A MOTH, A TRACTOR AND THE BIGGER PICTURE By Dave Puglia, President and CEO
A long time ago as a college student, I took a course on bureaucracy. That one word constituted the entire name of the course, which felt a little like Dante’s warning: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Friends who had taken other political science courses with me now waved off; not one of them dared dedicate an entire semester to something so mind-numbing as “bureaucracy.” These days that feeling of hopelessness is as pungent as ever, thanks to the intransigence and impenetrability of California’s bureaucracies. This came to mind recently during a Western Growers membership meeting in Salinas, where several growers once again pleaded for help with the Diamondback Moth (DBM), a small but destructive pest that causes billions of dollars in losses every year, particularly for growers of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts and other brassicas. Specifically, growers pointed out that California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) is slow- walking approval for the usage of a new product to combat the DBM, showing none of the urgency the federal government is to get effective pesticides through the bureaucratic tangle. While a biological solution on the horizon shows some promise, the here-and-now reality is that California’s growers are losing significant crop production to the DBM. As in so many other areas of regulatory policy, California stands alone among the states. Farmers in the other 49 states operate under the pesticide regulatory regime of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); that federal science-based system of evaluation and registration of crop protection products is among the most stringent and conservative of its kind in the world. But California just has to be different, requiring crop protection companies to produce and submit research and data tailored to California’s unique requirements and then wait for years to hopefully gain regulatory clearance. It is not uncommon for farmers elsewhere in the nation to utilize a crop protection tool for years before their Golden State counterparts gain approval to use the same product. Despite all our pleas and pressure to act on the Diamondback Moth, the glare of common sense fails to illuminate in Sacramento. In a similar frustrating manner, while California’s political class boasts of the state’s leadership in
technological innovation, the state’s regulatory apparatus today stands athwart the most common-sense innovation awaiting farmers: the autonomous tractor. The state’s occupational safety board (Cal-OSHA Standards Board) has for years refused to allow farmers to deploy autonomous tractors, citing a 47-year-old regulation intended to protect employees from injuries that could result from jumping off a moving tractor. Of course, today’s autonomous tractors operate without employees and thus there is no one to jump off. But union-aligned activists on the Cal-OSHA Board have for years claimed the risks are just too great. Meanwhile, other states (such as another WG state, Arizona) have come to the common-sense conclusion: Autonomous tractors are here, they’re safe and they can help farmers struggling with soaring labor costs stay in business. Come to think of it, even some very progressive California cities have reached a similar common-sense conclusion, giving autonomous taxi company Waymo the green light to deploy thousands of driverless Jaguars in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Surely someone in Sacramento must understand that a driverless car winding its way through streets crowded with cars, bicycles and pedestrians presents a higher safety concern than a tractor on a lonely field in farm country. And yet we suffer increasing economic losses from a destructive pest while sitting on solutions, and we suffer from the unavailability of cost-saving technology that farmers around the country and the world are rapidly deploying. This should be cause for embarrassment in the state capital. And for the state’s chief executive, it should be more than that. In midwestern and southern states where agriculture is the dominant economic sector (rather than one of several major economic contributors as in California), these California-only regulatory shackles are unlikely to be welcomed. A deliberate and outcome-motivated initiative to cut away the bureaucratic thickets that have ensnarled the state’s agriculture industry would demonstrate a real understanding of regulatory overreach and the economic imperatives of a common-sense approach to fast-changing conditions in the private sector economy. It feels to me like that would sell well in Iowa. Looking at you, Governor Newsom.
4 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com November | December 2025
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