By DON CURLEE

One California state senator has become the poster boy for the wide band of dislike and misunderstanding that engulfs the state's agriculture industry.

As contradictory as it seems, he is chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Democrat Dean Florez. Elected to the State Senate in 2002 after serving two terms in the State Assembly, Florez comes from Shafter, a predominantly agricultural community in Kern County.

But his garishly gerrymandered district helps explain his mind-boggling positions and off-the-wall statements. It meanders along a heavily Democrat, but sometimes narrow path from south of Bakersfield north into parts of Tulare, Kings and Fresno Counties. Farming is paramount in all of it, but farm workers outnumber farmers 100 to 1 or more in much of it.

In his four years as an assemblyman Florez frequently aligned himself with the United Farm Workers union and its leader, turning his back on farmers in regard to bills and positions they favored. The union's headquarters near Tehachapi is just outside Florez's senate district.

In doing so he established himself as the perennial "loose cannon," likely to fire intermittently and erratically in any direction that seems politically expedient, no matter what it means to his constituency.

His ascendancy to a vital committee leadership position is more a tribute to his aggressiveness and political ambition than to any demonstrated performance or proficiency in behalf of the state's agricultural industry. For the Democrat power structure in Sacramento he filled a gap that few if any others in the party wanted to occupy.

Early in his current term he proposed off-the-wall legislation that offered little more than superficial support for agriculture. He favored a bill that would have forced egg producers in other states supplying eggs to California to meet the unfortunate restrictions placed on California poultrymen by last November's ill-conceived Proposition 2. It was clearly in restraint of interstate commerce and collapsed of its own weight.

More recently Florez has proposed elimination of the state's Department of Food and Agriculture. He seems unaware that the diversity of production of 350 commercial crops by 80,000 farmers requires specialized oversight and administration.

The agriculture industry has been an interested and somewhat astonished observer as Florez's legislative antics have unfolded as part of the sordid Sacramento political drama. Most ag leaders are holding their tongues, aware that his committee can be expected to consider and possibly sponsor strategic legislation dealing with their industry.

The normally mild-mannered Secretary of Food and Agriculture spoke volumes when he refused to attend a discussion group on the Florez "kill-the-department" bill, and appeared at an important citrus disease meeting in San Diego instead where other countries were represented.

The water issue, one of the most serious and strategic to face agriculture and at least 25 million off-farm residents in 50 years, seems to submerge Florez. The all-important California Aqueduct, central to the issue, passes through his district within a mere 20 miles of Florez's home town of Shafter on its way to Southern California.

Don Curlee is a freelance ag writer and editor based in Clovis. E-mail: agwriter1@sbcglobal.net.