>Beware... there were a great number of family farms - even in places like
>the Imperial, Salinas and San Fernando Valleys (as well as Orange and Santa
>Clara county) - in California at one time before massive federal and state
>irrigation systems.
But, as you also say, it was never like back east. And how many is "a great number"? The larger point is that California agriculture, by far and for a long time, is agrobusiness with the volume at 11. (I'm going off The Conquest of Bread by Richard Walker--- see below.)
btw Walker co-wrote a paper on California as pivot of the current recession that I linked to here last week. I highly recommend it. Walker is one of the crew of lefty geographers at Berkeley that Chuck ran into at the Harvey lecture. A brief version of this paper was in LBO a couple issues ago, and I have it on good authority that a further worked-up version is forthcoming in New Left Review.
Here's the link again: <http://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/pubs/reports/Walker_93.pdf>http://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/pubs/reports/Walker_93.pdf
http://www-geography.berkeley.edu/peoplehistory/faculty/R_Walker.html
The Conquest of Bread 150 YEARS OF AGRIBUSINESS IN CALIFORNIA
California agriculture has been described as ‘one of the wonders of the world,” an ever-evolving cornucopia, supplying one-third of the table food consumed by Americans. The earth’s most intensely farmed non-tropical landscape, California exemplifies capitalist agriculture in its purest and most advanced form. Indeed, many of the defining characteristics of 21st century world agriculture – such as irrigation districts, subcontracting, petro-farming, feedlots, biotechnology and concrete dams – were pioneered in California.
Nevertheless, as geographer Richard A. Walker argues in this pathbreaking and comprehensive account, California’s practically miraculous manipulation of nature has been purchased at the price of epic environmental degradation and ferocious exploitation of labor. Unlike the Midwest, California’s history of ‘manufacturing green gold’ has been built upon an entirely and purely capitalist model from its origins and without precedent, setting a historical vanguard. Ironically agribusiness has drained and poisoned the waters, reengineered plant and animal species, created toxic and saline wastelands, and forever transformed the iconic landscape of the Golden State.
California’s ‘factories in the fields’ (in the famous phrase of Carey McWilliams), have defeated every attempt by land reformers, family farmers and farm laborers to improve an exploitative social system. Three generations after Steinbeck, and despite the heroic struggles of Cesar Chavez, the overwhelming majority of California’s farmworkers are still trapped in seemingly continual poverty, subject to the unchecked power of the growers and prey to racism and discrimination. The squalid housing and unsafe working conditions in the fields that shocked the country in the 1930s persist in California’s rural valleys in the early 21st century.
As Walker points out, it is ironic that this paradigmatic socio-economic system – California’s state-of-the-art corporate agribusiness – has been relatively neglected in modern agrarian studies. THE CONQUEST OF BREAD redresses the balance from a unique viewpoint that focuses on both history and geography, and on the evolution of agribusiness and on its organization.
Walker thus provides the reader with an overview of the crop specialties and commodity networks that make California such an unparalleled green machine. Simultaneously he exposes the evolutionary links in the food change, showing how a continuous emphasis on productivity and high-speed growth have allowed the state to outpace agriculture elsewhere.
Full of thunder, paradox and surprise, THE CONQUEST OF BREAD offers general readers and specialists alike an unprecedented wide-angle view of California agriculture. Walker deftly decodes an agro-industrial landscape that even most Californians sometimes find inexplicable and mysterious.
THE NEW PRESS $27.95 CLOTH, 382 PAGES 1-56584-877-2 OCTOBER 14, 2004