During a work trip drive through the southern half of California’s sprawling Central Valley, I routed my journey away from main roads, and the result taught some powerful lessons.
What I saw redefined my perceptions of the Central Valley.
My geographic area of travel was from south of the California Delta (so, south of Stockton) to the Grapevine. I stayed well away from major towns like Fresno, Visalia and Bakersfield.
On my way from home to the Central Valley I took main roads and all the usual caveats apply.
For example, I want to look over the owner’s manual for Prius cars because I’m wondering if it may include wording such as, “When driving a Prius, you are authorized and encouraged to impede traffic in the fast lane, regardless of the laws of your state.” Nuff said.
Once onto the vast flats of the Central Valley I left the main roads and made long drives on back roads. Those roads tend to start and stop, but my cell phone’s map app guided me through the maze and I was easily able to cover long stretches of back country.
This put me on quiet one-lane roads where people actually drove with considerable consideration for other motorists. The exceptions were when tractors needed to use these side roads as they traversed between farm acreages, but they let motorists by, as best they could.
Even considering the vast agricultural output of the Central Valley, from what I saw, it could be increased by at least 50% and maybe much more. I saw many large acreages not in use.
There were some plots left fallow, looking as though it is planned for the health of the land, but I saw a huge amount of land simply not being cultivated.
Something that struck me powerfully was the number of old homes and farm buildings that were so run down many were literally crumbling and falling in on themselves. I also saw many that were still occupied but weren’t going to able to sustain dwellers for much longer.
Many in the Valley suffer with economic hardship.
Other places looked to be well maintained and featured nice additions. Those were most often on the larger farms. This gave me the feeling that small farms are very hard to make a reasonable living with. The bigger farms were more typically thriving.
There were modern anomalies, and I’ll hazard a guess: Some homes that looked nice were on small pieces of farmland not being cultivated. Some of those homes had nice cars in the driveway.
My guess on those homes is that the owners had gone to online businesses or had taken remote jobs and didn’t work their land for a living. Those people may be the start of a slow shift away from agriculture for many Central Valley residents who want to grow but stay close to the land where they grew up.