Stanislaus County.

Most of it is rangeland, where cattle graze and barley grows; only 260 acres is flat enough to irrigate. And even that land is so steep that it must be irrigated with a sophisticated and expensive sprinkler system--as opposed to the method of flooding the whole area every two to three weeks and letting the water soak in.

It costs $500 an acre to install sprinklers and $30 to $50 per acre per year to pump water to his land, Hooker says; these are costs that farmers of prime land do not incur.

Hooker’s almond trees are pushed to be more productive than those on prime land so he can recoup some of the extra farming costs. As a result, the trees have severely shortened life expectancies.

“We can raise grapes and almonds,� Hooker says. “Tomatoes, walnuts and sugar beets have been tried here and failed. We don’t have the versatility of the prime land.�

But the difficulties of farming on marginal land are not the only reason that Larry Hooker is pushing for agricultural preservation against the wishes of many of his fellow farmers.

“The rural lifestyle is important to all of us,� he says. “I have no desire at all to live in the Los Angeles Basin or Santa Clara Valley. I like to have some room. And it’s also important to the one-third of the people here whose jobs depend on agricultural production.�