Is the warehouse business recession-proof?

hat, shades and a red chequered shirt, Randy Bekendam looks every inch the grizzled farmer—albeit in a Californian countercultural sort of way. The tomatoes, courgettes and King David apples he sells at this time of year have never seen a pesticide. Young families visit to pet his goats and learn about the merits of soil health. The 70-year-old is not shy about sharing his convictions, either. They run deep. The land he has leased for the past 34 years, called Amy’s Farm, has been sold out from underneath him. Now, echoing Joni Mitchell, he is battling to stop the rural idyll from being paved over and turned into a warehouse.His home city of Ontario, less than an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, is now almost as replete with windowless “logistics centres” as it once was with orange and lemon groves. From his ten-acre plot, he can see them bearing down on him. Across the road, a building the size of 100 American-football fields, or 5.3m square feet (492,000 square metres), is rising from the dirt of what used to be a dairy farm. A block away, Prologis, the world’s biggest warehouse-builder, has nearly finished a five-floor facility on more than 4m square feet of land; the blue livery of Amazon, an e-commerce giant, already adorns its upper rim. Nearby, Amazon and FedEx, a package-handler, have more big boxes. Thundering down the country roads between them are 18-wheeler trucks. The dust they kick up smothers a man hawking (chilled coconuts) to the few Mexican farm hands left working the land. “Those big rigs go wherever they want,” Mr Bekendam mutters.