The spread of irrigation broadly paralleled the intensification movement. Between 1869 and 1889, the share of California farmland receiving water through artificial means increased from less than one percent to five percent. Growth was relatively slow in the 1890s, but expansion resumed over the 1900s and 1910s. By 1929, irrigated land accounted for nearly 16 percent of the farmland.Data on the value and composition of crop output put California’s agricultural transformation into sharper relief. Between 1859 and 1929, the real value of the state’s crop output increased over 25 times. Growth was especially rapid during the grain boom of the 1860s and 1870s, associated primarily with the expansion of the state’s agricultural land base. Subsequent growth in crop production was mainly due to increasing output per acre and was closely tied to a dramatic shift in the state’s crop mix. After falling in the 1860s and 1870s, the share of intensive crops in the value of total output climbed from less than 4 percent in 1879 to over 20 percent in 1889. By 1909, the intensive share reached nearly one-half, and by 1929, it was almost four fifths of the total.3 Figure 1 provides further documentation of the transformation of California’s crop mix over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Figure shows how cropland harvested in California was distributed across selected major crops over the 1879-1997 period. The acreage data reveal that in 1879,nft hydroponic wheat and barley were grown on over 75 percent of the state’s cropland whereas the combined total for the intensive crops was around five percent. By 1929, the picture had changed dramatically. Wheat and barley then accounted for about 26 percent of the cropland harvested and the intensive crop share stood around 35 percent.
In absolute terms, the acreage in the intensive crops expanded over ten times over this half century while that for wheat and barley fell by more than one-third.Data on shipments of California fresh, dried, and canned fruits and nuts reveal the sector’s spectacular expansion over this period. During the 1870s and 1880s, growth rates exceeded 25 percent per year . Shipments continued to grow at robust rates of about eight percent per annum over the 1890s and 1900s. By 1919, California produced 57 percent of the oranges, 70 percent of the prunes and plums, over 80 percent of the grapes and figs, and virtually all of the apricots, almonds, walnuts, olives, and lemons grown in the United States. In addition, California produced significant quantities of apples, pears, cherries, peaches, and other lesser crops. The spectacular growth in California production of specialty crops had important international consequences as traditional Mediterranean exporters of many crops were first driven from the lucrative U.S. market and then faced stiff competition from the upstart Californians in their own backyard of northern Europe. California production significantly affected the markets and incomes of raisin growers in Málaga and Alicante, prune growers in Serbia and Bosnia, and citrus growers in Sicily.Explanations for the causes and timing of California’s structural transformation have long puzzled scholars. The traditional literature yields numerous causal factors, including: increases in demand for income-elastic fruit products in eastern urban markets; improvements in transportation, especially the completion of the transcontinental railroad; reductions in the profitability of wheat due to slumping world grain prices and falling local yields; the spread of irrigation and the accompanying breakup of large land holdings; the increased availability of “cheap” labor; and the accumulation of knowledge about California’s environment and suitable agricultural practices. Yet a careful investigation of the transformation yields a surprising result: much of the credit for the shift to intensive crops must be given to exogenous declines in real interest rates and to “biological” changes as farmers learned more about how to grow new crops in the California environment. Isolated from America’s financial markets, California farmers faced high, even astronomical, interest rates, which discouraged capital investments. Rates fell from well over 100 percent during the Gold Rush to about 30 percent circa 1860. The downward trend continued with real rural mortgage rates approaching 8 to 12 percent by 1890. The implications of falling interest rates for a long-term investment such as an orchard were enormous.
As one Bay Area observer noted in the mid-1880s, the conversion of grain fields to orchards “has naturally been retarded in a community where there is little capital, by the cost of getting land into orchard, and waiting several years for returns.”Calculations indicate that the break-even interest rate for the wheat-to orchard transition was about 10 to 13 percent . These estimates conform fairly closely to the interest rate levels prevailing in California when horticulture began its ascent. A second key supply-side force was the increase in horticultural productivity associated with biological learning. Yields for leading tree crops nearly doubled between 1889 and 1919. When the Gold Rush began, the American occupiers knew little about the region’s soils and climate. As settlement continued, would-be farmers learned to distinguish the better soils from poorer soils, the more amply watered land from the more arid, the areas with moderate climates from those suffering greater extremes. Occasionally overcoming deep-seated prejudices, farmers learned which soils were comparatively more productive for specific crops. California fruit growers engaged in a similar time-consuming process of experimentation to find the most appropriate plant stocks and cultural practices. Existing varieties were introduced from around the world, and new varieties were created. In the early 1870s, USDA plant specialists established the foundation for the state’s citrus industry with navel orange bud wood imported from Bahia, Brazil. Plums and prune trees were brought in from France and Japan; grape vines from France, Italy, Spain, and Germany; and figs from Greece and Turkey. Plant breeders also got in on the act. The legendary Luther Burbank, who settled in California in 1875, developed hundreds of new varieties of plums and other fruits over his long career.In part, the growth of horticultural knowledge occurred through the informal “folk process” highlighted in William Parker’s classic treatment of American agriculture. Over time, the process of research and diffusion became increasingly formalized and institutionalized.As an example, a series of major citrus expositions, held annually in Riverside from the late 1870s on, helped popularize the new Bahia orange variety. An emerging group of specialty farm journals, such as the Southern California Horticulturist, California Citrograph, and California Fruit Grower, supplemented the stalwart Pacific Rural Press to spread information about fruit growing.The California State Board of Horticulture, formed in 1881, provided an active forum for discussion of production and marketing practices, especially through its annual convention of fruit growers. The Agricultural College of the University of California, under the leadership of Eugene Hilgard and Edward Wickson, intensified its research efforts on horticultural and viticultural problems after the mid-1880s.
By the early 1900s, the USDA, the state agricultural research system, and local cooperatives formed an effective working arrangement to acquire and spread knowledge about fruit quality and the effects of packing, shipping, and marketing on spoilage and fruit appearance.These efforts led to the development of pre-cooling and other improved handling techniques, contributing to the emergence of California’s reputation for offering higher-quality horticultural products. This learning process eventually propelled California’s horticultural sector to a position of global leadership.More generally, the example of the state’s horticultural industry highlights the important,nft system if relatively neglected, contribution of biological learning to American agricultural development before the 1930s.A second major transformation took place in the early twentieth century with the increased cultivation of row crops including sugar beets, vegetables, and most notably cotton . These changes represented an intensification of farming with significant capital investments and often led to shifts onto what had been marginal or under-utilized lands. The advent of cotton, which by 1950 had become the state’s most valuable crop, offers another important case study in the continuing evolution of California agriculture.From Spanish times, visionaries attempted to introduce cotton into California on a commercial basis. A variety of factors, including the high cost of labor, the distance from markets and gins, and inadequate knowledge about appropriate varieties, soils, etc. doomed these early efforts. The real breakthrough came during World War I when high prices coupled with government research and promotional campaigns encouraged farmers in the Imperial, Coachella, and San Joaquin Valleys to adopt the crop. Figure2 illustrates acres harvested, bales produced, and yields per acre, from 1910 to 1964. The tremendous absolute increase in California’s cotton acreage since the 1920s contrasts with the absolute decline nationally. California’s acreage in cotton ranked 14th out of 15 cotton-producing states in 1919; by 1959 it ranked second.Several factors distinguished California’s cotton industry from other regions. First, cotton yields were typically more than double the national average. High yields resulted from the favorable climate, rich soils, controlled application of irrigation water, use of the best agricultural practices and fertilizer, adoption of high quality seeds, and relative freedom from pests. Second, the scale and structure of cotton farms was remarkably different in California. From the mid-1920s through the 1950s, the acreage of a California cotton farm were about five times that of farms in the Deep South. As an example of the structural differences between California and other important cotton states, in 1939 farms producing 50 or fewer bales grew to about 17 percent of the output in California, but in other leading cotton states, farms in this class produced at least 80 percent of all cotton output. One-half of the output in California was grown on farms producing more than 200 bales. For the nation as a whole, one-half of the output was raised on farms producing fewer than 13 bales.Thus,it is not surprising that California’s gross income per cotton farm was almost nine times the national average.Other distinctive features of California cotton farms were their more intensive use of power and their earlier mechanization of pre-harvest activities. In 1929, a California farm was almost 20 times more likely to have a tractor than a Mississippi farm.The Pacific Rural Press in 1927 offered a description of the highly mechanized state of many California cotton farms: “[M]en farm in sections…By the most efficient use of tractor power and tools, one outfit with a two-man daylight shift plants 100 acres per day, 6 rows at a time, and cultivates 70 acres 4-rows at a time.”The more rapid adoption of tractors created a setting favorable to further modernization. When picking machines became available, farmers already possessed the mechanical skills and aptitudes needed for machine-based production. The larger size of cotton operations in California and the more intensive use of tractors reflected a fundamentally different form of labor organization than that which dominated the South. By the 1940s, on the eve of cotton harvesting mechanization, most cotton in California was picked on a piece-rate basis by seasonal laborers under a contract system.Although conditions varied, a key ingredient was that a labor contractor recruited and supervised the workers, and dealt directly with the farmer, who might have had little or no personal contact with his laborers. This type of arrangement implied different class and social relationships from those that prevailed in much of the South. The California farm worker was more akin to an agricultural proletarian than to a rural peasant. The proverbial paternalism of southern planters toward their tenants had few parallels in California. As with many crops, California cotton growers also led the way in harvest mechanization. Many of the factors discussed above, including pre-harvest mechanization , relatively high wages, large-scale operations, high yields, a flat landscape, and a relative absence of rain during the harvest season all aided in the adoption of the mechanical harvester. Spindle picking machines first appeared on a commercial basis following World War II. In 1951, over 50 percent of the California crop was mechanically harvested compared to about 10 percent for the rest of the nation. At that time, about 50 percent of all the machines in operation in the United States were at work on California farms.16Similar forces—early adoption of large-scale operations and advanced technologies—characterized California’s livestock economy. The broad trends in livestock production in California since 1850 are reflected in Figure 3, which graphs the number of head of various types of livestock in the state as aggregated into a measure of animal units fed.The region emerged from the Mexican period primarily as a cattle producer.