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| Graphic: Wall Street Journal |
The Wall Street Journal (here) reports today that Oregon’s pear industry is getting bruised by land use policies.
The story asserts that SB 100–Oregon’s “storied” land use law–is preventing them from selling off land to use as capital to buy more land farther away from the cities.
The credit crunch and consumers unwilling to splurge for $30 boxes of pears are behind much of the pain, growers say. Yet they insist their real headache is their inability to raise capital by selling land at top value, which they say would let them buy farmland further from residential areas. That is because land-use laws say their orchards must remain in agriculture.
“It’s the worst case of unintended consequences you can imagine,” says David D. Lowry, chief executive of Associated Fruit Co., the smallest of Medford’s Big Three, who fears his business could be the next to close. Like others, he has plenty of land to sell, but no one willing to buy as long as it is zoned for farming only.
Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com