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Sigfried Carrle angled his farmer's hat into a forceful wind roaring across the Antelope Valley. He did not blink, even when a fly bounced off his craggy cheek.
Dust curdled the air and shrouded the sun, and stalks of wheat trembled like the strings of a harp. The sign at Carrle's farm stand on the gravel shoulder of California 138, in the town of Neenach, read: "Last Chance Peaches." The landscape was so bleak it seemed prudent to ask: Before what?
But the produce was fresh and plump and grown in Carrle's backyard. So you picked through his crates -- a half-pound of green tomatoes at 50 cents a pound, a pound and a half of Fairtime peaches at $1.25 a pound, and on and on -- until your arms were full of a high school algebra question with no calculator in sight.
"What about five dollars?" Carrle shrugged.
Oh, it should be more than that. . . .
"Yes," Carrle said, then leaned in for effect. "It should, shouldn't it?"
What he meant, on the surface, was that there isn't a place for backyard farmers in modern commerce, that it costs him more to irrigate his tiny orchard than he could ever get for his fruit.
But it was a reminder, too, that the truly rural outposts of Los Angeles County -- the nation's top agricultural county not so long ago -- are withering away. And this one happens to abut the proposed site of the largest planned community in county history.
Neenach -- and a smattering of other forlorn towns hidden between Lancaster and the Grapevine -- will be the subject of a fierce dispute in the coming year over when enough is enough in Southern California.
On one side, advocates will wave studies showing that there are 6 million more people headed this way in the next 20 years, people who will need roofs over their heads. On the other side, activists will point out that once construction starts here -- above the historical northern boundary of the region's development -- there will be nothing to keep "Los Angeles" from turning into a vast, broken metropolis stretching from Tijuana to Bakersfield.
It would all be very apocalyptic-sounding, if only it was the...