Occupying a central position in California, it is bounded by the Cascade Range to the north, the Sierra Nevada to the east, the Tehachapi Mountains to the south, and the Coast Ranges and San Francisco Bay to the west. 26. 2727 Presidio Drive, San Diego, CA 92103. According to Smythe, irrigation and profitable agricultural production were primary ingredients for inventing a new rural social order that allowed collective community life compliant with individualism. 62. 51. Kennedy quoted in “Exhibits for Fair Pour in by Hundreds,” San Diego Union, 5 November 1914. Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, (London: Verso, 1997), 30. This research aims at assessing the limited water resources for better crop-water irrigation and conservation of a drought affected agricultural area in California. Boosters assured that San Diego’s hinterlands would be earmarked for the agricultural market, but the rhetoric of intensive-farming and life on the land sounded distinctly “suburban” in the tone of their writings. He observed that the middle class farmer who worked a small unit was, not deprived of family life, and by having neighbors working small units is guaranteed the benefits of community life, good roads, good schools and churches and the same social advantages that town offers. Noted California booster Anges C. Laut wrote that as “regards water transportation, – San Diego thinks she is justified on counting heavily, for she is the nearest port of call of all Pacific ports for the fleets of the world passing through Panama.”5 San Diego businessmen were ecstatic about San Diego’s new railroad to Yuma, which hauled the staples of San Diego’s agricultural economy, both in the county and the Imperial Valley, outside of the region for the first time. Giannini Foundation Information Series 94-1. “Souvenir Guide of the ‘Out-of-Doors’ Exhibit of the Seven Southern Counties of California,” Panama-California Exposition, 1915, Ephemera Collection, Box 18, Folder 2, np., (SDHC). The urbanization of Southern Californian cities and agricultural boosterism spurred reclamation projects that exploited water resources so that Southern California, the Great Imperial Valley, and “what was once the Arizona Desert”, enjoys a supply of pure fresh water adequate to all the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people who have made this garden land their permanent homes.40, Due to the abundance of water and the temperate climate, one commentator asserted that “we [California] have the things in superabundance and at a time of the year which no other section [of the country] possesses.”41 In order to prove the optimal cultivation of agricultural commodities in the county, San Diego boosters produced a portrait of the viability of small farming, soil fertility, and overall production. As of Friday night, the 11-county Southern California region had only 13.1% of its ICU beds available, the California Department of Public Health reported. 25. San Diego’s open landscape and sunshine, the rich soils of its inland valleys, and a temperate frost-free climate were all attributes which helped San Diego boosters create a mental picture of California for potential visitors. Along with such diverse terrain, each area presents with its own set of challenges and threats that affect California. California's service industries, as a group, make up the largest part of the state's gross product. Commenting on the early twentieth century West, historian Donald Worster explains that the region was “only the latest in a long series of experiments in building an irrigation society.”4 San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition of 1915 promoted a vision of the American Southwest and Southern California as a region of Edenic abundance. California's agricultural abundance includes more than 400 commodities. Agnes C. Laut believed the fair embodied a powerful blueprint for California living, showing “southwestern irrigation farming, tea plantations, olive groves, orange orchards, date orchards, palm and bamboo plantations.”13 The Prospectus could claim that other expositions “had their freak, overgrown vegetables,” while at San Diego, the vegetables were “sprouting from the ground on [a] five-acre model farm.” Other fairs had farm machinery that was “beautifully nickeled and polished and standing inside a great machinery building,” while “San Diego’s Exposition has the farm machinery at work on the fields.”14, Nature, Southern California, and Agricultural Utopias. The San Joaquin Valley—California’s largest agricultural region and an important contributor to the nation’s food supply—is in a time of great change. 2, (May 1997): 149-184. 1649 El Prado, Suite #3 5. 8. Anglos, when they first poured into California around 1850, viewed the ranchero system as inefficient and wasteful of natural resources and they squatted on the claims of many an elite Californio family. People living in northern communities experience colder weather and more fog than those in southern ones, but all benefit from the moderating influence of ocean winds. Farmland two hours north and east of Denver, outside Fort Collins and its hinterlands!, is experiencing this increase in value due to expanding suburbanization; desirable less as potential farmland than for its residential development value. In 1850 California became the 31st state, and is now the third largest state behind Alaska and Texas. They came to establish missions in Baja and convert the natives to the Catholic lifestyle. The most ambitious agricultural reformer in the region was William Ellsworth Smythe. 1 (Winter 1975): 43. Smythe’s ideas filtered into the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, where he was a prominent witness and advocate of the 40 to 160 acre family farm.16 Implicit in Smythe’s ideas were notions that small farms bred democratic community life, while Federal irrigation and land laws allowed entrepreneurial farmers fair competition with larger growers. Most of the farms that come to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market from this area use well water supplied on site or have runoff catchment and storage systems, and a few get water from local irrigation districts. The leaders promoted a regional world’s fair in 1915 to boost their dreams and aspirations. Drought is one of the most severe natural hazards in the world. Farmers in the Wellington area of Northern Colorado, such as the Millers, face this encroachment of the real-estate market. The millions of tourists and local visitors not only glimpsed the economic opportunities of the region at the fair. This is an extreme case of land value differentials, the Denver metropolitan area, which serves as bedroom community to the mother city. 66. collections@sandiegohistory.org Don C. Bitler, Commissioner of the El Centro Chamber of Commerce, boasted that economic opportunity was not the only reason for residing there, it was his town’s “metropolitan aspect.” He believed that El Centro was “a place in which to live; where life may be enjoyed in its fullness.”49 Bitler voiced other sentiments that nostalgic Americans knew so well with the passing of the agrarian order and the emergence of the twentieth-century industrial state. Sign-up for our e-newsletter: William F. Spilling, of San Diego State Normal School, noted that “the bungalow is open to visitors, who are shown by the hostess the attractive features of a home which, although planned for rural surroundings, should be equally suitable to the city.”28, The bungalow on the model farm suggested that the modern rural home would maintain the same gender relationships and household responsibilities prevalent in the homes of urban America. Panama-California Exposition, Prospectus, 757. The first significant crop in the region was potatoes, the main consumers of which were nearby gold miners. The warmer semi-desert of Southern California supports the cultivation of subtropical fruits that cannot withstand temperatures below the high 20s. “Indians and Mexicans are not highly satisfactory or efficient farm hands,” said Hall, “but they can be had in large bands in the valley. Receive our weekly newsletter, California Farming Regions: The Great Central Valley, California Farming Regions: North Coast and Mountains, When it Comes to Food, One Size Doesn’t Fit All, Farmsteads of the California Coast: Swanton Berry Farm, CUESA's Farmers Market Winter Holiday Guide, CUESA Farmers Market Box for Curbside Pickup or Home Delivery. Aridity signalled the need for irrigation, and irrigation brought a systematic and predictable aspect to the production of agricultural goods. Summer quoted in “Exposition Shows Possibilities of Farming,” San Diego Union, 27 January 1915. The figure was 8.6% for the San Joaquin Valley region, composed of a dozen counties in the agricultural Central Valley and rural areas of the Sierra Nevada. The number of unoccupied beds in Southern California has steadily dropped as hospitals are flooded by unprecedented numbers of COVID-19 patients. It's positioned as the agricultural powerhouse of the United States. The most ambitious agricultural reformer in the region was William Ellsworth Smythe. 54. The maritime climate and resulting fog (held in by the mountains) keep the summers cool and winters warm – a key factor in the diverse and prolific agricultural production that occurs there. Finally, the dialectic of nature in booster writings (soil fertility, abundant water, longer growing seasons, and general opportunity) was the cultural equivalent to the economic over-development that plagues California’s cities and suburbs today, in addition to environmental destruction and how climate has become ideology in the region.64 Early twentieth-century Californian developers and land speculators clearly evaded (naturally so) the realities of social and economic opportunity, while promoting their own special interests, often using public monies and institutions to do so.65 The capitalist transformation of the land in Southern California and urban/rural interdependence mitigated against the success of the small farmers that William Smythe had envisioned. Hall, writing for Sunset Magazine, indicated that the “care of cotton does not require skilled labor, and as to the harvesting it is often true that a small child can pick more of the white crowns in a day than a grown man.”57 Racial thought among Anglo Americans throughout California in the 1910s generally defined racial minorities as part of the laboring classes. I pledge to do my best to advance the mission of CACASA, which is to educate, advocate, and promote equity for agriculture, weights and measures and all citizens of California. The six-county region’s median price reached $600,000 … Although not a socialist cooperative, such as Job Harriman’s Llano del Rio in Los Angeles’ Antelope Valley, nor a community modeled after the collectivist political theory of Mary Parker Follet or Herbert Croly, the San Ysidro colony resembled a competitive marketing cooperative. Among them, Hunter Orchards, from Siskiyou county, brings lavender, late cherries and Rocambole garlic. The figure was 8.6% for the San Joaquin Valley region, composed of a dozen counties in the agricultural Central Valley and rural areas of the Sierra Nevada. 15) Similarly, what is the name of the agricultural region in the southern tip of California… From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to the 1910s, Anglos resigned European American immigrants, Mexicans, blacks, Asians, and Indians into a descending racial and labor hierarchy based on employment desirability and other prejudiced “cultural” criteria.58. Vaught missed the opportunity to analyze the qualitative changes made in the small farm sector through irrigation, and how the booster literature evaded the difficult economic predicament experienced by small farmers in competition with large growers. 58. Panama-California Exposition, 1915, Prospectus, reference collection 712.5, 756, (SDHC). With millions of acres of farmland, California leads the U.S. in agricultural production. In Smythe’s mind, small landholdings should, Be available for the multitude possessing only small means. Crop expert F.C. One must note that the organization of The Ecology of Fear is Davis’ debt to Carey McWilliams’ Southern California Country. Laut, “San Diego: First Port of Call,” 118. This racial hierarchy also followed the creation of San Diego’s agricultural utopias throughout the city’s hinterlands. The Valley produces over half of the vegetables, fruits, and nuts in the United States. The southern tip of the valley has interior drainage and thus is not technically part of the valley at all. 619-232-6203, Located in Presidio Park AREA: 18,000 square miles (47,000 km2). The water supplies of Southern California, those of the Owens Valley and the Colorado River, were brought to the areas where agricultural boosters planned to attract small farmers and settlers. There are more than 400 commodity crops grown across California, including a significant portion of all fruits, vegetables, and nuts for the United States. The “irrigated society” aided the industrialization and predictability of crop yields for the small family farm, thereby altering water, power, and land tenure needs in Southern California. “Official Address of G.A. Lee, “The Little Landers Colony of San Ysidro,” 36. The figure was 8.6% for the San Joaquin Valley region, composed of a dozen counties in the agricultural Central Valley and rural areas of the Sierra Nevada. California spinach yield per acre is 60 percent higher than the national average. info@sandiegohistory.org Over a third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California. 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