The first two problems were fairly easily dealt with. The cooperative movement received federal encouragement in the form of highly favorable tax treatment and considerable exemption from anti-trust prosecution with the passage of the Capper Volstead Act in 1922. Subsequently, the Cooperative Marketing Act of 1926 and the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 further assisted the cooperative movement by helping to gather market information , and by helping co-ops enforce production and marketing rules. In addition, the 1929 Act provided up to $500 million through the Federal Farm Board to loan to cooperatives so they could buy and store commodities to hold them off the market. The federal government also provided a shot in the arm to the cooperative movement through a series of tariff acts that separated the domestic and foreign markets. The tariffs were in large part endogenous because co-op leaders and California legislators lobbied furiously for protection. But overcoming the “free rider” problem was a harder nut to crack. Every farmer benefited from the co-op’s ability to cut output, and every farmer would maximize by selling more. There was thus a tremendous incentive to cheat on the cartel agreements or to not sign up in the first place. The early California fruit co-ops were successful in large part because they dealt with crops grown in a fairly small geo-climatic zone for which California was the major producer. Many growers were already members of cooperative irrigation districts and thus linked by a common bond. These factors made it much easier to organize and police the growers,hydroponic nft channel and it reduced the chance that higher prices would immediately lead to new entrants who would, in a short time, drive the price level down. The fact that most output was exported out of the state via relatively few rail lines also made monitoring easier.

If California raisin prices increased, it was not likely that Minnesota farmers would enter the grape market; but if Kansas wheat farmers banded together to limit their output, farmers in a dozen states would gladly pick up the slack. For these reasons the success of cooperatives in California was seldom matched elsewhere in the United States.California agriculture defies simple, accurate generalizations. This chapter gives the reader two of many possible cross-sectional views of the state’s agriculture to portray the diversity and complexity which make simple descriptions impossible. California’s agriculture has always been sufficiently different from farming and other related activities found elsewhere in the United States, or in the world for that matter, to befuddle visitors and the uninformed. When discussing farming with visitors from the other 49 states, and places even more afield, my father, a life-long Yolo County farmer, always proudly stated, “Anything that can grow anywhere, can grow somewhere in California!” He was right, of course. The state’s agriculture, founded on self-sufficiency goals of early Alta California missions, developed in less than two centuries from a predominantly livestock grazing economy, providing wealth to large, Rancho land holdings from the sale of hide and tallow products in the early 1800s, to today’s agriculture which includes highly capitalized, intensively managed firms as well as a large number of “small” and part-time farming operations.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, 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,nft growing system 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.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 sub-regions 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 .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 Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valleys lying north and south of the Delta, together form the Central Valley. Containing almost half of the state’s farmland, nearly 70 percent of the state’s cropland, and 75 percent of the irrigated land, this is California’s agricultural heartland. The Central Valley is generally regarded as the richest agricultural valley in the world. It has also recently been identified as the most endangered agricultural region in the United States because of the potential loss of substantial acreages of farmland to urbanization.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.