Between 1995 and 2012, Coburn Ranch of Dos Palos, California, raked in $5,558,358.28 in federal farm subsidies, mostly commodity price support payments. BTW, that placed this poor struggling family agribusiness in the No. 2 slot of the 642 recipients of such government payments (dare I say, entitlements) in Coburn Ranch's zip code in the California Central Valley. Coburn Ranch knows how to use a little extra spending money when they get their hands on it: Pick a fight with a fish, and lose.
That sounds like an excellent use of federal funds. /snark. If you want to know more about this story, follow me out into the tall grass.
The fish in question are Chinook Salmon dependent for survival upon a certain minimum flow and preservation of enough upstream access on the region's rivers. Of course, these Chinook Salmon are not a protected species and do not by themselves figure so much in federal environmental calculations. It happens, however, that a small tribe of orcas, which inhabit territory off the Northwest U.S. Coastline, depend upon these particular Chinook Salmon for survival.
Can you imagine how annoying it must be? You're a giant in your local agribusiness community. You demand the respect of thousands, control dominions measured in square miles and command fortunes in the millions. But the government makes you share water with a fish for the sake of a whale.
What is an agribusiness to do in a situation like this, but sue the government to get more water? Fish and whales be damned! So that is what Coburn Ranch did with some of its extra money (thank goodness for that $5+ million extra from Uncle Sam) pooling in with another big local grower, Empresas del Bosque and some right wing anti-environmental loonies.
And they lost.
Federal officials have denied a petition by San Joaquin Valley farmers to drop a small West Coast group of killer whales from the endangered species list.
The refusal represents the latest development in a decade-long legal battle over protections for three pods of orca whales that swim off the Pacific Northwest coast, ranging as far south as Central California and as far north as southeastern Alaska.
The southern resident killer whale population, as it is called, was listed as endangered in 2005 after a federal court ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to reconsider an earlier finding that the pods did not constitute a distinct population segment.
So fish win, whales win and agribusiness loses, but doesn't lose. The only skin agribusiness ever had in the game was higher profits. Water is money in this business. One of the growers in the suit, Empresas del Bosque, explains it like this on
their website:
On our farm, every available drop of water is used for the beneficial use of our crops. No water that is delivered to our farm ever leaves it except through our crops that are harvested and through evapotranspiration (the combination of water transpired from vegetation and evaporated from the soil and plant surfaces).
In a business where higher crop yields mean higher profits and water = crops, water+ = profits+. They don't care about the whales. They don't care about the fish. They care about crop yields and profits.
Those who take government money shouldn't be able to spend it to fight government programs. I say that if you are going to be on the take on the scale of these people, at least be an honest crook and stay bought.