Posted 8:29 PM by Floyd

I have made fun of the San Jose Mercury News for publishing "letters to the editor" from six-year-olds, but I guess it's no worse than the muddled reasoning from this gentleman:

Farmers provide a vital commodity

Your editorial, ``Farmers, cities must find a way to share water wealth equitably'' (Opinion, Dec. 16), misses a key point about what products consumers are guaranteed to need in the 21st century.

No one can predict what the next century will hold. For all we know, in 100 years the microchip may prove to be as irrelevant as the buggy whip.

But no matter what, people will still need to eat. Farming may not meet your definition of the ``new economy,'' but it is the essential economy. As a society, we should take care to ensure that farming continues to prosper in the most productive region on earth, California.

And we should be slow to condemn the people of the Imperial Valley, who face wrenching choices that could affect their home for generations to come. We should remember that they were poised to approve a water-transfer proposal, only to have the terms change -- radically and to their disadvantage -- at the 11th hour.

Californians must work to develop new water sources and use existing sources more efficiently, so that fewer communities face the Imperial Valley's dilemma.

Bill Pauli
President, California Farm Bureau Federation
Sacramento

It's the Pauli exclusion principle! There is room for only one brilliant person named Pauli; all others must take up positions of blithering idiots.

Greenhouses grow better food then fields. So if we don't mind erecting greenhouses, water distillators, and power plants, Antarctica could be the most productive farmland in the world.