Packard Foundation Puts Its Faith, Funds in the Central Valley

This long, flat valley, walled off by mountains and enduringly lost in the shadows of Los Angeles and San Francisco, has been called the Other California, the overlooked heart of the state.

For years, whenever economists or urban planners discussed California’s booms and busts and future dreams, they skipped right over the nation’s richest farm belt.

But futurologists are ignoring the Central Valley no more. With a new University of California campus and 6 million new residents expected over the next four decades, no part of the state stands to gain or lose more in the next century than California’s big middle.

For some environmentalists, builders, farmers and long-range planners, the Other California is the only California being talked about these days. Gov. Gray Davis is planning an economic summit here, and architects and urban designers from around the country have been weighing in with models on how the valley should grow.

Now, one of the nation’s richest philanthropic groups, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, is using a fortune made in the Silicon Valley to protect prime farmland from Bakersfield to Redding.

Created 35 years ago by the late co-founder of the high-tech giant Hewlett-Packard, the foundation expects to shower more than $175 million by 2002 to conserve Central Valley farmland and other endangered areas on the California coast and in the Sierra Nevada.

The directors said last week that their five-year conservation plan exceeds even the grandness of the Rockefeller family’s work earlier this century to establish national parks such as the Grand Tetons. About a third of the money, in addition to low-interest loans, will be targeted to keep farmland out of the hands of developers.

They say the focus of their largess isn’t Southern California or the Silicon Valley for good reason. Those regions, for better and worse, already have been made. The Central Valley is the state’s last cheap dirt, a place to shape California’s future and not duplicate the suburban sprawl and the death of the farm that define the rest of the state.

“What alarmed our board was the realization that only 50 years ago, Los Angeles was the most important farm county in the country,” said Jeanne Sedgwick, director of the conservation program for the Los Altos-based Packard Foundation. “What’s happening in Fresno and the valley today is the same pattern that swallowed up L.A.’s farmland--the same rates of growth and the same policies encouraging sprawl.”

The four Packard children, three of whom serve on the board, have fond memories of time spent on two big ranches owned by their parents in Merced County, one spread running up against a big wildlife refuge. The foundation, its initial endowment growing to $12.3 billion in assets during the stock market boom, has been a leader on the California philanthropic scene for years. Last year, the foundation gave $7 million to Sacramento County for a host of education programs.

It was a 1995 report by the nonprofit conservation group American Farmland Trust that caught the interest of the Packard Foundation. The report, using current growth rates, projected a Central Valley where much of the best farmland along California 99 would be strip malls and housing tracts by 2020. The report noted that with just a slight change in policy and counties and cities emphasizing in-fill projects and higher density growth, much of this farmland loss could be avoided.

“The report played out three different scenarios and really focused the board’s attention on what was at stake,” said Michael Mantell, a Sacramento lawyer and former state Resources Agency official who drafted the foundation’s new conservation plan.

Mantell cautioned that money from the private sector can never be enough to keep all the important agricultural land in production. “You can’t buy it all. As big as the Packard money is, it has got to be used to leverage other dollars and work collaboratively with local and state government to build long-term policies that conserve important farmland and channel development into suitable areas.”

Farmers Will Have Another Option

For any given farmland preservation project, Mantell said, the foundation never puts up more than half the money, with the remaining chunk coming from other private and public sources. If a prime farm is in the path of development, the foundation could underwrite that farmer if he agrees to sell his land to another farmer, paying him the difference between the farm value and the higher development value for the land.

“For years, farmers have been saying, rightfully so, that the only way I can retire is to sell my land to a developer. Well, suddenly that farmer has a new option,” said Carol Whiteside, president of the Modesto-based Great Valley Center, a think tank devoted to finding ways to preserve farmland and attract new industry to the valley.

The Packard Foundation has helped fund Whiteside’s center with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. Some of this money has been used by the center to buy easements on a ranch in Merced County.

The foundation, whose executive director is Richard T. Schlosberg III, former publisher and chief executive of the Los Angeles Times, already has allocated nearly $18 million in grants to conserve and restore wetlands and ranches in the Central Valley. That includes $4 million to help the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust buy riverfront farmland.