The Appalachia of the West: California’s agricultural heartland threatens to become a wasteland

The following article was printed in the The Economist on January 21, 2010:

MIKE CHRISMAN looks out from his SUV as he drives through seemingly endless rows of walnut trees on his property near Visalia, in central California. “I have to be optimistic, I’m so tied to this land,” he says. His great-grandfather, after trying his luck in the Gold Rush, settled in Visalia in the 1850s, and the family has been there ever since. But as California’s secretary for natural resources—a job at the intersection of the environmental and farming lobbies, perennially at loggerheads over the state’s scarcest resource, water—Mr Chrisman also knows that optimism has become a minority view.

His land is in California’s Central Valley, a region that covers 19 counties and stretches for 450 miles (725km) from the Cascade mountains in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, and is bounded in the east by the Sierra Nevada and the west by California’s Coast Ranges. Much of it was an inland sea in its geological past, and its alluvial soils and Mediterranean climate make parts of it, particularly the San Joaquin valley in the south, about the most fertile agricultural region in the world.

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