State and Federal action on Everglades Restoration is an effort Floridians should truly be proud of. When one of the largest pieces of the puzzle, the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, is finished, it will be the largest above-ground reservoir in the world. At 23 feet deep and 10,500 acres, plus an additional 6,500 acres for stormwater treatment, this reservoir system will be larger than Manhattan and deliver up to 470 billion gallons of clean water each year to the Everglades and Florida Bay.
But clearly Gov. Ron DeSantis’ $4 billion crown jewel of Everglades restoration isn’t great enough for the activists at Friends of the Everglades (FoE). Its chief scientist, Thomas Van Lent – who went to jail for allegedly stealing and destroying more than a decade’s worth of research at the Everglades Foundation and then lying about it in court – recently published a “science-based” report arguing that a much larger reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area must be built.
Van Lent proposes a massive reservoir more than five times the size – and likely five times the cost – of DeSantis’ current $4 billion project, which is already the largest of its kind. This proposed reservoir would be 77,000 acres large at six feet deep, plus take up an additional 25,700 acres of stormwater treatment area to pass the flows from this reservoir.
This report is the perfect example of activist organizations using bad science to get what they want. In this case, that’s the elimination of farmland in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), which is critical to our nation's food supply.
The EAA Reservoir was already built on decommissioned farmland. Friends of the Everglades calls farmland removal the “ultimate solution” to Everglades restoration, and they’re already asking donors to help them buy at least 100,000 acres of farmland. By proposing a 102,700-acre reservoir based on “scientific data,” they’re trying to justify a need to take nearly 100,000 more acres of farmland out of food production. It’s only a matter of time before they find creative ways to target the remaining acreage.
Removing additional farmland from this region is not the ultimate solution for anything – unless the goal is to threaten our economy, food safety and national security.
The Everglades Agricultural Area includes 700,000 acres of critical farmland, and this land is vital to our food security. Why? Because South Florida is one of the very few regions in the United States where food can be grown year-round.
The EAA is America’s Salad Bowl during the winter months. Each year, farmers in South Florida grow enough lettuce for Americans to make 1 billion salads, along with 40 percent of our nation’s tomatoes, 36 percent of our cucumbers, and nearly 30 percent of America’s bell peppers – not to mention 36 million pounds of radishes, 120 million stalks of celery, and 350 million servings of green beans.
If we remove this land, America’s consumers would be largely dependent on other nations, like Mexico, for our vegetables in the off-season. This shift would have major food safety, economic and national security implications.
Foodborne illness outbreaks cannot be easily tracked when food is sourced from other nations like Mexico. We were taught this lesson just a couple of months ago, when Mexican lettuce was at the center of the Cyclospora outbreak that sickened nearly 13,000 people across 21 states.
That international supply connection caused major tracing delays and jurisdictional friction between U.S. and Mexican health authorities before the CDC could even confirm the source of the disease. Tragically, many of those fell ill before the CDC could properly act. Two people died, and 570 people were hospitalized. If these crops were grown in America, our food supply tracing systems would have caught the source of this outbreak much faster.
This wasn’t the first incident. Mexico’s onions were behind the largest hepatitis A outbreak in American history, killing three people, sickening more than 500, and prompting health department authorities to recommend hepatitis A vaccinations for those potentially infected. Mexican-grown cucumbers also caused a recent Salmonella outbreak that sickened nearly 1,000 Americans across 40 states, hospitalizing 200 and killing six.
America is one of the few nations in the world capable of producing nearly everything it needs for itself. We are the only country in the world capable of putting the nutritional needs of our people first. So why would we want to weaken our own food safety – and food security – by eliminating the few acres of farmland capable of producing fresh vegetables during winter months? It forces America to become more dependent on nations like Mexico, and it gives them greater strategic leverage that could further deepen our $197 billion trade deficit.
Key Republicans – from President Trump to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to Gov. DeSantis – understand that food security is national security. That means growing and securing a safe food supply on American soil.
Florida and the Army Corps of Engineers are already restoring the Everglades without sacrificing our nation’s food security. Remaining farmland in the Everglades Agricultural Area should be protected. Using science to support fundraising that would remove even more of our strategically important farms here, like Van Lent himself, is practically criminal.
Chad Hagan is a financier, author, executive producer, and philanthropist involved in economic and environmental policy in the United States and U.K.. He is the author of the book “The Myth of California: How Big Government Destroyed the Golden State.”