The Most Productive Farm County in America

Fresno County has been the highest-value agricultural producing county in the United States for most of the years since the statistic has been tracked. Not the largest by acreage. Not the most heavily mechanized. The highest value. The numbers from recent years run past eight billion dollars of agricultural production annually from a single county, a figure that exceeds the total farm output of most American states. What grows here, and how it came to grow here, is a story about water, soil, climate, and a century and a half of investment in infrastructure whose costs were not always paid by the people who benefited from it.

The valley floor is deep alluvial soil, deposited over millions of years by the rivers running out of the Sierra Nevada. The soil itself is not scarce or fragile. It is, in the right conditions, extraordinarily productive. The condition it required was water, and the natural rainfall of the San Joaquin Valley, roughly eleven inches per year on average in the Fresno area, is not enough to grow the crops the county now produces. Everything beyond dryland grain farming required irrigation.

The irrigation came from two sources. The first was groundwater, extracted from the Central Valley aquifer system by wells that by the mid-twentieth century were drawing down the water table faster than rainfall and snowmelt could replenish it. The land in portions of the valley has been sinking measurably for decades as the groundwater beneath it is removed. Some areas have dropped more than thirty feet from their original elevation. The second source was surface water delivered through the Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project canals, built with federal money and sold to agricultural water districts at rates that environmental economists have described, in a series of published analyses, as subsidized below the cost of delivery.

What the county grows with this water is a list that reads like a grocery store inventory. Grapes. Almonds. Pistachios. Peaches. Plums. Nectarines. Tomatoes. Cotton. Poultry. Milk. Fresno County is among the nation's leading counties for almonds and pistachios, and produces a significant fraction of the country's stone fruit and table grapes. The productivity is real. The accounting is incomplete. The full cost of the water that makes it possible has not yet been presented as a single number.