Today’s agricultural bounty consists of hundreds of commercial agricultural commodities and products sold in every conceivable form at markets ranging from local roadside stands and farmers’ markets to distant markets around the world.The challenge to California farmers and ranchers has always been to match available, and often limited, physical, human, financial, and managerial resources to produce and market alternative outputs chosen from a long and constantly evolving set of potential agricultural commodities and value-added products. Investment and management decisions often involve the integration of production with other economic activities. The highest and best use of resources available to California’s agricultural decision makers requires frequent re-examination of the criteria of the numerous possible uses that are legally permissible, physically possible, financially feasible, and maximally productive. In the dynamic setting of California agriculture, changes are frequent, and often dramatic, as producers and marketers recurrently assess alternatives and make decisions that change important features of the state’s agricultural sector. A half century ago, University of California Dean of Agriculture Claude B. Hutchison in his preface to the book California Agriculture noted the difficulty of measuring the diversity of agricultural production in California even then. He compared the existence of 118 distinct types of farming areas in California in 1946, to substantially lesser numbers in other important agricultural states: 8 in Illinois, 12 in Kansas, 20 in the huge state of Texas, and 25 in Pennsylvania,nft system the state with the next highest number of farming areas. He also noted that only 6 percent of California farms had been classified by the 1940 Census as being general field crop and livestock farms of the sort characteristic of the Midwest Corn Dairy Belt.
“The other 94 percent are distinctly specialized farms, farms devoted largely to the production of a single commodity…Such concentration of effort or specialization calls for outstanding technical and scientific knowledge as well as familiarity with good business methods and procedures” . The developments of the past half century have accelerated greater diversity in types of farming and number of commercial commodities or products. This chapter portrays some of the current dimensions of the state’s diverse agricultural sector by first discussing the characteristics of the major agricultural production regions of California. Natural endowments and man-made infrastructures, in part, determine the nature of agricultural activity within each of the regions. Comparative advantage varies from region to region, and many crops are grown in several regions for reasons of temporal and geographical diversification. A second section discusses the changing composition of agricultural production from extensive to more intensive, higher investment, and higher valued crops. Finally, in the third section, a discussion of the state’s “Top Twenty” agricultural commodities gives better understanding of the nature of agricultural production in California. Nevertheless, the following pages, constrained by time and space considerations, are obviously nothing more than a brief introduction into several ways of examining the diversity of California agriculture.Landforms, hydrography, and climate primarily comprise the physical resources available to farms, ranches, and agribusinesses. Augmented by inputs of production capital, management, and labor, and by private and public investments in institutions and infrastructure, the physical resources importantly characterize the state’s agricultural production regions. California is a large state, the second largest in the conterminous United States. Within such a large geographical area, variations in physical resources are often extreme. For example, normal annual precipitation ranges from only 2.75 inches at Imperial in the southeastern comer of the state to over 100 inches of rain in the northwest corner of the state and at higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada and Coast ranges.
The availability of natural rainfall and snow melt fostered early irrigation development on the western slopes of the Sierras. The uneven seasonal and geographical distribution of surface water led to early private, and later governmental, investments in storage and conveyance systems. Both the highest and lowest elevations in the conterminous United States are found in California—within 75 aerial miles of each other.Climatic regions range from hot desert to alpine tundra. While most of the state’s population and much of its agricultural production occur in areas characterized by a Mediterranean climate, many of its agricultural areas in the San Joaquin Valley and in southern interior areas are located in steppe or desert climatic zones.Growing seasons range from year-round frost-free areas along the coast to relatively short seasons in higher elevation mountain valleys. The more than 700 soil series in California also reflect vast variations in age, parent material, and natural vegetation, in addition to the influence of climate and topography. Residual and transported soils vary greatly in depth, permeability, water-holding capacity, and nutrient-supplying capacity. For these and other reasons, the great variation in the physical resources available to agriculture across the state is more than sufficient to bear out the “any-crop, somewhere” maxim. Figure 1 shows California agricultural production regions delineated along county boundaries.For the most part, these regions are characterized by different resources and land uses, with the exception of valley versus mountain-type lands found along the boundary between the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada region.8 Forty-nine percent of California lands is in public ownership, most of it controlled by the federal government .Conversely, the most agriculturally important regions have the highest private ownership levels, ranging from 71 percent in the San Joaquin Valley to about 80 percent in the Central Coast and Sacramento Valley regions. Statewide, 28 percent of the land area is in farms. Of the land in farms, 39 percent is cropland; and of the land in cropland, 81 percent is irrigated. The 1997 Census tallied 74,126 farms, which averaged 374 acres in size and sold an average of $311,000 of farm products per farm.
The size and value-of-sales statistics include both small, part-time and larger full-time farm units.Among regions, the highest average per acre sales were reported for the more intensive South Coast and South Desert subregions and the San Joaquin Valley region. The following discussion includes brief descriptions of California’s agricultural production regions as denoted in Figure 1 and summarized in Table 1. Regional values of agricultural production are based on 2001 crop reports prepared by County Agricultural Commissioners. Regional production is distributed among five categories: Field crops, Fruit and Nut crops, Vegetable crops, Livestock, poultry and products, and Nursery, Greenhouse and Floriculture crops .Consisting of the nine counties in the three northernmost production regions, the North region is in the main a relatively unimportant agricultural area of the state, even though it contains about a fifth of the state’s land area. More than half of the land area is in public ownership, and private forestry is a significant land use. Relatively small proportions of land are in farms , and of that land only 20 percent is cropland. Cattle and sheep operations, the most important component of the region’s overall agricultural economy, utilize a combination of owned land, a portion of which is typically devoted to hay or irrigated pasture production, and leased public rangelands, commonly used for summer grazing. Some dairying is still found in coastal areas. Field crop production,hydroponic gutter which includes rangeland and pasture for livestock, contributed 34 percent of the value of production in 1995, and livestock production itself amounted to another 28 percent. Some highly productive farming areas include the North Coast grape growing region in Mendocino County and the Tulelake district and mountain valley areas of the northeast, where potatoes, alfalfa hay, malting barley, durum wheat, and sugar beets are regionally important cash crops.This production region consists of a number of highly productive areas with coastal climate and fertile soils devoted to high-valued vegetable, fruit, and nursery production, as well as less productive dryland farming areas, all of which occur in relatively close proximity to the north-south Coast Range of mountains. Since early settlement, the Central Coast has been a very important agricultural region of the state.However, significant acreage has been lost to urban development as California’s population has grown. For example, farmland in the once highly productive Santa Clara Valley has been almost totally displaced by urbanization; having lost its historic reputation for tree fruit and nut production, the region is now widely known as the “Silicon Valley,” a center of the computer and electronic industries. Because of agreeable climate and other coastal amenities, pressures for urban development continue in many locales. Despite the inclusion of the important Napa and Sonoma County wine grape growing areas north of San Francisco, and the important vegetable and wine grape production areas of the Salinas Valley and Santa Maria and other coastal areas of the south, only 22 percent of the Central Coast land area is in crop land.
About half of the cropland is irrigated. High valued vegetable production, mainly in Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito, and San Luis Obispo counties, contributed 53 percent of the value of production from the Central Coast production region in 1995; fruit and nut crops contributed 23 percent. Major vegetable crops include almost all of the vegetables from A to Z .Wine grapes, strawberries, and raspberries are the major fruit crops. Expansion of high valued production has exacerbated surface and groundwater supply concerns. Producers in this region are highly specialized and often use very sophisticated technologies in production and post-harvest activities. Nursery products are important in several of the counties. Dryland farming and livestock activities on the more extensive farming operations contribute only a minor portion of the region’s value of production.The northernmost part and the smaller component of the Great Central Valley, the Sacramento Valley has the highest proportion of land in private ownership of any production region of the state. While urbanization pressures are substantial in the southern portion of the Sacramento Valley, most of the region continues to be heavily dependent on agriculture. Eighty-two percent of Sacramento Valley cropland is irrigated. Irrigation water sources include private and cooperatively developed surface water supplies along the western slope of the Sierras, riparian sources along the major rivers, e.g., the Sacramento, Feather, Yuba, Bear and others, and more recent additions of federally developed water supplying the western valley via the Tehama-Colusa Canal. The Sacramento River and its tributaries are the initial components of the conveyance system for federal and state water systems which, from the Delta southwards, delivers surface water via pumping plants and canals to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California for agricultural, municipal, and industrial uses. Groundwater sources are also significant. Cooler winters, higher rainfall, and less productive soils than the San Joaquin underlie the continued importance of field crops in the Sacramento Valley. Rice is grown in areas with more impervious basin soils; both wheat and corn are included in irrigated crop rotations; and alfalfa, dry beans, sunflowers, safflower, and vine seeds are among other important field and seed crops. Field corn is grown extensively in the Delta. A variety of fruit and nut crops—mainly almonds, peaches, pears, prunes and walnuts—are grown on the deeper, better-drained and more fertile soils of the region. Fruits and nuts amount to 33 percent of the region’s value of production in 1995. Vegetable crops, mostly processing tomatoes, contributed 16 percent, and livestock and livestock products, an additional 11 percent, of the regional production total.About a third of California’s farmland and 55 percent of its irrigated lands lie in the San Joaquin Valley. Nearly 90 percent of valley cropland is irrigated. The eight counties of the San Joaquin Valley accounted for $12.75 billion of the $22.1 billion total value of California agricultural production reported for 1995 . Unlike the Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin does not have a single river system that runs through the entire valley. The southern portion of the valley is two lake basins, historically fed by seasonal runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east. Early farming depended on private and cooperative development of water supplies from Sierra rivers to irrigate alluvial lands on the east side of the valley, and on the reclamation of the Tulare and Buena Vista Lake Basins in the south valley bringing more acreage into agricultural production. In the post-World War II period, federal and state surface water development brought additional water supplies to the most southern area and to the entire western San Joaquin Valley, which had formerly depended on limited and often poor quality groundwater. Because much of the valley is either of a desert or steppe climatic type, irrigation is the major factor that has made the San Joaquin the most extensive and productive of the agricultural regions of California.