I’ve worked in the fields of the Salinas Valley since I was 18, tending grapes and picking broccoli.

Agricultural work has many contradictions. It is both steady and uncertain. I work constantly but don’t have one job. Instead, I work different jobs for different contractors during the picking season.

I could not have survived without doing this work, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive doing it. Farmwork is getting easier in some ways, and harder in others.

I immigrated here from Guanajuato, Mexico, at 18 to find work and help support my large family. I had relatives in the Salinas Valley, and not long after I arrived, I met my husband, a Jalisco boy who also works in the fields. We had the first of our three children when I was 19 and soon settled in the small city of Greenfield, on U.S. 101, about 40 minutes south of Salinas.

When the kids were young, I tried to work less, skipping some seasons. But we needed the money, which meant more time away from them. Sometimes I found myself working 14 hours a day, six days a week—and getting paid not hourly, but by the box. I remember making just $1 for each box of broccoli I gathered and packed.

The work came with physical costs. I’d have pain in my back and neck and right arm. When I began working with grapes, I found, as most workers do, that I had to pull so hard on the grapevines that I would sometimes fall on my back. The pain could make it hard to sleep. Jorge is good at giving massages, but that isn’t always enough.

It was easy to get sick, especially since the companies didn’t provide gear for working in the wind and in the rain. I’d sometimes get nausea and headaches from the herbicides and insecticides. I believe that my work, including exposure to chemicals, contributed to the complications I experienced in my last pregnancy and to the health and development challenges of my youngest child.

Getting care for injuries and illness has always been very difficult. Companies didn’t offer sick days or leave days to go to the doctor or clinic if you were sick or hurt. And getting the right treatment might mean a trip up to Salinas.

Also, there were no medical benefits or healthcare coverage. My children, as native-born Americans, have always had their healthcare covered under Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. But as an undocumented worker, I was not eligible for Medi-Cal. When I had to have a gallbladder operation, we were stuck with a hospital bill for $24,000 that we can’t pay.

Some, but not all, of these working conditions have improved in recent years, because of changes in the state laws and regulations for farmworkers.

The laws now require that we be paid hourly. With the higher state minimum wage, I make $16.50 per hour. We also get paid sick leave—at first, it was three days a year, but last fall, it was raised to five. And Jorge and I, like other undocumented people in California, were made eligible for Medi-Cal last year.

Our maximum hours a week are now 40. That means more time for family, for church, and for my volunteer work with Líderes Campesinas, which advocates for and organizes female farmworkers.

The trouble is that it’s often hard to get 40 hours of work these days. Sometimes I get 30 hours or less.

Together, my husband and I now earn $43,000 a year. That’s more than before. But the cost of living in California rises faster than our wages. We can’t come close to buying our home here in Monterey County, where even small houses cost $600,000 or more. And renting a three-bedroom house in Greenfield can cost $3,000 or more a month.

When all three children lived at home, we paid $2,800 to rent a three-bedroom. Now that our kids are growing up and moving out, we have a smaller place with two bedrooms for $1,600 a month.

You may have read about agricultural companies providing housing for workers. But that housing is almost always for guest workers who come here from Mexico or other countries under visas, stay for a few weeks or months, and then go home. I’ve never received any housing support.

Despite all these challenges, our lives have been blessed. I’ve always made enough money to send $200 to $300 a month to my mother. And we are so very proud of our three children.

Our older son, 26, graduated from Fresno State and is working in Monterey. Our 20-year-old daughter is entering her junior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Our 17-year-old son, soon to be a high school senior, is raising a prize pig that he will sell to help pay for college next year.

But we also feel frustrated at the obstacles to a better future.

My husband I have both tried to go to school. I’ve long wanted to become a teacher and work in early childhood education. I’ve taken some community college classes and even did some training. But I haven’t been able to finish a degree or get a job—because I’m undocumented. My husband, who wants to be an electrician, faces the same barriers.

The biggest thing this country could do for us would be to legalize our immigration status.

We have been living here, and paying taxes, our entire adult lives. We should be like anyone else—able to train for better jobs, collect unemployment when we lose our jobs, buy life insurance and better health insurance, and find a house that we can purchase.

Perhaps, someday soon, all of that will be possible.

The post California Farmworkers Stand on Uneven Ground appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Is there a family trait more common than keeping secrets?

These secrets can have hidden costs. When we leave a place or person behind, we don’t know what becomes of them. We miss out. We cut them out of our familial history.

These secrets can even make us miss the entire life of a loved one—a burrowed family secret, not passed down, and brought to light only in late harvest.

That’s one lesson of the most thought-provoking California story I’ve come across in years. It’s told with heart and heightened imagination by David Mas Masumoto, the Central Valley writer and farmer, in his recent memoir Secret Harvests.

The book ranges widely but at its center is Shizuko Sugimoto.

She was the sister of Masumoto’s mother. But he didn’t know she even existed until about a decade ago, when a Fresno funeral home called to ask if Sugimoto, who was 90 and appeared near death, was related.

He was skeptical about the call at first—could this be a scam?—but he went to meet her and began talking with family members about her. In the process, he pieced together many elements of the life of an extraordinary California woman whose very existence had been a family secret.

Sugimoto was born in Fowler, California in October 1919, daughter of a family of farmworkers of Japanese heritage. At age 5, she contracted meningitis, which attacked her brain. No one called a doctor. No one knew what to do.

The illness left Sugimoto with an intellectual disability. She would never again complete a full sentence or thought. In the recollections of Masumoto’s family, she was described as “confused, fuzzy, irritable, and difficult to comfort, traits that will linger for a lifetime.”

She was 23 in 1942, when the family was ordered to evacuate to Arizona as part of the government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans. The burdens on the family were immense—it was just before the harvest, and they were being evicted from their rented home. How could they survive in a concentration camp?

The father went to Arizona, and died within a month. But Sugimoto remained in California. A few days before the evacuation, the family turned her over to a county sheriff, making her a “ward of the state.”

It’s believed that Sugimoto lived in various institutions from 1942 until the early 1950s. It’s unclear where. Masumoto learned that some relatives had spent years searching for her after World War II, and may even have visited her at a facility in Porterville. The story goes that once they found her and visited her, they believed that she was doing better than she might have done with her own family, who were trying to rebuild their lives after incarceration. So they left her where she was, and resolved not to speak of her again.

Other family members who had known Sugimoto were left to assume she had died. But she had lived, moving between institutions for decades. Masumoto would learn that she spent several years, until the 1970s, at the DeWitt State Hospital in the foothills above Sacramento. For a time, she was at a Fresno-area facility only a few miles from his farm in unincorporated Del Rey.

Sugimoto had been living at the Golden Cross nursing home for 13 years when Masumoto received the call asking if he was the relative of a person whose existence was unknown to him.

“How do you tell your family that after seventy years, you ‘found’ their sister and aunt?” he writes. “None of us had seen her since 1942. No one knew anything about her. There are no photographs of her existence.”

When he went to see her, she had suffered a stroke and was in bed, dying.

“I am struck by her size, small and compact, folded in a fetal position. She appears comfortable, breathing gently as if asleep. She lays motionless and alone, real and authentic. This is not historical research conducted safely behind words, photographs and artifacts. I touch her warm hand, feel a bony shoulder, hear a soft sigh as she moves her head to one side. She embodies all that is wrong and right in the world, the sorrow and joy of life, the guilt and happiness of family. She delivers light to our dark past; she complicates and completes us.”

But that was not the end of the story. Masumoto got to know the staff that cared for Sugi, as they called his aunt. In the book, he praises them, and gives his due to the system that kept her alive into her 90s. The caregivers tell him of her feistiness, how she loves to tease and tickle them, how she adores music and dancing, how she wanders the halls, and how she drinks her morning coffee and then throws the cup behind her.

“She is a real character,” he writes. “Sugi has a home here. … Her disability is not a punishment and not a cure… She refuses to believe anything is wrong with her.”

As Masumoto and his family were making plans for her funeral, one day, amazingly, Sugimoto woke up. She returned to moving through the halls. She playfully kicked Masumoto in the leg. “Shizuko came to life and visits us,” he writes. “She is a living ancestor, awakened to illuminate. She no longer lives in the shadows and now steps into the light of family and our history.”

When she later died, shortly before her 94th birthday, she was the oldest client at the Central Valley Regional Center. At her funeral, the family passed out plastic cups. Mourners pretended to sip coffee, and then tossed the cups blindly behind them.

Sugimoto was interred in the family mausoleum, and Masumoto dedicated a bench at the Fresno Fairgrounds—she loved the Big Fresno Fair—to her and “those with disabilities and special needs who were separated from their families” during the World War II relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

When I spoke with Masumoto recently, he talked about Sugimoto’s story, and the roles racism and discrimination against people with disabilities played in it. But we also talked about secrets, especially in families, and all that we miss when we keep them.

“I now force myself not to look away,” he said, adding: “Memories can and should change.”

The post What’s the Cost of a Family Secret? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Russia and Ukraine control about 11.2 percent of the world’s arable land, and supply 28 percent of its exported wheat. A substantial portion the world’s most fertile wheatfields lie along the two nations’ borderlands south and east of Kiev, stretching to the Black Sea. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, most of those croplands have become battlefields.

It is unknown exactly how much productive capacity for wheat has been damaged since the war began, but the situation is dire. The Statistics Service of Ukraine estimates that roughly 40 percent of Ukraine’s cropland may not be planted this year, resulting in a 54 percent decrease from 2021 wheat production levels—an amount of lost wheat equivalent to that consumed by 151 million people in an average year. With U.S. wheat yields also expected to drop 15 percent this year because of drought, the world faces food shortages on a global scale. Much of humanity, including food insecure nations, relies on Ukrainian and Russian wheat. Without it, millions may go hungry—and wartime politics and international relations could suffer a destabilizing jolt.

Images of wheat are stamped on currencies and engraved upon temples. Our oldest stories equate wheat with salvation, and with life itself. And wheat is ubiquitous in conflict. Armies have often targeted wheat storage for capture and destruction. Control of wheat protects allies and coerces opponents. Modern history shows us wheat’s central role in large-scale human conflict and evinces the enormity of the global disaster unfolding in Ukraine.

During the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, increased efficiencies in transportation enabled countries to produce specialized goods and generate surpluses to facilitate trade, laying the foundation for our current global system. Between 1868 and 1902, as the internal combustion engine mechanized food harvesting and processing and powered faster trucks, ships and trains, the cost of wheat shipments dropped 75 percent. It became economically feasible to move wheat from the U.S. to Britain, or from Odessa to Britain. What had been a local commodity began to become part of an interconnected international system. This interconnectedness is further illustrated by the fact that most of the wheat grown in Kansas and throughout the Great Plains today shares a common genetic heritage with Russian and Ukrainian wheat. For example, the prolific Turkey Red varieties were first introduced to the U.S. in 1874 by immigrants from the Volga River region of Russia.

But while efficient transportation created more interconnections between different commodity markets and enabled international trade, it also created new vulnerabilities in economic warfare. Wheat was crucial in World War I and World War II. In both conflicts, combatants, struggling to feed their populations and starve their adversaries, sought control of rich agricultural areas in and around Ukraine. World War I revealed the fragility of nascent global supply chains for grain. In 1914, over 90 percent of the world’s wheat was exported from only seven countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, Romania, Russia, and the United States. Net wheat importers such as Britain proved vulnerable; for example, prices in the United Kingdom rose by about 60 percent during the war, leading to severe rationing and bread riots.

Wheat exports from Russia, Romania, and what is now Ukraine, were disrupted when Turkey entered the war at the beginning of November 1914 and closed the narrow Turkish straits. Meanwhile, drought reduced Australia’s and Canada’s wheat crops, and Argentina exported 10 percent less wheat than the previous year as well. India embargoed exports to reduce prices for its internal market. U.S. grain, reinforced by hardy Russian wheat strains, remained plentiful—but prices, buffeted by fluctuating growing conditions and wartime chaos, were unstable from 1915 through 1921.

Price variability and blockades caused human suffering and negatively affected war efforts. Historically, when nations are at war, their populations and their armies require higher calories—thus the old Napoleon-attributed aphorism: “an army marches on its stomach.” Even populations that were not directly involved in conflict were affected by price increases as food became scarce and unaffordable, which led to malnutrition and social upheaval.

World War II was marked by greater stability in wheat and other staple grain production, as nations implemented lessons of the earlier conflict by reinforcing supply lines and stockpiling what wheat they produced. But this was easier for the Allied powers—which included major wheat producers the United States, the Soviet Union, and Romania—than for smaller wheat-producing Axis powers. In particular, Germany and Japan shared a concern about producing enough food for their large urban populations. Thus, wheat became an objective and a weapon of war.

Sometime around 1940, German SS-Obergruppenführer leader Herbert Backe convinced Adolf Hitler to try to divert Ukrainian grain flows from Soviet cities to Germany in what was known as “The Hunger Plan,” to sustain the Third Reich and impose death by starvation on 30 million Soviets. By 1942, Germans consumed more than 7 million tons of Ukrainian grain and tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians starved.

Global wheat prices doubled from February 1941 through the end of the war. And by 1948, as Ukraine and Russia contended with failed crops and poor transport infrastructure, prices doubled again leading to malnutrition within Europe and other countries, experiences that drove many governments, including the Soviet Union, to prioritize national food production in the later part of the century.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Russia pursued a policy of strategic self-sufficiency and surpluses large enough to support the global market for wheat and other critical staples like sunflower seed and oil, rapeseed, and corn. Despite economic sanctions, Russia is still poised to be the world’s top wheat exporter in 2022 and 2023.

Like earlier conflicts, today’s war in Ukraine has enormous potential to disrupt economies and lives not only within the region but beyond. The United Nations and World Food Programme is warning that food insecurity has worsened in the past year for 193 million people across more than 20 countries—of these, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen require urgent humanitarian interventions to avoid starvation and death.

Low-income countries are most affected by tightened wheat supply and price volatility since they will have to increase the proportion of income they expend on food. If governments subsidize food purchases, then precious resources will be diverted from other investments like healthcare, sanitation, and education.

Impacts from upended harvests and exports are staggered, and until detailed damage assessments of Ukrainian infrastructure can be performed, predicting the damage to wheat exports will be difficult. Logistical challenges could conceivably outlast the war. One reason for Ukrainian and Russian dominance over wheat exports is their farms’ proximity to the Black Sea and global shipping routes. But critical food transport systems are under attack. Ukraine’s Mariupol port has been destroyed, and other ports are occupied, or under blockade. With Russia closing off access to the Black Sea, Ukraine wheat exports may face bottlenecks on other transportation routes.

In anticipation of global wheat shortages, governments around the world are spurring their farmers to plant more acreage to replace missing Black Sea grains. In the United States and Australia farmers may plant more winter wheat than usual. Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s breadbasket, announced temporary export quotas on wheat grain and flour of 1 million metric tons and 300,000 metric tons, respectively. And India, the world’s second largest wheat producer after China, announced it will withhold its wheat exports this year, about 900,000 metric tons, to meet domestic food security demands. With wheat harvest scheduled to begin in July in Ukraine, the ability to effectively store that crop along with other crops harvested in September and October is critical. Without proper storage, wheat will spoil, further reducing food availability.

While questions abound, this is certain: Any war between Russia and Ukraine is a war over critical nutritional resources for humanity. Bread is life.

The post Bread and Conflict in Ukraine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the Ojai Valley is also a place in peril. That’s because the water source that keeps this inland Ventura hamlet thriving is nearly dry.

Lake Casitas reservoir was built in the late 1950s when decades of plentiful rain hid the true nature of California’s arid climate. Back then, the official projections for water-resources potential were pretty optimistic. Today, that story has changed dramatically, and any other approach to water supplies seems beyond our conventional ways of water management.

I came to the Ojai Valley with my husband about 15 years ago, when the disruptions to the climate regime still seemed distant. But two consecutive deep droughts have brought water uncertainty front and center.

It’s this fear of water shortages that is dominating conversations and creating antagonisms: farmers versus city dwellers, farmers against farmers, water officials vs. everybody. We all know that the snowpack in the mountains is dwindling, so if we run out of water and average temperatures continue to climb, what then?

I am a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability with several decades of research on California land use, water, energy and the question of sustainability and climate change. I’ve done research with biologists, hydrologists, engineers, climate scientists and public health experts looking at environment and sustainability, environmental justice, policy and politics, and conducted a great deal of quantitative research on water resources. I am also a native Californian, in love with the state.

Thinking about the state’s future and its magnificent resources and agricultural productivity, the fact that much of agriculture today is intertwined with dependence on hydrocarbons—from fertilizers, fumigants and pesticides to diesel and plastics—poses a predicament. These don’t just override the natural conditions, but damage them, seriously. This means that continuing to grow crops and rear livestock using highly consumptive 20th-century methods in a leaner, dryer 21st century will compound ecological crises and implode the agricultural sector. It’s inescapable that in order for California agriculture to survive, and even flourish, with less water and fewer hydrocarbons, we need nothing short of a revolutionary re-envisioning of the future without carbon.

The politics of this change will be enormously contentious, difficult, and protracted. But consider the alternative: The path of agriculture today is toward extinction. A changing climate is here, and water is not something that can be manufactured. With more dry years, and more groundwater extraction, the path toward groundwater depletion is clear. That’s why though what I propose below may seem fanciful and impossible, I offer them as thought pieces, as sketches of a possible future that provides livelihoods and sustenance, a future that the current trajectory cannot deliver.

Before globalization, which is dependent on being able to rapidly ship products anywhere across the world using fossil fuels, people ate far more seasonally. It was unimaginable to eat bell peppers in the wintertime in northern climates, for example. But now, the global south grows crops for the global north to ensure foodstuffs are available all year round. Reduce or eliminate fossil fuels, and a new agriculture will have to emerge for a post-hydrocarbon fuel world that will rely on local and regional resources. People will eat more seasonally and will eat fewer high-energy dense foods, such as meat. Different regions across the U.S. and the world will return to growing what can be grown in those places, supplemented by hot houses heated with compost (for example) in cold regions, or eat mostly tropical crops in tropical regions.

This means California will no longer be a large exporter of food, domestically or, especially, internationally. California agriculture will be primarily destined for Californians. Food will be more expensive and perhaps our diets will be more limited, but that does not mean there necessarily will be less to eat. Rather, we will simply not be able to source the world for our food, often to the detriment of growers here, in Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere.

One of the most challenging issues, fundamental to the type of transition described above, will be the question of corporate large-scale land holdings, and the price of land. With dramatically less water available, and the shift away from hydrocarbon agriculture, land prices may plummet on their own. But it may also be that big farms will break up, as they will no longer be viable without water and without the ability to cultivate lands using large-scale, fossil fuel intensive machinery.

Corporate owners might be compensated, but at the pre-water development land costs, and perhaps subtracting the cost of land and water remediation necessary because of the extensive chemical contamination. (Under the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which authorized federal water projects, farmers were to sell acreage above 160 acres, or 320 for married couples, at pre-water prices, or pay for the full cost of their share of the project. They never did, and under President Reagan that law was overturned, handing over to large-scale corporate agriculture the investment of the American taxpayer in water delivery systems.) If the return on investment for corporate growers declines, they will exit. And since water will be scarce and fuel for commuting non-existent, turning farmland into housing subdivisions will not be an option.

A new agroecological agriculture will, however, create many new jobs. Though lands that were brought into production by the sheer application of fossil energy will go out of production, and the footprint of agriculture in the state will shrink, many more people will work the land. This has the potential to allow us to adopt more sustainable farming practices, modeled on historical examples of regions with climates such as ours, like the Eastern Mediterranean region where water systems were managed by experts adept at passive water systems, where and when the resource was available.

Peasant farmers grew crops based on knowledge about seeds and traditional practices passed from generation to generation and developed over many centuries. Each skill- and knowledge-base was specific to place—to the soils, flora and fauna, climate, slopes, light, and seasons. Practicing small-scale intensive agriculture, growing a diversity of crops, and applying organic inputs to increase or maintain soil fertility, these land artisans were decision makers responsible for feeding their families and others in the community.

We have such land artisans today, although their skills and knowledge are rarely appreciated. They anchor small towns. They create local economies and connected communities. And they have been advocating for such work for decades.

Back in 1996, the international peasants’ movement came together during the Food and Agriculture Organization World Food Summit in Rome to lay the foundation for a 21st-century approach via a policy framework. The coalition, comprised of working-class farmers—known globally as peasants—and Indigenous communities around the world, pointed to the urgent need for an organized, international response to the crisis facing agriculture. They advocated for practices based on agroecology—agriculture that respects local ecologies and fosters wholesome and productive interactions between plants, animals, and humans in order to keep ecosystems healthy and grow food for humans.

The agriculture movement they have built is based on the understanding of the mutual benefits that accrue when farming and livestock rearing practices respect the long-term need for ecosystem functions to endure. Around the world, organizations like the National Family Farm Coalition in the U.S., the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and Nyéléni Europe and Central Asia Food Sovereignty Network are leading this campaign, which calls for food sovereignty, participation in agricultural policy, and land reform so that workers can retain their land. In addition to farming itself, this movement encompasses occupations including composting, raising beneficial insects, bee keeping, building and maintaining small-scale irrigation systems, manufacturing and maintaining new electric-powered agricultural machinery and processing equipment, food processing, weaving, the making of rope and twine, technical assistance, and local commerce such as distribution, retail, and social services.

Vibrant, modest, local economies will eventually thrive as a result of this agriculture. But none of it will be possible without a politics for a new future, a politics of reclaiming California for the common good, a politics that posits a positive future against an apocalyptic one. It is difficult to construct alternatives within the dominant system, but change does occur, the past is not the present, nor is it destined to be the future.

Take worker cooperatives, for example, which have been growing rapidly, by a net of 35.7 percent since 2013; such cooperatives have an average pay ratio, between the highest and lowest paid workers of 2:1, in contrast to the average pay ratio in the corporate world of 303:1. Current labor trends—including people seeming to prefer to stay home than work for poor wages—also represents a possible shift in thinking about commitment to the current system, which may lead to the kind of transformation that enables other shifts.

All we have to do is look to the Central Valley, which produces a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of the nation’s fruits, nuts and other table products, for the problems California will face if we continue to follow the path we’re headed down now. There, small towns are shrinking or have disappeared. The workers who live near the fields are served by archipelagos of franchise restaurants, gas stations, and chain hotels. Highway 99 rumbles through these towns, often below grade, both destroying the urban fabric and by-passing it, causing the Valley to reek of pollution from heavy truck traffic and diesel-burning locomotives in addition to the tractors and irrigation pumps whose toxic mix of pesticides and herbicides are contaminating the water or the air.

This story of poverty and ill-health will become the story of our state unless we develop a different ethics of practice, one where modesty, and living within our means is the foundation of a better and wholesome future where life of all kinds thrives. It is a pathway along which it will be possible to repair the rift between humans and nature and reconnect humans with the rest of life, upon which we so ineluctably depend. The driving force of this new ethics is about loving place.

I see glimpses of this other future in the Ojai Valley. Ojai is a transliteration of the Chumash word A’hwai or “moon,” and vestigial ancient oaks that the Chumash lived with still dot the orchards and town. For those who choose to live here, learning to farm within the limits of this small place will ensure the viability of the town and the surrounding agricultural land.

This means learning about place. It means learning about its groundwater resources—how to reinfiltrate stormwater effectively when it does rain (and it will, buckets), and then applying it carefully through up to date and well-maintained drip systems, and ensuring there is enough mulch to maintain soil moisture and build soil fertility. And it means planting locally appropriate plants in gardens, refraining from building individual swimming pools, being thoughtful and aware of limited water resources, and treating it as precious and life-giving.

The idea of living with limits needs to reach the Valley. In response to our changing climate, rather than bring in more water, despite the obvious fact that water from elsewhere does not exist and/or has been long promised to others ahead in the hopeful queue, the Valley should invest in proven and reliable groundwater resources that do exist here and can be managed for long-term sustainable yield. This does not represent hardship; it represents recognition of place and living in that place, fully.

Similarly, a new path for California may seem revolutionary in its vision as it will mean dissolving current systems, reappropriating land through expropriation for the benefit of the many, and insisting on mutualism and collaboration for new social organizations. But it’s a vision that can be possible if we decide this is the future we want, and resolve to follow a new ethic, one of mutual respect, one of compassion, and one that is aimed toward nurturing life.

The post California Needs an Agricultural Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The thrills continued when my uncle tried to ski down the southern face of this active volcano. Back then, Lassen Peak was mostly covered in snow through midsummer, so a diehard skiing down its face in July was hardly notable. But doing so by moonlight was—and remains—half-baked, pun emphatically intended.

Nowadays, the peak’s snowpack succumbs to the summer sun much sooner, and thus is more suitable for an e-bike daredevil with a death wish. The Lassen Ski Area resort, where my professional ski bum uncle originally took up the sport, had closed in 1993, in part because of poor snowfall.

In retrospect, the fate of Lassen Ski Area was a preview of California’s, and the world’s, impending environmental and economic reckoning. Some adaptations will be successful and even beneficial, such as the Lake Tahoe region’s ski resorts pivoting to summer recreation. Other adaptations will leave scars and trauma. Ultimately, many climate change adaptations come down to math and tradeoffs. In that framework, we need to think harder—across the state—about the snow and water we have left.

Water is life, the saying goes, but snow is prosperity. California’s annual agricultural output is approximately $50 billion, or just 2 percent of the state’s GDP. Yet the state’s agricultural industry uses 80 percent of its annual water supply. Our agricultural brethren have fed a lot of people with crops grown with that water. But this whole venture presumes water supply stability courtesy of the Cascade-Sierra snowpack.

But for how much longer? Our warmer and drier climate is reducing the snowpack’s historically ample “excess” water that trickles down to streams, lakes, and rivers each summer. Record low reservoir levels threaten to idle hydro-electric dams like Lake Oroville, and may contribute to rolling blackouts this summer. State and federal water managers have significantly cut water allocations to agriculture. We’ve just emerged from the severe drought of 2011 to 2017 into a new one with inequitable human, environmental, and economic costs we won’t know for years.

Statewide policy and political actors are clinging to solutions aimed at fortifying the status quo, primarily the continued Frankensteining of the desert on the south and west sides of the Central Valley into an agricultural behemoth. The status quo also includes the perpetual expansion of the insatiably thirsty Southern California mega-region and big water conveyance infrastructure projects like Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Delta tunnel.

There are some new ideas. Researchers from UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz are more imaginative in a study suggesting that all 4,000 miles of canals be covered with solar panels—reducing evaporation and producing clean energy! But so far absent from the water discourse is a policy considered best practice for confronting another climate change villain, sea-level rise.

That policy is managed retreat.

On the coast, managed retreat means abandoning housing and development to the sea. But more broadly, managed retreat is a risk management approach for evaluating land use of environmentally sensitive or at-risk property and infrastructure. It’s the simple and prudent acknowledgement that we can’t rebuild and replace everything mother nature reclaims, but we can repurpose the land for other, positive uses.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency projects sea-level rise of 3 to 5 feet by 2060, and 7 to 9 feet by 2100. For every foot of sea-level rise, the ocean moves inland by 300 feet. Think of your favorite beach and how far it is from the water to the closest street or home. Now from the water imagine one football field inland. Anything inside that football field will be underwater from just 1 foot of sea-level rise.

Managed retreat isn’t popular with everyone, especially those with vulnerable beachside property. But once storm surge after storm surge makes you uninsurable and FEMA declines reimbursement for rebuilding in the new high-tide zone, you’re taking the full loss. A managed retreat approach actively and collaboratively migrates communities out of harm’s way before catastrophe strikes. It’s easier to move on a sunny day than in waist-high tides. Living examples of successful managed retreat are the cities of Pacifica and Marina, in San Mateo and Monterey Counties, respectively.

Managed retreat also needs to be on the table for the San Joaquin Valley, where the water situation ceased being sustainable some time ago. A number of local communities lack safe drinking water, and pumped-in groundwater is causing the land itself to sink, in some places up to 28 feet.

Managed retreat would make more sense than anything we’re doing now. We must start encouraging and incentivizing people and farms in drought-stricken regions dependent on water transfers to migrate somewhere more hospitable to agriculture and other forms of human development.

Here’s the key question our leaders are running away from: How much more profit-driven stress can the state’s water supply be subjected to before the ecologies of whole regions—the California Delta, the Sacramento Valley—collapse? There’s only one right answer to that question: We don’t want to find out.

If we stop diverting so much water to agriculture, especially in the hot and drier southern parts of the San Joaquin Valley, then the Sacramento Valley and the Delta stand a better chance of enduring through climate change. This doesn’t mean the end of agriculture. Rather, the goal is to preemptively and collaboratively adapt this thirsty industry by downsizing it to match a diminished water supply.

Migrating agriculture north to the Sacramento Valley can’t be a one-to-one trade where every venture survives. The Sacramento Valley is approximately one-half the size of the San Joaquin Valley, and at most, 15 to 20 percent of the land could host relocated agriculture. The majority of San Joaquin agricultural businesses won’t survive in their current form—but some could find new life by converting their fallowed fields into solar farms to help the state achieve its goal of fossil fuel-free electricity by 2045. Or we can allow the San Joaquin Valley to revert to the desert it was before our forefathers planted a garden in it.

Our leading export crops, almonds and pistachios, are the most obvious candidates for downsizing, along with cattle ranching and the thirsty alfalfa grown for cattle feed. To ensure new water-hogging almond orchards aren’t planted in the North Valley, the state can incentivize a transition to low water usage crops.

None of this is easy—it requires our elected leaders to find new wisdom, wean themselves from big agriculture campaign donations and influence, and make holistic and geographic decisions for the state’s long-term health. But things will get even harder if we wait until nature gives us no more choices.

We don’t want California to end up like Lassen Ski Area, defunct because it no longer had the snow upon which it relied.

Which brings me back to my uncle’s harebrained moonlit ski. He lost his balance after 20 feet and slid down the peak on his side and back. He volcano body-surfed, and walked away with nothing but a minor scratch on his forearm.

I still can feel the beating summit wind, and I recall thinking that, viewed from above, fireworks resembled jellyfish. Today, I think about how that vista may not last forever. The state is so dry and fire-prone, that we don’t have long before Fourth of July fireworks, like that Lassen snow, are things of the past.

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Cultivars, or “cultivated varieties,” are variants of domesticated plants adapted to specific uses, climates, and soils. Soybean Digest printed the names of varieties recommended for specific locations over an outline map of the U.S. that extended far enough west to include a corner of Texas.

Unlike names for apples or other public-facing produce, the names for soy cultivars were not intended to entice consumers with appetizing imagery. Instead, they were a pragmatic means to keep a wealth of genetic lineages straight: single proper names chosen, it often seemed, for reasons known only to the breeders. What to make of “Clark” and “Kent,” often recommended for neighboring counties in the North? Or, in the South, such varieties as “S-100,” “CNS,” and “JEW 45” (bred by South Carolina farmer John E. Wannamaker, who lent his initials)?

There were, however, discernable shifts in naming practices. In the early 1900s, when the USDA began taking an active hand in importing thousands of samples of soybeans from Asia and sorting them into cultivars for American farmers, names indicating geographic origin, such as “Peking,” were common. By the late 1940s, names like “Mandarin” and “Hongkong” had become increasingly rare. Breeders instead chose names for soybeans, still widely regarded as a “botanical immigrants,” that more firmly rooted them on American soil. Northern breeders favored the names of presidents—“Adams,” “Madison,” “Lincoln”—and tribal nations: “Chippewa,” “Blackhawk,” “Ottawa.” Southern names of the time included “Arksoy,” “Volstate” (for Tennessee, the Volunteer State), and “Pelican” (in honor of Louisiana’s state bird).

These practices were inconsistent, though, next to one that emerged in the South in the mid-1950s that embodied a very specific regional identity. Somehow, a century after losing the Civil War, Confederate generals had returned—at least on the inside pages of an obscure trade journal. A new form of geographic identity was appearing in the South, beginning with a smattering of “Jackson” and “Lee” cultivars. By the last map of the series, in 1966, the rout of older varieties was nearly complete. They were crowded out by “Hood,” “Hill,” “Hampton,” “Stuart,” “Bragg,” “Hardee,” and “Pickett.”

This was not simply an invasion on paper. It pointed to a dramatic transformation of Southern agriculture, in which new soybean varieties played a major role once held by cotton. It was also a vivid indication of how this transformation largely excluded African Americans sharecroppers, who were being actively pushed off the land.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

As much as the Confederate cultivars reflected large structural forces at play, they were largely the work of a single man, responsible both for the painstaking scientific work it took to breed them and for the choice of this particular naming practice.

Edgar E. Hartwig was not a born Southerner. He grew up in Minnesota and received his Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Illinois. He joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1941. Founded in its current form during the Civil War, the USDA was tasked with conducting research of direct benefit to American farmers, often in cooperation with state agricultural research stations. In 1948, Hartwig was assigned to oversee the cooperative soybean breeding program for 12 Southern states: the 11 former Confederate states, plus Oklahoma. The North/South divide in cultivar breeding was not unusual. Soybeans, like many crops, are sensitive to conditions that vary markedly from north to south, such as summer daylength and the length of the growing season. An unintended consequence: soybean breeding did rather precisely map onto American sectional divisions.

Hartwig’s outsized influence on Southern soybeans was, in part, due to his consummate skill at the exacting and time-consuming technique of backcrossing. Previous generations of American soy breeders had largely focused on sorting through existing lineages from the rich genetic heritage of Asia to find those well adapted to the country’s needs. Backcrossing was a more active form of breeding, in which two variants were mated, and then one was bred with successive generations of the resulting crosses until the other’s contribution was diluted to a small cluster of genes or even a single desirable trait.

This ability to mix and match genes was crucial for the success of soybeans in the South. Earlier in the 20th century, existing cultivars in the region were generally short and bushy plants, grown for hay. Increasingly, however, the real money in soybeans was coming from growing beans that could be processed into oil and animal feed. This required plants tall enough to be harvested by combines, pods not easily shattered by mechanical harvesting, and high yields of long-maturing beans rich in fat and protein. Northern cultivars had these traits, but breeders needed to combine these qualities with adaptations to Southern conditions, including shorter summer days and more numerous plant diseases. Hartwig was adept at the work, and as his cultivars went into circulation, soybean acreage in the 12 states in his program increased sixfold between 1954 to 1974 to almost 16 million acres, one quarter of the nation’s total at the time.

While the supply of new cultivars was crucial for this growth, it was only because fundamental changes in the agricultural economy of the South had created demand. New Orleans, for instance, grabbed a big share of the growing soybean export market to Europe, which sought the crop to help raise the postwar standard of living through increased meat production. Initially, this benefitted Midwestern farmers who could ship down the Mississippi, but Southern farmers soon recognized the opportunity as well. Soy acreage in Louisiana accordingly shot up from 73,000 acres in 1954 to 1.8 million in 1974. This period also saw the rise of the “broiler belt,” ranging from Arkansas, down into the Gulf states, and up through Georgia and the Carolinas, where caged chickens bred for breast meat were fattened on soy-enriched feed. The poultry industry helped Georgia’s soy acreage increase by a factor of 31 in 20 years.

Above all, soy appealed to farmers because it was not cotton. For decades, the region had struggled with gluts of its main cash crop and consequent low prices. The government periodically attempted to limit supply through acreage allotments and marketing quotas, but with limited success. Reformers had long sought to convert the South’s cotton monoculture to mixed rotations of small grains, oats, and winter wheat, but the Southern landowners were uninterested in any system that did not provide them a robust cash flow. This is what Hartwig’s soybeans provided, enabling them to cut back cotton production. By 1960, American farmers were planting a little more than 15 million acres of cotton, down from almost 45 million acres at the crop’s peak in the 1920s.

This might provide the best clue for Hartwig’s commitment to naming cultivars after Confederate generals. (Beyond acknowledging the obvious fact that this was his practice, he never publicly discussed his reasons.) As an agricultural modernizer, he was selling Southern landowners on an entirely new, mechanized system of agriculture, of which soybeans were only one element. Confederate generals, memorialized throughout the region in monuments and the names of parks, towns, and military bases, were a readily available form of nostalgia to drape over disruptive innovation.

Key to the effectiveness of this pitch was the race of the intended audience, which remained a constant as the region shifted from sharecropping to mechanized farming. Nearly 90 percent of landowners were white, who were initially attracted to the prospect of increased earnings. With cotton, they had customarily sold the fiber while allowing their tenants to sell the cottonseed to local mills. Now they could dispense with the labor of sharecroppers and keep the profits from soybeans for themselves. As a Louisiana State University bulletin calculated in 1943, it took 184 hours of labor for each acre of cotton, compared to 10 hours for soybeans.

The tradeoff was the need to invest more heavily in equipment, such as combines, as well as fertilizers—particularly potash and phosphates—and pesticides. As Hartwig emphasized in the many articles he wrote for such venues as Soybean Digest, the large yield of beans promised by his new varieties required this kind of capital investment. At a meeting of farmers in 1975, he in fact chided them for only getting 22 bushels of beans per acre. “You ought to get 35,” he told them. At the same meeting, however, an agricultural economist reported that soybean processors had “soybean meal coming out of their ears” in a tight buyer’s market, indicating that there was no guarantee that farmers would recoup their investment.

This highly competitive environment cut both ways. As the number of farm operators decreased by more than half between 1954 and 1987, the number of farms in the South partly or fully owned by their operators rose from 71 percent to 91 percent, making the region’s agriculture in this sense more equal. But it was those best positioned to receive credit and government aid who benefitted. Such farmers were predominantly white. African Americans, poorer to begin with, suffered from discriminatory practices by both private and public lenders, notably the Farmers Home Administration, which systematically shut out Black applicants from government loans.

In 1920 there were 920,000 nonwhite farms in the South, a majority of them operated by tenants. In 1954, this had fallen to 430,000, or 26 percent of the region’s farms. By 1987, the number would drop to a mere 27,000, or 3 percent of farms in the South. This decline represented the virtual disappearance of Black sharecroppers, but also of tens of thousands of Black owner-operators unable to compete on a fair basis. Ten years later, the number was 19,000.

So as Southern agriculture became less unequal, it also became much whiter. Even at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Hartwig could thus avoid pushback from Black farmers over his choice of symbolism.

The influence of the Confederate cultivars waned after the 1970s, when commercial seed developers—given more patent rights to their seeds through the Plant Variety Protection Act—largely took the reins from USDA breeders like Hartwig. With a deluge of new cultivars, proper names were supplanted by alphanumerical designations like “AG2702” and “5344STS.”

In the meantime, Hartwig persisted in his enthusiasm for Confederate cultivar names, suggesting an embrace of Lost Cause mythology that went beyond strategic persuasion. He used all three of Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest’s names on separate cultivars. “Lamar” was probably named after Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar of Georgia, who, while not a general, was famed for being the last Confederate officer killed in the Civil War. Lamar also invested in the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade as late as 1858. Hartwig’s last Confederate soybean was “Lyon,” released in 1993, three years before his death.

By then, he was widely honored as the “father of soybeans in the South.” An endowed chair in Soybean Agronomy at the University of Mississippi was named after him and his wife. He was awarded the USDA Superior Service Award and the USDA Distinguished Service Award.

The Confederate soybean cultivars have receded into the past, but they were part of a larger pattern of systemic racism whose legacy can be felt to this day. Facing decades of pressure, the federal government has made halting progress toward redressing the wrongs it committed to farmers of color, most recently by promising them $4 billion of debt relief in the latest COVID aid package. Critics such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have decried this as reparations. In this context, is worth recalling Hartwig’s soybeans as one illustration of the USDA’s longstanding, built-in assumption that it served, above all, the interests of white farmers.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that the pelican is Louisiana’s state bird.

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Most Americans know little, and think less, about this complicated and neglected region. Novelist Manuel Muñoz describes the valley, where he was born and grew up, as “a strangely unexplored area of our nation. As a region, it gives so much of its bounty to the rest of the country and receives little in return.” By bounty, he means food. He could also mean the bounteous way valley migrants and immigrants have nurtured our collective American story.

The agriculture of the valley today is a joint creation of 19th century Mexicans, Californios, and Chinese, as well as 20th-century African-Americans, Sikhs, and Okies—along with dozens of other ethnic groups, like Assyrians, Croatians, Volga Germans, Russian Molokans, Mien, Hmong, and my own family of Basques and Béarnais. Farming was the lure for many migrants, who often found themselves in a triangular squeeze of resentment, rejection, and accommodation. While some who came to exploit the land then found themselves exploited, many immigrants bettered their lives.

By the 1890s, settlers from Japan, Sweden, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Turkish Armenia, and other regions helped make the center of the San Joaquin Valley “one of the more cosmopolitan regions in the country,” says the scholar David Vaught. By 1900, farming colonies blurred into new settlements, “creating a vast, unbroken region of small farmers.”

That’s when my Béarnais-American grandfather grew wheat and barley as a tenant farmer along the San Joaquin River. After World War I, with the expansion of irrigation and the development of deep-well turbine pumps, he moved to the interior valley to plant a vineyard and cotton on his own forty acres. One-third of the nation then lived on farms and ranches. Today, after a stunning hundred-year shift, a scant one percent of Americans remain on the rural lands that feed us.

Nicknamed “The Other California” because its character is distinct from the state’s tourist and metropolitan haunts, the San Joaquin Valley joins the Sacramento Valley to stretch 450 miles through nearly three-fifths the length of the state. It comprises the largest area of the richest soil in the world. Most farmers don’t like the generic term Central Valley because it expunges the distinctiveness of the two valleys that grow more than 230 crops and one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. This expanse is also more populated than Oregon and larger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined.

A bit of agricultural and environmental history is important here. At the heart of the Great Depression, during California’s worst recorded drought, farms were going under as their wells pumped dry. Unless something was done, it was predicted that the area’s underground aquifer wouldn’t last another thirty or forty years. So the federal government launched the Central Valley Project, joined later by the California State Water Project, building dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, tunnels, and lateral ditches to send water up and down the state. An irony of the water projects is that they killed off half the smaller family farms in the valley, while helping bigger and richer corporate “farmers” like Standard Oil, Prudential Financial, Southern Pacific Transportation Company, Getty Oil, and Shell. “Get big or get out” became the valley apothegm. My family got out.

In his novel Census, Jesse Ball writes:

No one but farmers understands fairness.
What is there to understand? I asked.
That there isn’t any.

A story that doesn’t often get told is how many valley farmers and ranchers, like most of my neighbors of immigrant and migrant stock, hung on. California farms remain smaller on average than in the rest of the nation. A current aerial flyover map of Madera County in the center of the state, the area where I grew up, shows hundreds of small parcels of twenty acres or less. Of 1,507 farms and ranches in the county, most are small: half are less than 60 acres and 1,095 are smaller than 180 acres. Only 118 are 1,000 acres or more. Some small farms get rented to larger ones. The original 40 acres once owned by my grandfather are now leased for table grapes to the biggest agribusiness investors in the San Joaquin Valley.

The problem of vanishing water—a defining characteristic of both the urban and rural West—is still extreme in the San Joaquin Valley. All farmers and ranchers, large and small, and the workers on the land suffered during this decade’s seven-year drought. With no federal or state surface water, farmers let millions of acres go unplanted, costing agriculture billions of dollars. Hot, dry winds stirred up fungus spores from the dirt, causing a silent epidemic of deadly valley fever, mostly among the poor. A front-page photo in the Fresno Bee in 2015 showed Cha Lee Xiong on his small twenty-acre farm near Sanger, hunkered down in a barren field with dirt in his cupped hands after his well went dry.

Advertisements like these recruited farm workers from around the world to California’s San Joaquin Valley. Courtesy of Frank Bergon.

In 2016, as the drought neared its end in other parts of California—but not in the valley—a controversial and sullied presidential election revealed a widening gulf between the country and the city. I came to see this split while writing about the valley, where mostly conservative small-town and rural residents sensed a clamor for their votes without a matching desire for understanding or empathy.

My initial intention was merely to write profiles of valley people I knew. Eventually my portraits became a book about generations of immigrants, migrants, and their descendants, who remain suffused with a prevailing ethic from the 19th century. An Old West state of mind emblazoned the career of the Dust Bowl migrant Darrell Winfield, who for thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man without abandoning his trade as a working cowboy. My valley friend Fred Franzia, the legendary creator of the best-selling wine in history, popularly known as Two-Buck Chuck, consciously adopted the work ethic of his Italian grandmother who’d immigrated to the arid valley of rattlesnakes and jackrabbits.

In the new millennium, the San Joaquin Valley endures as one of the most racially and ethnically rich areas in the country. Two out of three people are racial or ethnic minorities, and two out of five minorities are foreign-born. Belief in the valley as a place of individual freedom and economic opportunity for those who pursue education and work hard—a faith American at its core, though Western in its intensity—has become harder to maintain beyond a wistful dream in an era of gated communities and suburban isolation.

Not all is bleak. Sal Arriola, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border with his family without authorization when he was three, now farms the biggest vineyards in the country for the family-owned Bronco Wine Company. Irene Waltz, of mixed German and Chukchansi heritage, told me she experienced no discrimination in valley schools, worked for nearly forty years as the manager of grape contracts for Constellation Brands, and served as treasurer and now insurance executive for the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians. Albert Wilburn, a valley high school valedictorian and student body president who became the first black captain of the Stanford football team, and a physician, remembers his boyhood valley as a place of tolerance.

“We assumed tolerance,” he told me. “It came to us through osmosis and was as natural as drinking water and breathing air.”

From many rural and small-town people I heard how the valley gets a bum rap. Or no rap at all. A common refrain arose: “It’s like we don’t exist. We’re invisible.” If we are to understand America as it really is, the San Joaquin Valley and all its people must become visible.

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Inspired by the personalities of the creatures she encountered, Scott photographed the faces of animals who are “generally viewed as numbers rather than individuals”—livestock. Most of her subjects live at farm sanctuaries around the country. These animals, posing against simple black or white backdrops as if they were human models, are accompanied by a few sentences about the breed and a glimpse into the soul of that particular animal. Isaac, a Texas Longhorn cow who suffered abuse, feels most comfortable around goats. Ben David, a Yorkshire Cross pig (he of the envious lashes) was the runt of his litter. And Huacaya alpaca Bobbert shows affection by nibbling on clothing.

Environmental concerns as well as recent books and documentaries about factory farming are changing the way many Americans eat. Scott is taking a different approach by shifting the very way that we see the species that walk this earth alongside us.

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The circular pattern, however, is different from the regular patchwork many people imagine traditional farm fields to be. The shape is the result of the center pivot irrigation, a development of the post-World War II era that profoundly changed the course of American food production. In fact, the rise of center pivot irrigation turned the Plains—an area that had been dry land for more than 100 years—into a place that could sustain thirsty crops such as corn, creating an agricultural and economic powerhouse that carries the seeds of its own destruction.

In the early 19th century, the first Euro-American explorers labeled the region between the Rocky Mountains and the 100th meridian as the Great American Desert, a depiction that had remarkable staying power. For many years, American political leaders and other observers decried the prairies as waste, unable to support civilization, even though Native Americans had made homes there for thousands of years. The geological record tells us that many of those explorers who saw a desert arrived in drought years. Those who arrived in wetter years saw the region in greener hues, presuming that the land was a potential garden simply waiting for a gardener.

This promise of a garden-in-waiting was partially true. Very quickly, settlers and boosters discussed lending nature a hand through irrigation projects. Diverting water from rivers through canals provided water for thirsty crops such as alfalfa and corn. Such surface irrigation had limits, though. Users needed to be close to rivers and were dependent upon the variable, seasonal flow of those waters.

By the late 19th century, farmers had started pumping groundwater from wells, first using power from windmills—which became ubiquitous—and later from gasoline engines. But these techniques were expensive, far beyond the reach of most settlers. Even for those who could afford them, it was almost impossible to pump enough water to make a difference on a large scale. The groundwater was deep, sequestered between and among rock, gravel, and clay in a vast underground reservoir now known as the Ogallala Aquifer.

Groundwater irrigation from the aquifer received a boost in the 1930s and 1940s, when pumps powered by automobile engines accessed water from greater depths. (Before long, government investment in rural electrification helped farmers power a growing share of the irrigation pumps with electricity; later, low-cost natural gas became the fuel of choice.) Irrigators laid pipes across fields of crops, with sprinklers spaced at intervals. The practice was labor-intensive, requiring a lot of workers to move the pipes for seedbed preparation, for cultivation of row crops, and for harvest.

The 1930s also witnessed a protracted drought across much of the country, which brought into question the suitability of the region for agriculture. It was during the “Dirty Thirties” that a portion of the region in Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and the Oklahoma panhandle, suffering from extreme conditions, became known as the “Dust Bowl.” Government soil experts asserted that the solution was a retreat from agriculture across much of the country. They proposed classifying each acre according to its productive capacity and buying out land deemed as “submarginal.” The end of the drought and the onset of World War II, however, allowed the resumption of maximum production and scrapped the dreams of land use planners.

In 1948, an innovative Nebraska farmer named Frank Zybach developed a new type of sprinkler system, the center pivot, which he patented in 1952. Placing the pump at the center of the field next to a well, irrigation pipes supported by trusses were mounted on wheeled towers that could make a circuit of the field under their own power, leaving that distinctive circle pattern. Gun-style sprinklers sprayed water out from the pipes at set intervals, with smaller nozzles closest to the pivot and the largest nozzles at the end of the line. The system could cover 133 acres of a 160-acre field, and didn’t have to be disassembled by workers when it was time to plant, till, or harvest.

Ever more powerful motors allowed irrigators to increase the systems’ scale, with the largest set-ups covering all but the corners of a 640-acre section of land. Over time, farmers positioned sprinkler nozzles closer to the ground, resulting in less evaporation. During the return of drought conditions in the 1950s, those who had chosen to irrigate had an advantage over those who did not, which convinced many latecomers to get on board. In 1993, historian John Opie observed that industrial irrigation that emerged in the Great Plains was a three-legged stool supported by fertile land, plentiful and low-cost groundwater, and inexpensive fuel.

Center pivot irrigation was a technological triumph—and it also transformed the agricultural geography of the country. With feed crops becoming available in the Great Plains and easily portable via the new interstate highway system, feedlots and meatpacking plants moved to the region. An abundance of low cost, non-unionized labor and low-cost water for raising livestock and processing meat led the area, where 160 acres of land could previously support just one steer, to become a center for some of the world’s largest high-density livestock feedlots with hundreds of animals per acre. Large-scale swine production facilities have thousands of animals under one roof. Any one of these farms requires more water for drinking and waste removal than a typical city: A farm of 20,000 hogs uses far more water than a community of 20,000 people.

Water for irrigation and large-scale animal feeding didn’t only grow crops and livestock, it gave life to the Great Plains communities that depended on agriculture. Families and laborers shopped at local retailers and deposited wages in local banks, keeping small towns alive, and irrigators paid the property taxes that sustained local governments. Center pivot irrigation supported local high schools, clubs, churches, and a whole way of life that would have literally dried up if the fields were less productive.

The drought of the “Dirty Thirties” had exposed the limits of the Great Plains, raising the question of whether large parts of the region were suitable for agriculture, but the adoption of center pivot technology changed everything. For irrigators and their allies, the development of the center pivot “crop circle” was entirely beneficent. History, they could claim, was on their side. By the 1980s, irrigators from Texas to Nebraska sunk tens of thousands of wells, drawing on the massive Ogallala Aquifer. Irrigation, combined with new hybrid seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides continued to bring high productivity to an arid region.

Center pivot irrigation equipment at work in a cotton field. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It is little wonder, then, that for many people on the Great Plains, water regulation is a dirty word. Attempts to manage groundwater through local authorities during the 1970s relied on voluntary compliance—and there was so much money to be made with cheap water that regulation, many irrigators reasoned, constituted a violation of the natural order of the Great Plains and wasn’t worth the effort. It is easy to see why: The center pivot irrigation regime had come to seem inevitable, like a phenomenon of nature. When I was young, growing up in the area, I thought it was as natural as the seasonal migration of geese, ducks, and Sandhill cranes, and as inevitable as tornado season.

Center pivot technology epitomizes much of what it is to be an American. It was a technological triumph that enabled a production revolution. The people who built it took pride in their achievement: They were American inventors who created something out of almost nothing. But the system also drew on less-productive American impulses—not just ingenuity and drive, but also unchecked resource use and ever-increasing scale.

In recent years, it has become apparent just how finite the Ogallala Aquifer is. While water levels have increased in some areas, in most parts of the aquifer they have declined at a rate faster than natural recharge—sometimes by a foot per year—because of production agriculture. As of a decade ago, geologists estimated that there were less than 100 feet of saturated thickness remaining, with a minimum of 30 feet of thickness needed for successful irrigation.

By the time irrigators sensed the limits of groundwater irrigation, the region was stuck in what historians call an infrastructure trap: The success of center pivot irrigation has thwarted alternative visions for developing these dry areas. Capital investment in wells, pumps, center pivots, other equipment, and buildings have made it difficult to transition to less water-intensive farming practices. Consequently, change has been modest.

Twenty-five years ago John Opie noted that some irrigators adopted water-saving technology, but those measures did little to slow the overall draw on the aquifer and did not involve rethinking irrigation. Opie reported that some irrigators even admitted that when the aquifer is gone, the region’s economic lifeblood will be gone, but continued to irrigate anyway.

In 2013, a group of farmers in Kansas created a 99-square mile conservation zone in which all participants reduced their water use. As one farmer stated, “We had to change the culture. We took water for granted.” As of 2018, many of those who reduced their water use claimed that agriculture can be profitable even with reduced pumping. But efforts like these are the exception to the rule. The unwillingness to compromise short-term gain for long-term sustainability, of course, is just as American as the ingenuity that created center-pivot irrigation the first place. What a strange bind that for residents of the Great Plains, unchecked depletion of a major groundwater source has foreclosed options for future growth in the region.

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Today, Americans politics are partisan and polarized. But as a political movement made up of lower-middle-class farmers, the Nonpartisan League (NPL) took advantage of the direct primary—a new innovation at the time—to bypass entrenched politicians and parties.

During the early years of the 20th century, a broad impulse for popular government transformed election law—particularly primaries—in many northern and western states, but North Dakota took it further than some. Rejecting the notion that politics belonged only to professionals, citizens put themselves in the thick of things—replacing the mediating force of a political party with a self-organized polity. Parties, which had formerly controlled candidate selection, remained powerful, but voters could now challenge the establishment players who often used backroom deals and convention shenanigans to stay in power.

From the start, the movement backed anyone who supported farm-friendly economic policies, regardless of that candidate’s party affiliation. Later this alternative to politics-as-usual famously established state-run industries, but also—as a correspondent in The Nation noted in 1923—ensured that “a sentiment and point of view had been established in the minds of hundreds of thousands of farmers and ranchers.” By empowering regular citizens across the West and Midwest to see themselves and their society anew, it created a resurgence of “We the People” government that sits at the heart of the nation’s best democratic traditions.

North Dakota was especially ready for political reform because of its history. Established in 1889, it had an almost entirely agricultural economy, giving the outsiders who transported and processed the crops it grew outsized political influence. Talk of cronyism and the indirect control of state politics by Minneapolis-based companies defined life in the capital, Bismarck, from the start.

Agitators for change found a ready audience for basic political reforms, but few imagined that the state’s farmers could transcend their many differences to organize the way they did. The farmers were far from homogeneous, but included Icelanders, Czechs, Germans from Russia, Norwegians, Irish, Ukrainians, Swedes, Germans, Danes, Hungarians, native-born Americans, and a handful of African Americans. They were all settled on land that had been taken from Native Americans. In some rural districts, distinct congregations of Protestants and Roman Catholics and Jews jostled up against each other, while outside Ross, North Dakota, a small community of Syrians practiced Islam. In fact, census data show that North Dakota had the highest proportion of foreign-born residents of any state in the country before World War II.

Despite their differences, by the early 1910s, farmers across the vast wheat belt of western Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and eastern Montana all faced a common problem: the overwhelming economic clout of the Minneapolis-based flour millers and wheat traders who dominated agricultural commodities markets. Grain farmers who shipped their products to Minneapolis for processing—nearly all of them—saw little of the profit that their wheat ultimately produced. Crop prices, controlled by milling and transportation companies, were low. Transportation costs, set by railroad companies, were exorbitant. The combination left farmers cash-strapped. As the rest of rural America experienced an agricultural boom, failed mortgages and hard times defined farm life on the Northern Plains.

Abhorring electoral politics, which they saw as sullied by corruption and power, wheat farmers in North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana responded to their economic plight by organizing themselves into cooperatives, attempting to build power without getting involved in politics. They hoped that cooperatives might create a more equitable marketplace, one in which farmers might hold even odds to support their families. Their Equity Cooperative Exchange brought smallholders together to create democratically-run, customer-owned grain elevators across the Northern Plains. Farmer-owners made sure that more of the profits from wheat stayed in farmers’ pockets.

But in the 1910s the Exchange, realizing local organizing had its limits, tried to expand its reach by establishing a large terminal grain elevator to compete with those run by large corporations. Minneapolis-based companies responded by refusing to permit the Equity Cooperative Exchange to trade in that city’s wheat market. So, in 1915, the group’s leaders turned their attention from economic cooperation to state-level politics. Public policy, however flawed, seemed to offer the only avenue for change.

In North Dakota—and soon thereafter, in other states—wheat farmers used the Equity Cooperative Exchange as the foundation for a new political organization: the Nonpartisan League. The NPL built on existing relationships to encourage farmers to prioritize shared economic self-interest over ethnic, cultural, and religious divides. It also pushed farmers directly into electoral politics. Members canvassed door-to-door to recruit, ensure turnout at political rallies, and create an audience for the NPL newspaper. During election seasons, NPL people held their own members-only precinct caucus meetings and identified citizen-candidates to run for office. They quickly began to see themselves as political actors.

Platform-oriented rather than candidate-based, the NPL endorsed farmers for state offices, and supported the creation of a state-owned bank, grain elevator, and flour mill. And seeing their concerns reflected in electoral politics ensured that North Dakotan farmers responded enthusiastically at the polls. In 1916, NPL candidates won the governor’s race, the contest for attorney general, and the majority of seats in North Dakota’s House of Representatives. By 1918, they held those state-wide offices and seized a majority of seats in the state Senate as well.

Finally empowered to make their platform real, the newly elected farmers moved quickly to sidestep the large millers and traders in Minneapolis. They established a state-run terminal grain elevator and matched it with a state-run flour mill, keeping more profits from processed wheat in North Dakota. Leaguers also created a state-owned bank that allowed local lenders to reject financing from out-of-state interests. After taking hold of North Dakota’s state government in 1918, the NPL spread to twelve other states in the West and Midwest, and two Canadian provinces.

Misunderstood—then and now—as socialists, the NPL farmers remained avowedly nonpartisan. They held no ideological commitment to big or small government. They just saw government as the means to represent and institute the people’s will, rather than the interests of the powerful.

Image courtesy of Toksvig/Wikimedia Commons.

Too often belittled, this vision of citizens as more than just voters lies at the heart of a wide range of American movements for change—from 19th-century Grangers and Populists, to labor organizing in the 1930s, to the Black Freedom Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a tradition that encourages regular people to work across their differences to solve common problems.

In North Dakota, the NPL’s successes inspired broader change. Initially, for example, the group ignored farm women, who sought agency in their private and public lives, but its insistence on a participatory civic culture inspired women to organize NPL auxiliaries that engaged in fund-raising and civic education. One woman in Montana reported that “we are not going to talk about recipes for rhubarb conserve” but instead would discuss “the great battles for human rights so that we can vote straight when the time comes.”

After 1920, the women’s votes became more important than ever, as corporations in Minneapolis and established politicians began pushing back against the NPL, rightly seeing it as a threat.

Establishment foes attacked the League and its members at every turn, declaring it to be anti-war, and thus anti-patriotic—a serious charge after the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Though many Leaguers opposed the potential for war-profiteering and heavy casualties, they consistently did their patriotic duty. Nonetheless, in Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and Idaho, Leaguers remained suspect and faced direct challenges to their civil liberties. Local law enforcement denied the NPL the right to hold public meetings. Organizers were seized by mobs, tarred, and feathered.

In the meantime, in North Dakota, where the NPL-controlled statehouse ensured that local law enforcement would not engage in unconstitutional activities, autocratic League leaders made poor decisions that led to internal dissent. The head of the Nonpartisan League, a former farmer named Arthur Townley, alienated opponents and League members by proposing controversial business schemes that went beyond the organization’s stated aims. Put off by such behavior and new policies they saw as overreach, some NPL farmers turned against the movement—and as a result, in 1921, North Dakota held the nation’s first recall election. Many NPL officials, including the state’s citizen-farmer governor Lynn Frazier, lost their seats.

Never again would the League run the state. Yet its influence remained. A year after his recall, Frazier, still representing the NPL, was elected to the U.S. Senate. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nonpartisan League persisted as a wing of the Republican Party. In 1956, it merged with North Dakota’s Democratic Party, still known today as the D-NPL. North Dakota’s state-owned bank, flour mill, and grain elevator continue to thrive. Soon marking their centennial, these institutions stand as a concrete testament to the Nonpartisan League and its lasting—and innovative—vision of nonpartisan, cooperatively organized, citizen-centered politics.

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