In Kings County, as in other places along the HSR route, there’s a tendency for a small but vocal group of people to oppose the project and make it look like they speak for everyone like them when they do so. In Palo Alto, a few neighbors might attack the project and suddenly you see reports that “neighbors are opposed to HSR” when in fact many people who live near the tracks are strongly supportive. In Kings County it’s been “farmers” who are supposedly mobilizing against the project.

And there too, reality doesn’t follow the neat lines the critics would like. In today’s Hanford Sentinel, Bill Clark, a farmer whose family has been tilling the soil in Kings County for 100 years has an excellent op-ed in support of the project, directly addressing some of the flawed claims critics have been making.

He opens the op-ed with this:

I have not attended any of the forums on high-speed rail, largely because I did not wish to argue with good, longtime agricultural friends. However, I feel I must speak out.

The Clark family has farmed and produced milk in Kings County for over 100 years. We love Valley agriculture and therefore I read the lead article in the June 8 Sentinel “High-speed rail opponents jam meetings” with great interest and but also great concern. It seems like the whole ag community is against the high-speed rail in Kings County. I have not heard of ag concerns in Tulare or Fresno counties, but they may well be there. However, from what I understand, Tulare or Visalia would be very happy to have the train and station that Hanford is trying to reject.

In a business, which I founded in the 1970s and still continues, we export cattle genetics to over 70 countries around the world. My staff and I were fortunate to use the high-speed rail systems in Europe and Japan for many years. These systems are very impressive, And we have all read of the great network of high-speed rail that China is building. Thus, while I understand the anger of having farm land taken from you or maybe the frustration of not getting the answers you seek from the state, there is still much I don’t understand and I have questions which I have not seen fully covered in the news.

What Clark is saying here is that the agriculture industry derives direct benefits from having a high speed rail stop nearby. This isn’t the 19th century where the industry is solely made up of people who grow things on land and haul it to market by wagon. This is the 21st century, where an entire industry has grown up to serve the needs of farmers – who themselves need to get to and from the other parts of the state. A cattle genetics exporter, a fertilizer dealer, a tractor salesman all have use for a bullet train that can get them where they need to go quickly and affordably. So too do the farmworkers whose labor makes the industry possible. And of course, so too do the farmowners themselves.

Clark goes on to point out that other transportation projects have wound up requiring the purchase of farmland without any negative effect on the industry or the county at all:

It seems everyone is almost afraid to ask questions for fear of being shouted down. Therefore I post them in hopes of achieving a more objective discussion of the proposed high-speed rail in the media and meetings.

1. The biggest concern seems to be the ag land which will be taken out of production or crossed on an angle. The Kings County Farm Bureau seems to have taken a lead position on this. But if true, where were the farm bureau and all the others when widening Highway 198 took a big slice of prime farm land from dairyman DeJong and others? Where were they when we sold considerable prime land west of Hanford to the city which became the much-needed joint high school and junior college as well as subdivisions outside of town? I don’t recall the anyone telling us that expansion of the city was wrong.

As agriculturalists we were fairly compensated and the others will be as well. So why this sudden outburst of anger? And when I hear someone claim his orchard in the path of the high-speed rail is worth $100,000 per acre, please tell him we have quite a bit nearby we would be very delighted to sell for a fraction of that!

This is a folksy way of calling the HSR opponents’ bluff. Farmers in Kings County of regularly sold their land for the needs of development. It didn’t destroy the economy and it didn’t destroy agriculture. People adjusted, made do, and often were better off than before. This is all worth keeping in mind the next time you read a “sky is falling!!!” attack on HSR from a farmer whose land is in the path of the trains.

To be clear, we all sympathize with someone having some project come through their land. It’s never an easy thing to deal with. But what Clark points out is that it’s not a difficult thing to deal with either, as farmers who have been through the process can attest. Kings County has been through this process countless times and come through just fine. There’s every reason to believe they’ll come through high speed rail just fine, too.

Clark goes on to talk about some of the other benefits of HSR for the county, and challenges the absurd “it will cost the local economy $100 million” claim. Go read the whole op-ed, it’s well worth it. Common sense may not always win out over breathless hyperbole, but once again, common sense and the facts are on the side of those of us who want high speed rail built.