This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
For decades, a controversial tax break has subsidized Fresno County’s wealthiest farmers, siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars away from schools, health care, and vital public services. Tax records reveal that the program has delivered a near billion-dollar windfall to agribusiness over the past 30 years.
The subsidy continues to pour in even as the region’s farming empires have taken home record profits with the planting of ever-more almonds, pistachios, and mandarins. This boom has created generational wealth for a handful of Fresno County families and corporations whose landholdings now sprawl across hundreds of thousands of acres.
Now, a troubling trend threatens to drain even more tax dollars from the county, records and interviews show.
As land is increasingly sold to major corporations and investment firms, the Williamson Act – a 60-year-old state law designed to preserve farmland in the path of development – enables money to flow to out-of-state interests with no stake in California’s future, reaping disproportionately large subsidies on land nearly an hour’s drive from the nearest suburban tract.
A Fresnoland investigation reveals the vast scale of this tax dollar drain. For example, one of the county’s largest tax breaks in 2022, to the tune of $1.7 million, flowed to a $240 billion pension fund tied to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Fresno County’s own residents are effectively subsidizing the retirement of Canadian cops, thousands of miles away.
And they’re far from alone at the trough. Just 120 farming operations — less than 1% of recipients — captured half of the program’s $5 billion tax shelter in 2022, according to a Fresnoland analysis.
This tax break comes at a hefty price for Fresno County: $50 million in 2022, county tax records reveal, totalling $820 million over the last 30 years. The public is effectively subsidizing the region’s wealthiest corporations and families, a comprehensive analysis by Fresnoland shows, diverting critical funds from communities already struggling with some of California’s highest poverty rates.
A Fresnoland investigation, based on county tax rolls obtained through the California Public Records Act, reveals the complete list of Williamson Act recipients – information that’s never been publicly released before. The newly digitized tax rolls, encompassing over 14,000 parcels enrolled in the Act in 2022, show the amount of tax subsidy each landowner received.
Critics say the analysis calls into question whether the program lives up to its original purpose. Instead of small farmers on the brink, the Act’s biggest winners are powerful agribusiness conglomerates.
Paul Dictos, Fresno County’s tax assessor, said the Williamson Act betrays its own aim. It was meant to protect farmland that was in the path of growth, he said, yet much of the subsidy goes to faraway farmland owned by people who don’t even live here. He wonders how to reverse the flow to benefit small farmers, he said.
“The benefit of the $820 million has not trickled down to the small farmer – as the Williamson Act intended,” said Dictos. “Do these mega-farmers, hedge funds, and foreign investors really need the county’s subsidy?”
The majority of farms enrolled in the Williamson Act, county records show, receive, on average, less than $800 a year in tax breaks. Nearly 3,000 parcels in the Williamson Act get zero dollars in tax relief.
On the other hand, the majority of the Williamson Act’s tax break goes to the top .3% of large-scale growers and hedge funds, according to a Fresnoland analysis.
The result is that a program intended to protect farmland by shielding small California farmers from rising property taxes is instead widening the gap between the state’s agricultural giants and struggling family farms, interviews with tax and farming experts show.
The Fresno County Farm Bureau argues the Act remains vital for keeping land in farming during difficult times. But even some of the county’s biggest ag supporters are concerned that the Act provides minimal relief to most farmers while giving million-dollar tax breaks to large landholders and investment firms.
The Act’s small and medium-sized growers are subsidized $24 per acre, while the top mega-growers get $62 per acre. Documents reveal a further troubling trend: 91% of the land owned by these mega-growers sits more than a mile from any city. These remote parcels, far from the path of urban growth, are not the farmlands at risk of being paved over by encroaching suburban sprawl — the very lands the Williamson Act was designed to protect.
Annual tax breaks generated by the program continue to climb – by as much as $4 million every year, according to a long-term analysis from Fresno County. Even more striking, the tax breaks flowing to mega-farmers have exploded by 500% – funneling millions more to just 120 of the largest operations.
The program’s escalating costs to the public and questionable beneficiaries is giving some county officials – some of ag’s strongest supporters – pause, even as they struggle for solutions.
“The Williamson Act still has merit,” said Fresno County Supervisor and county farm bureau member Nathan Magsig. “But how to deal with the mega-farms that have come together? I don’t have a good answer for that.”
Westside land boom shows Williamson Act benefiting large landowners
Intended to aid small farms near cities, Fresno’s Williamson Act now funnels tax breaks to massive, remote agribusinesses.
Tax records show that the top 10 recipients of Williamson Act subsidies in 2022—all large-scale operators or out-of-state investors—collected millions in public subsidies for landholdings deep in rural areas, some an hour’s drive from the nearest major city.
Take the Smittcamp family, whose 8,200 acres south of Kerman received a $1.1 million tax break in 2022. Similarly, the Batth family, with 20,000 acres near Caruthers, enjoyed a near−identical $1.1 million reduction—even as 96% of their land sits far outside the path of development.
These subsidies extend beyond local dynasties: The Maddox family, owners of a 4,000-cow mega-dairy, secured a $550,000 tax break for 10,000 acres near Helm, while the Campos family netted $770,000 for 5,700 acres around Caruthers.
The operators of the old Smittcamp operation, the Batth, Maddox, and Campos families all could not be reached for comment.
The act redistributes the county’s wealth to out-of-town empires as well.
Three thousand miles away, corporate farmers on Wall Street got Fresno County’s fifth biggest tax break in 2022. Gladstone Land Corporation – which is “actively acquiring farms across the United States” – has 7,000 acres enrolled in the Williamson Act over an array of holding companies. Gladstone got a $1.1 million tax break from Fresno County in 2022, for land deep in the sticks near Coalinga. Gladstone declined to comment.
Faramarz Raban, whose office is on LA’s Wilshire Boulevard, received an $800,000 tax break for 12,600 acres near the Maddox and Smittcamp holdings. Wonderful, which is owned by Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick, America’s wealthiest farmer with a net worth of $5.6 billion, got a $440,000 tax break in 2022. Raban declined to comment. Wonderful did not respond to multiple phone calls.
The soaring subsidies to the top landowners over the last decade aren’t simply a result of large landholdings. The program is disproportionately benefiting – even incentivizing – farmland consolidation, according to Dictos.
Under standard property tax formulas, agricultural landowners are taxed based on the purchase price they paid for the farmland. However, if they enroll in the Williamson Act, they instead pay a much lower tax rate calculated using the land’s potential rental value for agriculture, Dictos said.
This preferential tax structure applies to all farmers enrolled in the Williamson Act. But Dictos said it’s the deep-pocketed investors who acquired prime farmland in recent years who see the largest tax reductions.
Take the case of a Southern California investor who dropped $9 million on 100 acres of cotton fields in Firebaugh. Had he paid taxes based on his purchase price, as nearly every other property owner in the state must do, his annual tax bill would have topped $90,000. But instead, because the investor’s land was enrolled in the Williamson Act, he was taxed at the rental value of the cotton land.
He ended up paying $3,300 on taxes that year, according to tax records provided by Dictos – only 3.6% of what he would have otherwise owed.
The result of this tax formula is that the higher the purchase price, the bigger the Act’s tax subsidy, Dictos said. Small farmers and landowners who have owned their land for generations see hardly any benefit under this tax formula, multiple assessors from across the state told Fresnoland.
These problems have become apparent over the last 10 years, as Fresno County’s west side nut boom caused deep-pocketed farmers to expand, snapping up land from their smaller counterparts at a dizzying pace. With each acquisition, the tax break reaped through simple consolidation has spiraled out of control, Dictos said, a classic case of the rich getting richer.
“The small farmer doesn’t grow. He doesn’t buy new properties. It’s the big farmer that gobbles up acre after acre,” Dictos said. “This is why the Williamson Act has become so unequal, where the biggest farmers take the lion’s share of the subsidy.
“As it stands now, the Act’s expanding subsidy is just a tool for the biggest players to keep getting bigger, while everyone else gets left in the dust,” he added.
For two of the county’s wealthiest farming families, hundreds of millions of dollars in tax liability has been wiped away by the Williamson Act.
The Assemi family dramatically expanded their farm holdings along Interstate 5 in Fresno County over the last decade, according to county records, adding roughly 180 parcels to a portfolio valued at over $300 million, according to 2022 county tax records. Thanks to the Williamson Act, $170 million of that value is shielded from taxation.
This has led to a stunning increase in the Assemi’s tax subsidies – a $1.6 million jump. Their county tax break for 2022 reached $1.7 million, the highest in Fresno County, compared to only $133,000 10 years prior. Over 85% of the family’s agricultural land is over three miles from the nearest city, according to a Fresnoland analysis using county GIS data.
In a brief statement to Fresnoland, Maricopa Orchards, the Assemi family’s major agriculture company, said they’re grateful for the tax break.
“Maricopa Orchards, LLC and its related entities are appreciative of the state’s support (through the Williamson Act) of continued agricultural operations in California,” said Elizabeth Steinhauer-Clark, a lawyer for the family’s farm management company, Maricopa Orchards, told Fresnoland.
The Woolf family, another prominent Fresno farming operation, has also reaped massive benefits, according to county tax records from 2011 and 2022. Their landholdings near Coalinga have increased by $107 million over the last decade, now totaling roughly 18,000 acres. They received over $500,000 in tax breaks from Fresno County in 2022, compared to only $109,000 a decade ago.
“Our plan is to continue to participate if it’s available in the future,” said Stuart Woolf, who manages the family’s farming operations, in an email.
For out-of-town investors, inheriting old Williamson Act contracts has been highly lucrative.
In 2017, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s $240 billion pension fund bought up scores of land enrolled in the Act on Fresno County’s west side. In one striking example, a small farmer’s 300-acre parcel, worth a mere $800,000 under its Williamson Act contract in 2011, was sold to the Canadian pension fund for $11 million in 2017.
Similarly, a Connecticut investor’s 300-acre parcel, valued at just $289,000 in 2011, fetched $8 million during the Canadian buying spree. The Royal Police’s farm hands, called Pomona Farming, did not respond to numerous requests for comment. The Royal Police’s investment bankers did not offer a comment by the time this story was published.
All told, the Canadian pension fund acquired 99 parcels along Interstate 5 worth $270 million. But by inheriting existing Williamson Act contracts, they were handed a massive tax shelter. The Canadians were taxed only $108 million on those properties in 2022, according to county records – less than half what they paid for their new tracts.
Fresno County Supervisor Buddy Mendes found the revelation troubling.
“That’s got to stop if they got a sweetheart deal. That’s BS.”
Echoes of land grabs: The Williamson Act’s historical roots
The Williamson Act, from its inception in 1965, reflected a precarious balancing act between policy goals and the power of those it sought to regulate. Born in the post-World War II boom years, the Act addressed the alarming reality of California losing a staggering 1 million acres of prime farmland to suburban sprawl.
The example of 1960s Los Angeles was a stark warning. In the matter of just 20 years, according to UC Davis’ Agricultural Economics Center, 90% of the county’s prime farmland was permanently lost to sprawl.
The crisis stemmed in part from the state’s property tax system, which assessed farms at their “highest and best use” value – often inflated by development potential – rather than their agricultural worth. By the end of the 1950s, property taxes on agricultural land in the state had doubled as a share of net farm income, according to Herbert Snyder, a UC Davis professor and a key figure behind the Williamson Act.
In the 1960s, a small but influential group led by Snyder and the state farm bureau lobbied Kern County Assemblyman John Williamson, chairman of the agriculture committee, to create a statewide law that would reduce agricultural property taxes.
From its inception, the Act favored large landholders. Even Southern Pacific, which once owned 2.4 million acres statewide, used the law to secure tax assessments far below their land’s agricultural value. While other property owners paid taxes on the market value of the land, these landowners were taxed only on potential farming rental income — typically a small fraction of the land’s true agricultural worth.
By the time Ralph Nader investigated the Act in the early 1970s, he found a telling detail: in Fresno County, 98% of the land enjoying this tax shelter lay was more than three miles from any city – far removed from the suburban encroachment the law had supposedly been written to combat.
“It’s really a historical artifact of the distortion of land law in the late 19th century. Policies for small-scale farming in the West were gamed, perverted, and warped by large farmers,” said Stephanie Pincetl, a UCLA professor who studied the Williamson Act’s history in her 1997 book, Transforming California.
“There have been no breaks in the Valley’s history politically powerful enough to change this.”
The county’s leading agricultural advocate, Ryan Jacobsen, who serves as the CEO of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, declined multiple times to be interviewed about what role the Act serves today. In addition to interview requests, Fresnoland sent Jacobsen a series of detailed questions about the investigation’s findings. However, Jacobsen did not provide any answers to these findings.
“The Williamson Act remains California’s preeminent tool in preserving our state’s precious, irreplaceable agricultural lands….For agriculture to remain a vibrant part of the state’s economy, programs like the Williamson Act are a necessity,” he said in a brief statement.
However, tax records challenge the notion that the Williamson Act helps agricultural owners stay in business. Key recipients who saw their Williamson Act tax breaks balloon 300-700% between 2011 and 2022 are the same ones now facing financial collapse, including the Assemi family’s default on $700 million in farm loans. The Act’s track record suggests it isn’t preserving agriculture so much as subsidizing its most aggressive speculators.
Pincetl said the Williamson Act demonstrates that California continues to prop up an entrenched system that’s as unstable as it is deeply rooted. Groundwater depletion, land concentration, and the detachment of property owners from the land they profit from and the communities around them – “all of this has only gotten worse,” she asserts.
“Today, we’re like some of the worst Latin American countries, in terms of the agribusiness’ land consolidation and the exploitation of the rural communities around them,” Pincetl said.
“What this program shows is we are still subsidizing this system.”
As nuts face crisis, farmland preservation program may benefit Wall Street, not farmers
The Williamson Act’s concentration of public support in the hands of a few comes at a critical juncture for Fresno County. A global land rush, fueled by the finance industry, has recently transformed who is in control of the future of Fresno’s farming.
To international investors, row crops have been likened to gold, and orchards and vineyards to diamonds and rubies. In California’s farm belt, the Williamson Act has become a safety net for these investor’s increasingly big bets, with almonds and pistachios emerging as particular targets for large investment firms over the past 15 years.
As market conditions became ripe for high profits a decade ago, said Emily Reisman, a professor of Environment at the University of Buffalo currently writing a book on the almond industry, deep-pocketed investors came on the California farm scene. They either bought land outright or lended to big farming families who wanted to expand their landholdings.
“Because almonds are so heavily mechanized, it takes shockingly few human beings to run a large almond operation, compared to other tree crops, like stone fruit,” she said. “The almonds can be shaken, swept, stacked and stored all by machinery. With wage rates and overtime pay for farmworkers, the stability of a low-labor crop model was something investors were very keen on.”
In Fresno, the Assemi family expanded on traditional farmland investment management organizations like Prudential. The Smittcamp family’s farming operations were bought out by a private equity firm. Other huge investors, like Gladstone and the Canadian Royal Crown’s police pension fund, bought the land outright.
In each case, these investors got six- and seven-figure tax subsidies for their high-priced Fresno County farmland acquisitions via the Williamson Act.
County supervisor Mendes acknowledged that the Act, in its current form, will continue to reward these huge owners who are buying up farmland.
“We haven’t looked at it that close,” Mendes said about the risk of subsidizing farming consolidation. “There’s nothing on the books that says you can’t get it (the Williamson Act’s tax break), no matter how big you are.”
The county’s subsidies towards this type of land ownership could incentivize bad outcomes for the region, according to two researchers who spoke with Fresnoland.
Once land is financed, owned or operated by these large investors, the purpose of farming changes. According to Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, land, jobs, water and other resources become more focused on generating large financial profits that are typically unsustainable.
Take the example of the old Smittcamp holdings. Once the private equity firm bought the farmland, it went bankrupt shortly thereafter, resulting in the loss of 10,000 jobs.
And after its rapid, finance-fueled land expansion in the 2010s, it is beginning to look like the Assemi family overextended itself, according to court filings.
Growers aren’t the only ones impacted by this system. Local food systems become more prone to instability and more vulnerable to environmental shocks from these investor-led land booms. For example, take the big almond operations.
The operators invested in new, expensive sprinkler technologies which could have resulted in less groundwater extraction. Instead, trying to maximize their revenue, the almond farmers plowed their water savings into planting more trees in the ground.
The result of this money-intensive form of farming, Reisman found, was that almond growers increased their overall water usage by 37% per acre using the “more efficient” watering techniques.
This intensified water extraction had devastating consequences — in 2020-2022, San Joaquin Valley land collapsed faster than any time since measurements began in the 1940s, a recent Stanford study found.
The growth of intense Westside-style almond plantations has also led to larger amounts of fertilizer and pesticides being sprayed, Reisman added, which has the potential to worsen pollution in drinking water wells and the air for nearby communities.
After adding up these impacts, critics say, it is unclear where Fresno County residents stand to benefit.
Most of these nuts are not enjoyed by local communities, market research shows. The nuts go to Europe and China; the wealth increasingly goes to out-of-state and overseas bank accounts; even during record hauls of nuts, Fresno farmers can go bankrupt; residents get stuck with fewer jobs, food deserts, collapsing ground, dirty air and underfunded schools.
For financial firms and mega-farmers hunting for maximum returns, tax breaks like the Williamson Act are simply one more way to boost profits, said Clapp. She warns that policies like the Williamson Act support a dangerous cycle of consolidation and abandonment on the public dime.
“If they think they can have a more profitable operation because they’re going to get that tax break, then it’s going to actually encourage more land purchasing, consolidation and ownership by these financial investment companies who are driven by the highest possible returns,” she said.
“And when the profits aren’t great, they will liquidate. And it’s the people and farmers who are left holding the bag.”
Dan O’Connell, the director at local labor-environmental advocacy group the Central Valley Partnership and an author of a book on industrial farming, said such an outcome wouldn’t help preserve farmland or the future of Fresno’s agriculture. The only thing the Act is boosting, he said, is big profits.
“Public subsidies for farmland conservation should benefit society at large, and especially small-scale family farmers and farmworker communities. It should not be a tax break for hedge funds and the wealthiest people in our society.”
The major source of profit for these large investors, an analysis of the industry found, is to develop major water infrastructure improvements and to consolidate land ownership. For example, in the case of the Canadian’s investment in west Fresno, they bought up scores of properties and have dug some of the deepest wells in the Valley, according to Bloomberg, which can outpump nearby farmers if a major drought hits in the coming years.
Research has found that these types of additions generate huge benefits for the investor’s clients – pensioners and stockholders – by increasing the resale value of the land. But in rural Fresno County, the potential consequences of losing tax revenue from these corporate takeovers and retakeovers via the Williamson Act is stark, according to Magsig.
It means diminished funding for essential services, he said.
“Any extra dollar that is able to be captured is another dollar that’s available to a school or for the county to deal with road issues and social services.”
But county supervisors, when interviewed last fall, weren’t keen on making changes to the program. Beside an occasional pot-shot at out-of-state investors, all five board of supervisors either declined to comment on the specific findings of this story or insisted that they still supported the Act overall.
To Dictos, the county’s tax czar who’s tried many times to reform the Act to no avail, the political situation has allowed a perversion of the Williamson Act to take place, under the public’s radar.
“A $200 billion hedge fund is certainly no small farmer,” Dictos said. “So why should they get multi-million dollar subsidies from drought-stricken Fresno County every year?”
How Fresnoland reported this story
To report this story, Fresnoland built a dataset via public records request of all Williamson Act contracts from Fresno County tax assessor rolls in 2022 and 2011.
The data for each Williamson Act contract included the value of the land that the owner of the agricultural parcel would have paid without the Williamson Act, as well as the value they actually paid in 2022 because of their Williamson Act contract. Farm entities with multiple parcels under the Williamson Act were combined by matching mailing addresses and Secretary of State business documents.
In order to analyze the data, Fresnoland used the method employed by the county assessor to determine the tax credit granted to each contract. The tax credit for each contract was calculated by subtracting the taxes paid under the Williamson Act from what would have been owed without it. Annually averaged data was used to confirm that Fresnoland’s calculations were identical to the official assessor methods.
For the analysis of each parcel’s distance to the path of development, Fresnoland cross-referenced Fresno County’s GIS database with the parcel numbers from the tax rolls that were in the Williamson Act. The distance to cities was calculated by taking the county’s database of urban boundaries for all cities in Fresno County and calculating the distance of each parcel to the closest city using standard georeferencing libraries in Python.
Want to dig deeper into this story? Join Fresnoland for a conversation next Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 5:30 p.m. at Sun Stereo Warehouse. Register to attend here.