'Pocket size' farms don't make up for loss of other farms, so food in S.F. Bay Area is even less local

The local-food movement has brought many "pocket-size farms" to the San Francisco Bay area in recent years, but "the continuing decline in the availability of farmland in the Bay Area's traditional growing areas threatens to leave consumers further away than ever from where their food is cultivated, Justin Scheck writes for The Wall Street Journal. "In recent years, the region has lost large tracts of farmland to housing and commercial development." (WSJ photo by Brian Frank: Goats at Alemany Farm in San Francisco)

"It's really a conundrum," Sibella Kraus, president of Sustainable Agriculture Education, a nonprofit group, told Scheck. "There is this demand for local, but we're not really investing in local." SAGE wants state and local governments to offer more incentives to prevent loss of farmland when the economy improves enough to spur demand for real-estate development.