Carrots, Cotton, and the Agricultural Empire of Kern County

The fields south and west of Bakersfield produce an improbable range of crops for a desert climate in a valley that receives only about six inches of annual rainfall. Kern County is among the most productive agricultural counties in the United States, and the diversity of what grows here, when water is supplied from the Sierra Nevada snowpack and from groundwater wells, includes commodities that require conditions the landscape does not naturally provide.

Carrots became one of the defining Kern County crops in the mid-twentieth century. The county now produces a significant share of the national carrot supply, with operations centered in the communities south and southwest of Bakersfield. The specific conditions that made carrot production viable here, sandy loam soils in certain areas combined with reliable irrigation water and a climate that produces sweet roots without the sugar loss that comes from humid conditions, were recognized by growers who were looking for alternatives to the commodity agriculture that dominated the valley.

Cotton is an older story. Kern County cotton production expanded dramatically in the nineteen twenties and thirties, driven by the spread of irrigation across the southern San Joaquin Valley. The cotton economy required abundant cheap labor, which is one of the structural reasons Kern County became a destination for Dust Bowl migrants in the nineteen thirties: they arrived in a landscape that needed exactly the kind of labor they could provide.

The water that makes all of this possible comes from two sources. The Kern River, fed by Sierra Nevada snowmelt, delivers water through a system of canals that was built out over many decades beginning in the nineteenth century. The State Water Project delivers Northern California water through the California Aqueduct, which runs along the western edge of the valley floor and delivers water to agricultural users in Kern County under contracts that are periodically renegotiated as the climate changes the snowpack that feeds the whole system.

What grows here is real. How long the water continues to arrive in the volumes that sustain it is a question that California's water engineers are working on without a settled answer.