Ag Futures Alliance

5 Reasons why Ag Matters in Santa Barbara County

As part of the formation process for the Santa Barbara County Ag Futures Alliance, members were asked to list five reasons why agriculture matters in Santa Barbara County. Jim Poett, 5th-generation Santa Barbara cattle rancher wrote this eloquent appeal for the long-term value of ag to the County

Why Ag Matters, Jim Poett, Santa Barbara County AFA

1. NO DEAD END JOBS: I would prefer that my kids do not end up in dead end jobs. I did not encourage them to go into ag but I did not discourage them. Both of them in different ways, however, are making life decisions that are moving them in that direction. And both of them are more interested in ranching then sod busting. Ag matters because there are people who want to do it.
Santa Barbara County's famous vineyards
2. MATRIX B: I participated for almost three years in the Gaviota Study Group. The idea was to find common ground on the future of the Gaviota Coast between environmentalists and landowners. For me, one of the more enlightening moments grew out of a diagram Mike McGinnis (Bren School) brought to a meeting. The diagram was labeled “Matrix A”. It showed a “core reserve” drawn as a circle connected to another core reserve by a corridor so that at its heart the diagram, looked like a dumbbell. This “Core Reserve” and “Corridor” was surrounded by two buffer zones called inner and outer. The whole diagram looked like three concentric dog bones. This was an environmental paradigm and a strategy for looking at environmental conservation. I drew what I labeled “Matrix B” as an alternative. I erased “Core Reserve” at the center of the dumbbells and replaced it with “Urban Areas. Ag matters in SB because it is a more holistic way of environmental conservation.
3. SELF CONTROL: Nature will be not relegated to a “Core Reserves.” This question of whether we try to control growth or control nature seemed central to miscommunication between differing viewpoints. Last November I was asked to talk to a class a UCSB about Naples (probably because I had been on the Gaviota Study Group and was a landowner) along with two “environmentalists” and another landowner. I decided to discuss this idea of the bounded cities: “Matrix B;” or bounded environment: “Matrix A.” This relates neatly to Naples. So after warming up the class up with an 1887 map of the county, I shared my difficulties with Matrix A. I drew the three concentric dumbbells on the black board and suggested that trying to encapsulate the wild was tantamount to trying to kill it. I then drew matrix B that is the same diagram at Matrix A, but substituting “Urban Areas” for “Core Reserve.” Drawing, however, on the black board is more difficult then I remembered from grammar school. Stepping back and looking at the scratchy drawing and my almost legible handwriting, I began to have doubts about the effectiveness of my teaching abilities. So I asked some kid at the back of the classroom if I was making any sense. He shook his head and said no. So I stood there for a moment and and tried to consider what I was trying to say. California tiger salamander Look, I said to this kid, the point I am trying to make is that if we try to dominate and control nature we can only end up destroying ourselves. What we have to do is to try to control ourselves. The reason that ag matters in Santa Barbara is that we have to deal with this issue. We can “save” the tiger salamander by creating core reserves and surrounding them with buffers. We can “save” Naples by creating fifty mega mansions instead of 150. But it would be far less destructive if we were to discover the social will of self-control.
4. THE RED CORRAL: There is a red corral on the San Julian. A great uncle built it for shipping when Highway 1 came in the 30’s. At some point, it got painted red. In 1999 I took over the lease on south side of the road. And thus became the leasor of the Red Corral. It had been held up by panels and when they went, the corral fell apart. I rebuilt some of it with wood, which I panted red. But I also had a lot of 8 inch steel pipe, which had been taken out of the ground when they rebuilt the gas line 40 years ago. I needed to put in a new alley up to the new cattle chute, and since that side of the road ran about 350 cows, I needed a strong working alley. For years I had been looking at Temple Grandlin’s corral diagrams and so I designed the curve of it to her specs. I did all the work of planting the steel and laying it out, and the welding using in the first part of the alley the 8” steel gas pipe as both the uprights set in concrete and the top rail. I consider it a thing of beauty and it works really well. I use a close up of a weld on a handmade hinge of a gate as a screen saver on my computer. It was built to last. I would not like it if in my life time or my kid’s lifetime that weld got ripped apart. But a few guys in Ag cannot exist in a vacuum. Ag is ecology unto itself. Ag matters in this county because without it, my weld is useless. There would be much in this county that would become useless.
Photo courtesy of Andy Shaffer.
5. THE PUMPKIN: I probably should stop at reason 4 but I’m sick and have to sit in front of this computer, so if we have to put up cash to attend these meetings I might a well get my moneys worth. I realize these reasons are subjective. I have read most of the reasons that you have all given and I agree with all of them and I apologize for dragging mine out to this length, but I want to make the point that for me, and I think most people who do ag, the reasons that it matters are complex, because they have to do with the reason people make life decisions. These should not be completely overlooked. I spent most of my 20’s living in Manhattan. And after five or six months of never getting off the island. I spent a fall weekend driving through the countryside of New Jersey (and there is a very real reason it calls itself the Garden State). I stopped at a pumpkin patch to get a jack-o-lantern for Halloween. It was a you-pick place so I went out into the field to pick the right pumpkin that I could carve up into something horrifying and in my search of the truly deformed, I suddenly had this sense of the—I don’t know the word—the “extravagance” of agriculture—living in nature, growing things, life coming out of the ground. Jefferson’s agrarian ideal. The beauty of this country. All that stuff. The side of agriculture that those of us in it almost completely forget or we joke about. Agriculture as a business is like any other business—a never-ending series of problems to be solved. I think ag matters because in some of ways it is more important to the people who don’t even do it….like national security is important or religion because it is so much part of who we are and where we came from.