For decades, Bosch Dairy in Ontario, California, where three generations raised cattle, was a bucolic outpost with fields of cows and rows of eucalyptus to cut the driving wind that came down the Cajon Pass.
A few years ago, Bud Bosch noticed semitrailers occasionally rumbling along the two-lane rural road by his property. Soon, dozens were kicking up dust, night and day, plying roads made for tractors.
Bosch thought he had escaped the explosion of warehouse development that has wiped out farmland and open space. But the ecommerce boom of the pandemic accelerated the land grab, and the region became ever more hardscaped into the staging point for trains and trucks carrying goods from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the rest of the nation.
