By sales value, California agriculture is comprised of a large number of small farms, while a small number of large farms represent most of the sales. The 16 percent of California farms with sales of more than $250,000 in 1997 also represented over 90 percent of total sales value. In 1997, almost 44 percent of California farms sold less than $10,000 of agricultural products. Retired or part-time farmers operate most of these farms.There appears to be a continuing trend toward fewer young people choosing farming as an occupation. Between 1987 and 2002 there were fewer farmers in the younger age categories and an increase in the oldest category. The percent of California farmers over 65 increased from 23 percent to almost 30 percent. Farming is likely a retirement occupation for an increasing number of individuals. Meanwhile, the share of the state population over 65 remained unchanged at about 10.5 percent between 1990 and 2000.Anecdotal information suggests that many family farms remain in the name of the oldest family members, even if they are less actively involved in farming than younger members. This trend may place an upward bias on age estimates since almost all of California’s farms are family owned and operated. In 1997, about 19 percent of U.S. farm operators described themselves as retired.Total pesticide use in California agriculture shows an upward trend, with total reported pounds applied fluctuating from year to year depending on pest problems, weather, and acreage and types of crop planted. Also,hydroponic dutch buckets the types and forms of the pesticides have changed to meet new pests and environmental demands. In 2000, more than 550,000 pounds of chemicals defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as “reduced risk” were applied by commercial agriculture in California.
This was equivalent to about one half of one percent of total pounds of pesticides applied to California crops. In 1990, California became the first state to require reporting of the agricultural use of all pesticides: insecticides, herbicides, rodenticides, fungicides, and sanitizers. In contrast, much of the non-agricultural uses such as chlorine for swimming pools and home and garden pesticides are not reported. About one-third of all California farms did not report using any chemicals or fertilizer in the 1997 Census of Agriculture. California has about 1,526 registered organic farmers, only a tiny portion of those farms that did not report using any chemicals or fertilizer. Therefore, care is needed in interpreting these Census of Agriculture figures. Many farmers may have failed to respond to this particular question or were small livestock growers or other operators whose farms used no chemicals or fertilizer without being defined explicitly as “organic.”California receives about 200 million acre-feet of precipitation in a normal non drought year. Roughly 65 percent of this is lost to evaporation or vegetation. The remaining 71 maf of average runoff, plus imported water, supplies the state’s water “budget,” traveling through California’s complex water distribution system to environmental, agricultural, and urban uses. Groundwater is an additional important source. In 1998 the California Department of Water Resources released a normalized water budget showing the state’s supply and use of applied water in an “average” non drought year. Figures in the “average” year budget were based on the distribution infrastructure in place in 1995. The 1.6 maf shortage is largely accounted for by groundwater overdraft that was not included in the budget. More than 70 percent of the average annual runoff occurs north of Sacramento, but about 75 percent of the state’s water demand is south of Sacramento. California uses a combination of federal, state, and local water projects to capture, store, transport, and import surface water to meet demand around the state. The largest water projects are the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project.
The amount of water per acre used by urban areas varies according to land use, population density and water use efficiency. In some areas agriculture may use less water per acre than nearby urban development while in other areas the opposite case may be true. Groundwater provides 30 percent of the supply used by agriculture and the urban sector in a normal non-drought year. Agriculture accounts for over 90 percent of the groundwater used in the San Joaquin, Tulare Lake, and Central Coast hydrologic regions. Only a portion of the applied water is actually used by the crop. The remainder percolates through the soil, flows downstream to other uses, or is irrecoverably lost due to other factors. Crop water use is measured as evapotranspiration of applied water . The ratio of ETAW to applied water is an indication of irrigation efficiency. The amount of water applied to a particular crop depends on many factors including plant evapotranspiration, soil properties, irrigation efficiency, and weather. Plant intake is the primary purpose of water application, but water is also applied to crops for cultural purposes such as frost control, facilitating cultivation and leaching of salts out of the crop root zone. There is a wide range in water application rates among crops and hydrologic regions. For example, depending on the hydrologic region, anywhere between 2 and 10-acre-feet/acre are applied to alfalfa annually. Hay production, including alfalfa, accounts for almost 15 percent of total irrigation water used in agriculture. Cotton accounts for about 12.5 percent. The top 12 commodities, those that represent 60 percent of the total value of California agriculture, account for about 48 percent of the water used for irrigation in the state. Agricultural surface water costs differ greatly by hydrologic region and source of supply. According to the Department of Water Resources, the 2003 Central Valley Project contract rates range from $2 per acre-foot in the Sacramento Valley to $27 in the county of Tulare and almost $30 in some areas of the Delta.
Almost one-third of California’s irrigated acreage used sprinkler, drip or trickle systems in 1998. The rest used gravity flow systems such as furrows. More than one method was used on some acreage.Technological innovation, fueled by research and entrepreneurship, has been a driving force in U.S. agriculture during the past century, leading to both higher yields and lower prices. In California, technological change has facilitated significant yield increases for many crops as well as other changes. Inputs have been used more efficiently to produce greater quantities of output. For instance, cash receipts per irrigated acre increased by 35 percent between 1960 and 1995. This can be attributed partially to the development and implementation of more efficient irrigation, such as drip systems, and partially to a change in the type of crops produced. The most recent analysis available finds that the productivity index for California agriculture doubled between 1949 and 1991. During the 1990s, particularly toward the end of the decade, computers were increasingly incorporated into farming operations. In only two years, between 1997and 1999, the number of California farms with Internet access doubled to 46 percent, and reached 51 percent in 2001. Overall, about 36 percent of California farms reported using computers in their business operations in 2001, compared to 29 percent for the United States as a whole, although there are several states with higher usage than California.In 2001, U.S. agricultural experiment stations collectively spent $2.3 billion on scientists’ agricultural research. The University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources accounted for about 10 percent of those resources. The DANR includes scientists with the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources, the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the Division of Biological Sciences,bato bucket and the School of Veterinary Medicine; and the UC Riverside College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. The DANR’s two major organizational units are the Agricultural Experimental Station and the Cooperative Extension . The AES is basically a multi-campus research organization, with a staff of near 700 academics distributed in more than 50 different departments. The CE constitutes the main outreach program, with about 400 specialists and advisors dispersed throughout the state. During the 1990s DANR aggregate funding stayed approximately constant at an average of $235 million per year. From 1999 to 2002, total funding increased in constant terms by 25 percent. The three campuses ,accounted for 72 percent of the 2002 annual DANR expenditures, while regionally based units accounted for 14 percent of the budget, and statewide academic programs and their support 12 percent. In 2002, about 80 percent of total funding came from government sources ; 13 percent came from private gifts, grants and contracts, and 7 percent from other sources, such as county government, endowments, sales, services, etc.The number of CE County Advisors decreased by about 18 percent between 1990 and 1999, from 326 to 265, and their distribution among program areas has changed. Agriculture Program Area now accounts for 60 percent of the UC Cooperative Extension County Advisors, up from 55 percent in 1990, while Human Resources decreased from 34 to 30 percent. Natural Resources program changed slightly from 11 to 10 percent of the CE County Advisors.
Each dollar earned within agriculture fuels a more vigorous economy by stimulating additional activity in the form of jobs, income and output. In general, the greater the interdependence in the economy, the greater the additional activity, or multiplier effects. These multipliers may be applied to the county, state and regional levels using the IMPLAN4 model. Multiplier effects can be represented by four measures that reflect the impact that agriculture has on the state. The first measure, sales impact, records how agricultural purchases influence total private sector sales. A second measure is the amount of personal income produced directly and indirectly by the economic output of agriculture and agricultural processing. The third measure calculates the total value-added linked to agriculture. “Value added” in this case is equal to the value of goods and services sold by a firm or sector of the economy, minus the cost of inputs and services used to produce those goods. A final measure is the number of jobs in agriculture, agricultural processing and other sectors of the economy related to agriculture in the state. These multiplier effects may be demonstrated by tracing the activity of an individual farm. A farm’s sales impact would include all the inputs used on that farm, such as machinery, fertilizer, electricity—anything farm dollars buy. The personal income from the farm would include the farm’s income and a portion of the income of those from whom the farm purchased inputs. The farm’s value added would be equal to the cash receipts from sales of farm products less the costs of inputs that went into producing those goods. The jobs related to the farm’s efforts would include labor on that farm as well as in input and output industries that rely on business from that farm. For example, agricultural machinery manufacturers, chemical manufacturers, processors, and people working in retail food trade have jobs that are related to agriculture. The economic impacts shown in Table 22 can be interpreted as an indication of how the state would be affected if agricultural production and processing were to cease, and the associated inputs were not reemployed in any other economic use. Multiplier effects differ by commodity since some commodities may be related to more input and processing industries than others. For example, dairy production is related to a relatively extensive processing sector, for which a wide range of inputs and specialized machinery has been developed. Hence, the dairy industry may have a greater effect on the economy in terms of multiplier effects than some other commodities. Multiplier effects may differ by region due to geographic dispersion of industries related to agriculture, aggregate size of agriculture and type of commodities produced in that region. Some industries have more local impacts, while others have impacts that are spread farther afield. For example, county or multi-county multiplier effects do not include input and processing industries located outside of that region, even if those industries are located elsewhere in the state. Similarly, state multiplier effects do not include input and processing industries located outside of the state. Thus, multiplier effects for commodity groups with geographically diffuse input and processing sectors may be underestimated. Through multiplier effects, agricultural production and processing account for about 6 percent or 7 percent of the state’s total income, value-added, and jobs.