John Pisturino, pictured, has recently been named as the President of the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau. I got that news from the November 2025 edition of Between The Furrows, the Farm Bureau's monthly newsletter. Welcome and congratulations to Mr. Pisturino!
It might be news to some of those who know me, but I am a Lifetime Member of the Farm Bureau, and I am extremely proud of my Farm Bureau Membership, which was a gift to me from the Farm Bureau when I retired from twenty years on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. You can click this link to find out more about the Farm Bureau, and especially about Measure J, an initiative measure that I wrote, that the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors placed on the ballot, and that was adopted by the voters of Santa Cruz County in June 1978.
Here is a picture of some of the farmland surrounding the City of Watsonville. That farmland is still here because of Measure J:
As I read the November edition of the Farm Bureau newsletter, I really appreciated how Mr. Pisturino introduced himself to Farm Bureau Members (emphasis added):
I was born in 1952 and raised on a prune orchard in Cupertino. My dad worked for Frank DiNapoli and ran all his orchards in Santa Clara Valley. They grew prunes, cherries, apricots, pears and walnuts. The DiNapoli's also owned Sun Garden Packing Co. in San Jose. This was when Santa Clara Valley was known as the "Valley of Heart's Delight." People have no idea what they lost when they built up that valley. It had the best climate, soil and an abundance of water for growing crops. They started building in Santa Clara Valley in 1955, and by 1970 [in just fifteen years, in other words] it was almost all gone.... We started working in Watsonville in April 1970.
If you read my blog posting from 2024 - previously linked in my second paragraph, and now linked again, one more time - you will see that Santa Cruz County avoided what happened in Santa Clara County, in what is no longer called the "Valley of Heart's Delight." Santa Cruz County did not become another, smaller-scale version of the so-called "Silicon Valley" because the voters of Santa Cruz County have made it a rule that "prime agricultural lands, and lands which are economically productive when used for agriculture, shall be preserved for agricultural use."
Agricultural land is usually flat, and it usually has access to water. It's "developable," in other words. Farmland can be developed for almost anything - for housing, for factories, for used car lots, for new car lots, for shopping centers .... for anything. In other places, as in Santa Clara County, that is exactly what happens, as the owners of farmland sell off their landss at the highest price they can get - at "development" prices. That's how those richly productive farmlands disappear.
Not here! Here, lands that are economically productive when used for agriculture must be preserved for farming, for agricultural use.
I think you can see, as I do, from President Pisturino's statement, that the new Farm Bureau President knows how precious our farmland is, and how quickly it could be lost, if we were to allow our productive farmlands to be used for anything but agriculture. Thanks to Measure J, and to the vigilance and ongoing commitment of the Farm Bureau (and the voters) that's not going to happen here!
So, I want to give congratulations and a warm welcome to the new Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau President, with a shout out to the voters of Santa Cruz County, too, whose enactment of Measure J has made sure that we don't make decisions that will add up, all too quickly, to the loss of our precious farmlands.
Image Credits:
(1) - http://www.sccfb.com/about-us/
(2) - https://www.gapatton.net/2024/03/62-celebrating-protection-of-farmland.html
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