Sadly, we're losing small farms at an alarming rate, and that's been going on for a long, long time. There are no subsidies or price supports for citrus or avocados. There is a crop insurance program, but the costs for that are going up. Water for irrigation is going up, and citrus and avocados absolutely require irrigation most of the year there. The price my parents are paid for oranges has gone down steadily from what it was in the 1960s. And that's in actual dollars, not dollars adjusted for inflation. That's due to cheap imports of fruit from Mexico, Argentina and other countries, where costs are lower to grow the stuff.
Sadly, a number of crop diseases have been imported along with the fruit, and now there are new exotic diseases attacking citrus in particular. One of them has the potential to completely destroy all citrus growing in the United States within the next 20 years. It has already been found in the area where my parent's far is located, and the cost of unproven preventive measures against it is horrendous, too.
I'm not sure there is a solution to all of this. It's just one more thing that is damaging the US economy at its most basic level - food production. Add climate change to the equation and profitable farming may become impossible in much of this country at some point. What happens after that is sort of frightening to consider.
One of the problems Democrats face is that we recognize the problems, but don't really have a way to ameliorate them. That feces inspection I mentioned was instituted after a couple of outbreaks of E. coli from ground crops that are nothing like citrus, and from some imported crops. The response was to require all agricultural operations to inspect their properties for feces, regardless of whether contamination was even possible. The farmers understand how stupid it is. That affects them in their political decisions, for sure.
Things are a mess in all sectors of society, I'm afraid. Sadly, the wrong people get blamed all too often, and common sense is not common at all in government. Uff da!
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