Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California ¡ª about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade.
It¡¯s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but razing the land was a necessary triage ¡ª ¡°Like cutting off your horribly infected hand to keep the rest of the body going,¡± he told me.
Woolf plans to replace the trees with cover crops he¡¯ll neither sell nor harvest, but will use to sequester greenhouse gasses in his soil. He¡¯s setting aside other land for another kind of farming: industrial solar.
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