2022
The Third Year of Major Aridity.
California is in a part of the world whose climate has been classified by Europeans as Mediterranean – hot dry summers, cool wet winters, with periods of aridity. This is the same climate as the Levant where western Europeans determined agriculture began. Agriculture in this region, it is claimed, enabled the growth of cities, and civilization to emerge. It is worth casting back to examine what this pre-modern agriculture delivered in crop varieties, prevalent cultivation practices, and irrigation systems. Might California agriculture have something to learn from the past in this 21st century time of change where water will be even more scarce?
The following essay posits a transformed California agriculture to meet the Anthropocene, an era in which we are told we must dramatically reduce our dependence on all types of hydrocarbon products from fuel to fertilizers and pesticides, plastics, solvents, polymers and more to avoid dramatic Earth systems changes, the most potentially catastrophic of which is global warming. A warming climate in California means a dramatic reduction of the state’s snowpack, which is the backbone of the huge irrigation works in the state. Melting snow water is stored in reservoirs constructed on mountain rivers, and released throughout the dry summer months for agriculture. A changing climate means warmer temperatures year-round and more extreme heat events interspersed with extreme precipitation in wet years. The state’s highly developed water infrastructure system was designed for a different climate, lower population numbers and a smaller agricultural footprint. Today, not only is it oversubscribed and unable to meet promised deliveries, but its infrastructural elements are also decaying and ill -suited to a water scarce future.
Currently, California’s agricultural sector consumes 80% of the state’s developed water. This is supplemented with groundwater extraction, a practice which is drying up aquifers, and has been the cause of land subsidence for nearly a century. As farmers continue to bring more land into production, they drill wells of greater and greater depth, steadily exhausting groundwater resources. A great deal of farming in California is dominated by large scale enterprises such as Stewart Resnick’s 180,000-acre orchard holdings or the Harris Ranch Beef Company that comes in at 17,000 acres. Farms rely on water from publicly subsidized developed water in addition to groundwater resources.
California’s large scale land holdings are historic. At first a result of Spanish land grants that rewarded Spanish settlers for coming to California, they passed to Mexican ownership. Those, titles were subsequently contested by white settlers and mostly passed into their ownership. Further large-scale land appropriation occurred by cheating under federal land disposal laws.
Large scale corporate agriculture is not sustainable in either a post-carbon or low hydrocarbon input future. It is not sustainable in any sense of the term: the use of hydrocarbon inputs contributes to soil and groundwater contamination, toxic air pollution, dust, the loss of topsoil and the exhaustion of the state’s formerly abundant groundwater. Continuing to grow crops and rear livestock using highly consumptive 20th century methods in a leaner, dryer 21st will result in nothing less than the implosion of the state’s agricultural sector and the creation of compounding ecological and social crises. Developed water and hydrocarbon products have allowed California to greatly supersede ‘natural’ limits. But the advent of the Anthropocene challenges this system today.
Looking Back to Look Forward
Agriculture in the pre-modern Mediterranean Levant was diverse and rich in crops. These included pulses (lentils, garbanzo beans), barley, wheat, as well as sesame seeds, sunflowers, and grapes, dry farmed tree crops like olives, apricots, almonds, pistachio and more. Fiber was also cultivated: cotton, hemp, flax, which served an array of needs from fabric to the making of rope and twine. Weaving and dying was common. There was sophisticated hydraulic technology consisting of wells, spring tunnels and qanats (subterranean aqueducts or canals), collecting groundwater and directing it through gravity feed systems to fields. Canals directing water from streams and rivers were also prevalent. These were communally managed water systems with negotiated water sharing, cared for by a skilled cadre who managed them and passed their skill down from one generation to another. Certainly this system supported less numbers of people than there are in CA today, but population numbers are slowly declining, and a shift to such an agricultural system would take place over time, and would be accompanied by a raft of societal changes.
The question before us is the following: with less water and decarbonized agricultural inputs, does agriculture in California disappear or transform? What could a transformed agriculture look like?
The Dire Present
Most discussions fall short of imagining the state’s agricultural future, and understanding its extractive and untenable present. California agriculture is the product of land grabbing, water mining and federal subsidies, of labor intimidation and exploitation protected by law enforcement and federal regulations. It is the product of decades of funding of University of California (UC) research by agribusiness corporations, including cultivars that can be more easily mechanically harvested, equally developed by UC ag engineers. The use of hydrocarbon fuel, and hydrocarbon by-product agricultural chemicals has made this form of agriculture highly productive. With water development undertaken by the federal government, and then by the state itself, it has seemed there were no natural limits. What has been long forgotten is that the state was once dry farmed, and that federal water came with the stipulation it would go to family farms (160 -320 acres) whose owners would have to live on the land; these regulations were flouted and finally transformed in the early 1980s under President Reagan, such that the major agribusiness corporations could legitimately use federal water on their huge holdings. Farms in the state have been dominated by corporate entities (even the ‘family’ farms are essentially corporate holdings), and large-scale monocultures. Without going into more detail about how all of this occurred, a significant factor to note is there has been immense land hunger by small farmers for those 160 – 320-acre farms (or smaller); today such a possibility is unimaginable. Instead, the farm sector employs managers and farm workers, people who are employees or are seasonal. Water access is now governed by markets – who can pay the most. Farm laborers are among the most thoroughly exploited workers in the entire economy. Towns are shrinking as farm services are no longer supplied locally, and farm workers have little purchasing power. This situation, while well-documented and studied historically, seems perennial, as though there had never been any other possible future, and as though there will be no possible other future – except some sort of “managed” collapse under the conditions of the Anthropocene.
True, imagining anything else today is difficult. California’s (and the nation’s) breadbasket, the Central Valley, is usually choked by air pollution and a toxic mix of pesticides and herbicides, dominated by endless acres of almonds, pistachios or grapes. Row crops have been diminishing because they are less profitable, but summer tomatoes - that all ripen at once due to UC- engineered seed varieties that make for tomatoes hard enough to harvest by UC-developed harvesters and whose simultaneous ripening is as a result of chemical agents - are still prevalent. Towns are bypassed by the I-5 – served instead by archipelagos of franchise restaurants, gas stations, and chain hotels. Highway 99, the old road, rumbles through towns, often below grade, both destroying the urban fabric and by-passing it. The valley reeks of poverty and ill-health. Many of the Central Valley’s residents either face water scarcity due to over-extraction of ground water, or contend with chemical contamination of their water from the surrounding farms.
A productive agriculture indeed, exporting throughout the US and the world, contaminating and exhausting its nest and exploiting and poisoning its people, the land, water and soil. Still, imagining anything else seems antiquated, or impossible.
Yet, with less water, a hotter climate, and little hydrocarbon products available, California agriculture can be viable; it will be dramatically different. This is where a peasantry is needed.
Toward the Future
The term peasant, especially in the developed West, conjures images of dirty, poor, miserable people barely subsiding in substandard huts. But in some other parts of the world, peasants remain the backbone of agriculture- feeding the majority of the population. They retain local knowledge, seeds and practices developed over many centuries that are specific to place, to the soils, flora and fauna, climate, slopes and seasons. They are decision makers, often in charge of their own destinies. Peasants generally practice small scale intensive agriculture, growing a diversity of crops and applying organic inputs to increase or maintain soil fertility. Crops themselves can assist, such as interplanting nitrogen fixing legumes or ones that attract beneficial insects. Peasants are poor where food is cheap, and where they compete with subsidized hydrocarbon agriculture, agricultural concerns backed by global capital, and where they are undercut by free-trade agreements. But peasants have knowhow, and anchor small towns; they create local economies and connected communities. They are ingenious problem solvers and creative bricoleurs.
Indeed, a corps of people working and living on the land, practicing an agriculture based on agroecological principles, is the most enduring model of agriculture this planet has. Peasant populations have waged great struggles to endure—the Zapatistas (https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/su10-tourism/item/879-su10-brief-historical-background-zapatista-movement.html ), a movement for indigenous rights and land reform, the members of Via Campesina (https://viacampesina.org/en/food-sovereignty/), advocating for food sovereignty, participation in agricultural policy, land reform so peasants retain their land, the National Family Farm Coalition in the U.S. and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (https://nativefoodalliance.org ), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa ((https://afsafrica.org), Nyeleni ( https://nyeleni-eca.net, ) Europe and Central Asia, a Food Sovereignty Movement. Food sovereignty is a policy framework advocated by farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, women, rural youth, environmental organizations and other supportive constituencies. It was launched in 1996 by the international peasants' movement during the Food and Agriculture Organization World Food Summit in Rome.
In a changing climate, knowledge from sciences birthed during the Enlightenment, such as ecology, pedology, hydrology, oriented toward enriching biodiversity, and restoring soil function local to place, can be joined to traditional ways of working the land to further enhance a resilient and place appropriate agriculture. This coupling can support peasant agriculture to adapt into the future. In addition, in California, there is critically important traditional ecological knowledge from indigenous tribes that is increasingly imperative to creating a reciprocal relationship with the environment where human activities contribute to human and ecological health. These hybrid knowledges will make for an agriculture that works with nature rather than, as with modern agriculture, seeing it as a substrate from which to extract value. It’s an agriculture whose approach is one of mutual benefit with the land and the place.
In California, decades of soil abuse will have to be countered by soil enrichment practices. Large swaths of California soils have been crushed and leveled by heavy machines and pumped full of fertilizers, fumigants and pesticides, killing soil microbiota. Applying organic material, regrowing soil microbial communities, mulch, green cropping and more will restore and grow fertility, tilth, resistance to pests, will be critical to ensure good yields and healthy plants and crops. But it will take time to learn the local conditions and soils and to understand how to remediate soils and regrow communities of supportive organisms within them. Biological science and indigenous knowledge will provide essential insights.
Industry
For a viable peasant agricultural alternative to extractive modern corporate agriculture, the creation of small, nimble, electric, agricultural machinery and the reintroduction of animal power suitable to smaller scale agriculture will be necessary to help alleviate the burden of manual labor. While more manual labor will certainly be necessary in a post carbon agriculture, application of renewably powered and appropriately scaled technologies, can extend human capabilities and relieve a great deal of the back-bending labor involved. Fully automated agriculture, even if possible, would not be desirable, since machines cannot reflect on their relationships with places and problem solve. The future for a viable agriculture is a sophisticated coupling of peasant knowledge and practices with the life sciences, traditional ecological knowledge, and new machinery.
Irrigation
The development of new irrigation systems will be a significant challenge in California, where there is little tradition of communal small-scale local gravity feed systems. Water constraints, partly due to their seasonal nature and increasing uncertainty about year-to-year precipitation levels, is probably the most uncertain factor in a future peasant agriculture for California. Many crops may need to be dry farmed, reliant only on seasonal rainfall. The crops of the Levant, that were grown under similar climatic conditions to those that exist in California, can all be grown this way. Traditional intercropping practices, growing diverse crops, intensive management, will be necessary, and selective use of irrigation will need communal discussion, debate and decision making. Some years there will be very low yields; rainy years, higher yields. All along the Sierra foothills, where there are rivers and streams, it could be possible to manage local irrigation systems as a public commons. In rainy periods, land will need to be flooded to begin to recharge ground water. And as groundwater recovers, quanat systems might become viable too. But the huge water systems transferring water hundreds of miles will be anachronisms. In choice growing areas where there is more water, irrigation will enable more specialty crops to be grown. Many of the states’ crops today could be grown dry farmed, like almonds, olives, grapes, pistachios. But the practice of adding water vastly improves yield and fruit weight. We export our water in these crops. Such profligacy will no longer be possible without the huge expenditures of hydrocarbon fuels on moving water and machinery, and it may not be possible anyway in a drying climate.
This future is one where California is no longer a large exporter of food. In any event, it seems likely that the exportation of food (domestically and especially internationally) will be curtailed due to necessary, concomitant shifts in transportation technology towards low energy density electrified vehicles.
International Implications
More food will be grown more locally, everywhere. People will eat more seasonally and will eat fewer high energy dense foods, like 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 tropical crops in tropical regions. A post carbon agriculture will mean a plummeting of the growing for export and the perfidious substitution of indigenous crops and food stuffs for those crops, leaving people hungry and tied to a global economy as wage workers. We cannot expect global supply chains will endure post carbon, and thus a turn toward relying on relying on local regional resources will be required across the world. California agriculture will be primarily destined for Californians.
The Road to Change
Fundamental to the kind of transition described above - to low to no hydrocarbon inputs, and low to no irrigation - will need to be a vast change in land holdings. Large corporate farms will be broken up into small units, as had been originally envisioned with the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act that funded water development in the west and required parcels to be no more than 160 acres per person or 320 per couple. Even 160 might be bigger than necessary under this new regime. Farmers, under the Newlands Reclamation Act law, were required to live on the land to receive federal water. Going forward, the small farm will be necessary for new reasons beyond the exigencies of the Anthropocene: the small farm is of a scale that is highly productive due to intensive agricultural practices. There is ample, and often ignored, evidence that intensive small farming can be fecund, but it is generally diverse, so by modern standards, yields on small farms don’t match up, acre by acre, with agribusiness as they are growing a variety of crops. However, small farms will enable a peasantry whose dexterity and intelligence supplemented with appropriately scaled machinery, local knowledge and mixed cropping methods, to create a vibrant new agricultural regime in the state. This type of intensive, localized agriculture will also help to revive indigenous ecosystems, including the great inland lakes in the Central Valley that were once fed by flood waters off the Sierra Nevada mountains. The restoration of ancestral lands to Indian tribes will also have to be woven into this hopeful collaborative future to restore the state and shape California’s Anthropocene. Towns will grow in the adjacent areas to serve peasant agriculture as such agriculture will not require hydrocarbon-based chemical inputs from far off factories, and peasants will no longer rely on agrochemical companies for seeds.
New, and different processing facilities will also need to be built, also employing smart low energy and electrically powered machinery, leveraging human ingenuity and skill in these processes, from threshing and bagging of crops like lentils or sesame, to the drying or canning of fresh fruits and vegetables to the pressing of oils. Hybrid systems in which fine craft and judicious use of human labor will be coupled with nimble machinery will emerge in local artisanal workshops. Fiber crops such as hemp, flax, and cotton may provide inputs to new types of products for the state, such as thread, fabric and rope and twine. Silk is also possible with the cultivation of silk -worms grown on mulberry leaves from orchards. The scale of this processing will be modest, crop yields may vary annually depending on rainfall, and production will largely serve California.
This new agroecological peasant agriculture will also create many new jobs. Though lands that were brought into production by the sheer application of fossil energy, like the Westlands, will go out of production and the footprint of agriculture in the state will shrink, many more people will work the land. The local multiplier effect will allow people to live in smaller towns dotted in the agricultural areas, offering different types of livelihoods for people now confined to cities as corporate agriculture has squeezed livelihoods and local knowledge out of rural areas. Occupations, in addition to farming itself, are numerous in this future: composting, growing 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, local commerce such as distribution, retail and social services. Transportation infrastructure will rely on smaller electric vehicles and a backbone of electrified rail, servicing the smaller towns, and could include some animal power. Vibrant modest local economies can then thrive from this peasant agriculture. Cities like Los Angeles will continue to exist, but will be considerably smaller, and local land will be reclaimed in places for agriculture.
Farming has a Future in California
Farming in California has a future, a productive high quality job future that promises to repopulate the land in a mutually beneficial way. It will offer a pathway for people in the larger cities to have a choice of a different way of life and career, one where creativity and experimentation is encouraged and rewarded. Land reform and de-financialization of property are critical to making this happen, and will engender the ability to live in a constructive, less destructive way, one which has a long-term future. There are many alternative models that can make small scale holdings work: agricultural cooperatives, long term leases of communally agricultural land, agricultural land trusts are just a few among them, but not without a politics for a new future. This is a politics of reclaiming California for the common good, a common good that extends from the human to the inhuman, life and nonlife; a politics that posits a possible future against an apocalyptic one. It is time to suggest paths that nurture life and undermine capitalist hegemony. Such a path is revolutionary in its vision, dissolving current systems, reappropriating this place through expropriation for the benefit of the many and insisting on mutualism and collaboration for new social organizations.
The Transition
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 with no water and the inability to cultivate lands using largescale, 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 (320 for a married couple) at pre water prices, or pay for the full cost of their share of the project. They never did, and under Ronald Reagan that law was over-turned, handing over, to large scale corporate agriculture, the investment of the American tax payer 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, subdivisions will not be an option The politics of this change will be enormously contentious, difficult, and protracted. But consider the alternative. The path of agriculture today is toward extinction. With more dry years, and more groundwater extraction, the path toward groundwater depletion is clear. While it maybe that this has been foretold before, and we have been able to forestall this collapse, a changing climate is here, and water is not something that can be manufactured.
A New Politics
None of this 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 will it be the future. The question is, what kind of a future do we want, and do we participate in making it? Benner and Pastor (from USC), recently put out a book called Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter. They invite us to imagine a new sort of economics, based on our instincts for connection and community. We are also witnessing the growth of worker cooperatives in the US, an over 35% net growth since 2013 (https://www.fiftybyfifty.org/2020/02/worker-co-ops-show-significant-growth-in-latest-survey-data/), with an average top-to-bottom pay ratio of 2:1, in contrast to the average pay ratio that sits at 303:1. Current labor trends – 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. But, of course, these may lead to nothing, but they may also lead to the kind of transformation that enables other shifts – toward values of care and well being.
Finally, this vision of the future in the Anthropocene in California is about developing a different ethic 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 to repairing the metabolic rift and reconnecting humans with the rest of life upon which we so ineluctably depend.
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A shortened version of this essay was graciously published by Zócalo Public Square, my thanks to Steve Matthews, and also in the Los Angeles Times, as an even shorter editorial, and again, thank you Steve!
Short Bibliography
I did not add citations in this essay, but there are quite a few resources I have drawn on over the decades as I have worked on California land use, water, agriculture and climate, as well as critical political ecology and theology.
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Arax M, Wartzman R. 2003. King of California. Public Affairs.
Escobar A 2011. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World: second edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Gates P.W. 1968. History of Public Land Law Development. Washington DC.
Hibbard B.H. 1924. A History of Land Law Politics. New York: MacMillan Co.
Hays S. P. 1959. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: the Progressive Conservation Movement 1890-1920.
Hundley N. 1992. The Great Thirst. Californians and Water, 1770-1990s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Keller C.2018. Political Theology of the Earth. Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. New York: Columbia University Press.
McWilliams C. 1971. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith.
Moore J.W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.
Pincetl S. 1989. Transforming California. The Political History of Land Use in the State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pisani, D. 1984. From the Family Farm to Agribusiness. The Irrigation Crusade in California and the Wes, 1850-1931. Berkeley: University of California Press
Preston W.L. 1981. Vanishing Landscapes. Land and Life in the Tulare Basin. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sale K. 1980. Human Scale. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.
Taylor P.S. 1979. Essays on Land, Water, and Law in California. New York: Arno Press
Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.