Driving from Gold Country in Northern California down toward Los Angeles and the south, the route takes you either along the coast, or down the Central Valley.
On my recent road trip, I stayed in the valley until after the Bay area, and spent a lot of my sightseeing-while-driving and my pull-over-for-a-picture time amazed at the extent of agriculture in the valley—areas so vast and so organized and occasionally so green as to defy such a simple word as ‘farm.’
And, of course, I was right to be impressed. The Central Valley, about the size of the Dominican Republic, is one of the most productive farming areas in the world. Sprawling across parts of nineteen counties, it produces more than half of all fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the U.S.
The picture above was our One-Clue Mystery this week; given the highly generic nature of these images, it was quite a feat that George G identified not only the Central Valley, but guessed at specific parts of it!
When I drove through in March, some crops were well underway; others were still being sheltered in plastic-covered warmth and others being set out in the fields. In some cases, long strips of plastic covered rows of germinating seeds.
These are not the kinds of farms some of us think of, with a farmhouse at the center and clusters of houses nearby; many of these farms have large industrial-looking sheds but no houses; most of the workers live in the area’s cities. In the fields, if you look, you can spot clusters of cars and trucks, portable toilets and the like.
Behind all this, there are long histories: struggles over water—seven million of the Central Valley’s twelve million acres depend on irrigation—and labor. This is the area the Okies came to in The Grapes of Wrath in the 1930s, and it is where in the 1960s farmworkers led by Cesar Chavez organized the National Farmworkers Union. Neither of those struggles is truly in the past.
