Lost in the Geometry of California’s Farms By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Published: May 4, 2013 I drove down the San Joaquin Valley along Interstate 5 the other day. It was a tour of the less populous California, a route that — to borrow a 50-year-old phrase from Joan Didion — is also “the trail of an intention gone haywire.” You can pick up that trail almost anywhere in the state, if only because the history of California is a story of feverish intention, a tale of almost manic possibility and reinvention. The state has been arguing with itself since the days when it was just a territory — arguing over possibilities that have come and gone, too often leaving a layer of sediment from which the dust now rises, obscuring the future. Like anyone who has lived here for long, I have my own tales of how the state used to be. I can talk about the fields of hops that used to stretch away endlessly across the American River from my high school in Sacramento, where, 40 years ago, there suddenly sprang up endless suburbs. Californians tend to tell these stories, I think, not out of nostalgia but to marvel, as we always do, at the rate of change. My own sense of change is measured against the first trip I ever made down the San Joaquin Valley. It was with my parents in the summer of 1966. We were scouting where we might settle after we left Iowa, and the valley looked like nothing we’d ever seen, a place where farming looked totally unfamiliar, except for the spots where cattle grazed or hay was being made. The valley was immense then, just as it is now. What has changed, more than anything, is the immensity of its agriculture. It was a windless day, this past week, when I drove southward, and a dome of high pressure seemed to trap everything beneath it. The mountains in the distance had vanished in the haze, and it struck me that the legendary smog of Los Angeles had migrated northward. It looked as if the purpose of all that agriculture — those endless rigid, rectified miles of trees and vines and seed rows, the acres and acres of beef and dairy cattle standing under shade-roofs — was simply to feed the sky. Every tractor, vastly too small a word for the machines in the distance, was raising a dust storm all its own, and there were hundreds of them, up and down the valley. But this was only the dust you could see. There was mingled with it the fetor that rises and spreads from the feedlots and dairies, a stench that shimmers over the valley like a heat mirage. It’s easy to let yourself be overwhelmed by the agricultural geometry of the valley, all those rows seeming to rush past as you drive. But to understand its true immensity and capacity for transformation, you have to drop down off the interstate and onto the valley floor. There is something stunning in the way the soil has been engineered into precision. Every human imperfection linked with the word “farming” has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded. The angles are more rigid, and more accurate, than the platted but unbuilt streets out where easy credit dried up during the housing crisis. This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure, like the vast concrete sluice of the California Aqueduct, like the convoluted arrays of piping that spring up everywhere at the corners of fields. The vast regiments of nut and fruit trees, casting sparse shade on bare earth, seem to defy the word “orchard.” I realized that I didn’t know what to call them, except where they had climbed the hills west of the freeway, up and out of the irrigated zone. There they had become firewood. It is hard to know what you’re seeing. You notice the plant matter — the bright green of grape leaves, the stout, grafted trunks of the oldest nut trees, the saplings that look impossibly frail under the blunt sun. But what you cannot see is this: The entire valley has sunk in on itself over the years as the aquifer beneath it has been siphoned off. You can’t miss the massive California Aqueduct alongside the freeway, which draws water from the Sacramento River delta. One of its purposes, aside from watering Los Angeles, is to keep the owners of these vast acreages from pumping still more water out of the ground and sinking the valley further. Even in wet years there is never enough surface water to satisfy the valley. AS it is, the United States Geological Survey calls the subsiding of the San Joaquin Valley “the largest human alteration of the Earth’s surface.” A kind of landscape that once seemed barely imaginable now seems inevitable and necessary: that’s the logic and the illusion in so much of California, urban and rural. I can’t help marveling and despairing at the transformation, the way agriculture, here and elsewhere, has created a landscape that is fundamentally inhuman, devoid of people. Every scenario for the future of the valley must begin with what is now a biological desert, a place where only a handful of species are allowed to thrive, a place utterly alien to all but a few machine operators wearing hazmat-like suits. Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board » A version of this editorial appeared in print on May 5, 2013, on page SR 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Lost in the Geometry Of California’s Farms.
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