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Why is agriculture vital to the Sacramento region?
To start, our region’s farms help feed the world. Roughly half of the nation’s specialty crops come from California, while more than 28 percent of the state’s production is shipped overseas. Agriculture also is one of the few regional bright spots in this recession, increasing about $300 million in value – a 22 percent jump since 2006.
The importance of agriculture is one of the reasons the Sacramento Area Council of Governments started a new project last year called the Rural-Urban Connections Strategy, which has been compiling data about our rural economy.
Our farmers currently produce $1.66 billion in food, supporting 28,000 jobs and $3.3 billion in economic activity. At the local level, the effects are even greater. In El Dorado County, every job in agriculture supports seven jobs in local processing, distribution and agritourism.
Before RUCS, our knowledge was limited to whether rural lands were agricultural or open space. Now we have maps that illustrate the incredible diversity of agricultural activity throughout our region, and we’re developing information on environmental uses such as habitat conservation, flood protection and carbon sequestration.
So where’s the “urban” in our rural-urban connection? Farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, restaurants, grocery stores, schools and hospitals are a huge potential market for local farmers. Yet less than 2 percent of the food we eat is supplied locally. Considering that our region consumes 2.2 million tons of food annually, you can imagine how much economic activity we could generate if more of what we eat were produced locally.
Yet the clock is ticking. Over the past 20 years, the region has lost more than 300,000 acres of farmland. Between 2000 and 2005, nearly 60 percent of that loss was for housing on lots between 1 and 10 acres.
As we emerge from the current economic downturn, we must not forget the importance of agriculture to our economy. The preservation of agricultural land and the ability to grow food in our region is vital to the sustainability of both rural and urban communities.