Farmers are capable stewards of the land
Daniel and Marguerite Capp
Updated Apr 17, 2019
On Wednesday, the Board of Supervisors voted on the controversial Water Quality and Tree Protection Ordinance, an assault on both property rights and the family farm.
My husband Daniel Capp’s great great grandfather, David Hudson, and his brother, William, and sister Lucinda including brother in law John York, David’s wife to be Frances Griffith and her brothers, all came to Napa together in 1845 in the Grigsby Ides wagon train, the first wagon train to make it intact over the Sierra.
They settled this county assisting Dr. Bale in building the mill, fought in the Bear Flag Revolt, co-founded St. Helena, built a fine house where they helped raise surviving children from the Donner Party, as well as their own five children, after planting some of the first vineyards in Napa.
Our point here is that development and farming is in our DNA and we’ve been stewards of the land, and our family has loved this land for 174 years, since before California became a state. Dan and I planted our first vineyard here in lower Wooden Valley in 1973, and slowly expanded our farming interests over the years. While we never formally got the organic designation for our vineyards, we treated them as such. If farmers don’t truly care for the land and environment than nobody does.
This ordinance suggested that we farmers and property owners either do not care about the environment, are incapable of doing what is right, or an ugly mixture of both. As stewards of the land, a title we proudly own, please know that we do care about our property.
We also care about our future. We care about the future rights of property owners to develop, plant and harmonize with the land. If the supervisors want farming to remain viable for the small family farmers, they should more carefully consider their future decisions. It’s already hard enough for a small family farm to make it financially when competing against corporate farming.
Corporate farmers have the staff to deal with these requirements, plus deep pockets. Small family farmers will have to hire specialists they can’t always afford. This onerous, judgmental and hideous travesty of an ordinance will only reward the wealthy and/or corporations in that future. Only the very rich will want to buy country property, and will no doubt be ready, willing, and able to offer us middle-class landowners offers of a sizable discount for our now made worthless properties.
If there was any specific need for this ordinance, we might not be as shocked that the supervisors considered it, but no such need was presented to us in any form. Napa County already had some of the most carefully thought out and limiting regulations in California. Why did we even need this?
And why was this taken into consideration when not a year ago a similar proposition was voted on throughout Napa County? Why did you go around the will of the people? Did you supervisors believe that we’re either too ignorant or too greedy to only want what’s in our financial best interests and not what’s good for the land? Or did you think that we don’t care about what happens here in the future after we’ve died?
Did these environmentalists proposing these onerous regulations have a stake in what happens here in Napa? Are they landowners too? Or are they carpetbaggers here to educate us slower, backward country folk as to the error of our ways? Why didn’t they start this assault on property rights in Santa Clara or Marin County? Why a small, agricultural county like Napa and not a more developed county? Because that’s what this is, an assault on property rights in the name of environmentalism.
Please remember that our forbears helped start the Bear Flag Revolt in Napa County when an overreaching demand came from a government to abandon land, plants, animals, personal belongings, and guns, and walk away from their future. That revolt changed everything in California. It could happen again today here.
Daniel and Marguerite Capp
Napa