The Nation's Breadbasket, California Agriculture

California produces more agricultural output than any other state in the country by a wide margin, and has for decades. Half the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables come from California soil. The Central Valley alone, stretching roughly four hundred fifty miles from Red Bluff to Bakersfield, is the most productive agricultural region on earth, acre for acre, for high-value crops.

How California became a farm empire is inseparable from its water story, its labor story, and its immigrant story. The railroads that arrived in the eighteen seventies brought refrigerated cars in the eighteen eighties, which meant California produce could reach Chicago or New York in days. Orange growers in Southern California built an entire marketing campaign, including the famous Sunkist brand, whose cooperative was formed in eighteen ninety-three and whose Sunkist name came in nineteen oh eight, around the idea that California sunshine was bottled in their fruit and could transform health and happiness three thousand miles away.

The labor that picked and packed all of it was overwhelmingly immigrant and often exploited. Chinese workers, then Japanese, then Filipino workers, then Mexican workers, and then the Dust Bowl migrants immortalized by John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath formed successive waves of agricultural labor. After the Dust Bowl migration of the nineteen thirties, the novelist Carey McWilliams called California factories in the field in a nineteen thirty-nine book of that title, documenting the industrial scale and the miserable wages.

The Bracero Program, a wartime guest worker arrangement with Mexico that began in nineteen forty-two and ran until nineteen sixty-four, brought approximately four hundred fifty thousand workers a year at its peak. When it ended, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association in Fresno in nineteen sixty-two, beginning the organizing campaign that would produce the United Farm Workers and the first collective bargaining agreements in American agricultural history.