In World War II’s aftermath, California’s rapidly growing military and civilian populations had to be fed, necessitating a further increase of cropland productivity. In the postwar era and through the 1950s commercial agriculture continued to be the leading sector in the state’s burgeoning economy. Throughout that time, crops accounted for 61 percent of the state’s agricultural output, and livestock 39 percent. Cheap, plentiful water, an inexpensive labor force, and further mechanization of farming lowered production costs, ensuring affordable prices for California farm products in a national market. By 1950 an “agricultural-industrial complex” had formed, taking modernization of farming to a new level. The lucrative fruits (and their derivatives such as wine), nuts, vegetables, and other plants from the state constituted, in effect, “green gold.”
Water for irrigation was the key to California’s farming economy. In 1951 the 117-mile-long Delta-Mendota Canal was in operation, transporting water southeasterly from Tracy in the San Joaquin Valley to Mendota, 30 miles west of Fresno, completing the Central Valley Project. Growers in that agricultural hinterland thereafter had a reliable supply of water for field irrigation. By 1960, in part due to irrigation, the Central Valley’s farm products were valued at $3 billion, nearly 9 percent of the total value of U. S. farm income. Similarly, growers in the southern desert valleys could count on ample quantities of Colorado River water to make their arid lands bloom into gardens.
Ample water, however, came at an environmental cost. Agribusiness, enticed by record profits and an expanding national market for California fruit, wine, wheat, cotton, and vegetables, tapped into aquifers (pools of underground water) to increase cultivated acreage. When aquifers were thereby drained, the ground above often sank, creating depressions 30 or more feet in depth. Subsided land tended to be dry, leaving a soil that became dusty and windswept.
A low-paid, dependable labor force was scarcely less important than water. Such farm workers were recruited from Mexico, underscoring the economic interdependencies between California and its Pacific Rim neighbor to the south. In 1942 the U. S. Department of Agriculture oversaw a program authorized by a Congressional Act and treaty that brought Mexican farm workers called braceros (the term means “strong-armed ones”) to harvest California crops. The federal government thereby assured agribusiness a captive labor force whose contracts with growers prohibited strikes. In 1957 growers had 192,438 braceros working in California’s fields. Two years later the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations) launched a campaign to stop the flow of these foreign workers into the United States on the grounds that they lowered wages and working conditions for American field hands. The program ended in 1964. As important as bracero labor was, it constituted only 30 percent of the entire migrant workforce from Mexico that harvested California’s crops.
Mechanization of farming further facilitated agribusiness. Diesel engines came into use on tractors and other equipment. Aircraft seeded, fertilized, and dusted crops with various chemical compounds aimed at preventing plant diseases and curbing insect blights. By mid-century an “agricultural-industrial complex” had emerged. The state supplied water
Figure 11.5 Dorothea Lange, First Braceros, c.1942. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.
From the Central Valley Project and scientists from UC Davis, California’s preeminent agricultural institution of higher education; manufacturers produced chemical fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides developed by UC Davis scientists; and large growers, assured of water and chemicals, expanded their acreage. The result was a network of ties between researchers, manufacturers, and agribusiness that made California the nation’s leading state beginning in 1948 in terms of the value of its agricultural output. Los Angeles County alone, according to University of California agronomist Rachel Surls, surpassed Iowa and all other Midwestern states in the value of crop production in the early 1950s.
World History
