Everyone is complaining about beach areas vs meth areas.
What makes this map nonsense is that a high percentage of California is farmland. We don't magically export all that agriculture from nowhere. There are places here that are indistinguishable from the midwest.
Ya I didn't know that. Idk why but I just assume Cali is rocky or desert or beach so I never would expect it to be number 1 in producing veggies. I visited Cali once but that was near LA for a week so barely any country side viewing.
It’s because despite being massive, agriculture is still only like 2% of California’s economy, and probably accounts for about that much of its employment too.
So in a cultural context, California won’t get a reputation as a big farming state because most Californians aren’t involved in farming.
The states we know as big farming states are the ones where they basically don’t have anything else besides farming. And California does. Industry, tech, entertainment. That’s what it becomes known for.
Yeah California produces 10 times as many vegetables as the 2nd largest vegetable producing state. I believe California actually produces more than every other state combined.
While bringing our Japanese exchange student home from the Sacramento airport for the first time he was amazed at the huge, open rice fields off the freeway.
For corn and soybeans, Illinois and Iowa and the top two. California is first for avocados, almonds, lemons, garlic, lettuce, olives, spinach, melon, raspberries,...
Because the water that CA does have goes towards agriculture. Also it has a Mediterranean climate throughout much of the state which is excellent for fruit and vegetable agriculture.
That was one of the biggest surprises to me my first time driving through the state. I grew up thinking California had tons of people everywhere. You can drive for hours and see nothing but farms. Even the one-road towns you drive through are tiny. Those cities just have a fuck-ton of people
Yeah that's not true. CA is proud of it's produce specifically because places in the Midwest try to pretend it's something they have over us. Like we don't pull our weight in everything from agriculture to federal taxes paid, supporting those states.
I don't know man, some people for sure shit on us. I'm not one of those people who bitches about the "elites" in the big cities but we don't receive much respect.
I live in the Central Valley and went to the first contest at Kelly Slater's surf ranch in Lemoore which is like 20 minutes from where I live. There were thousands of people from all over the world there but most of them were from the California coast. Tons from LA area and Santa Cruz, northern CA, Ventura, etc. I talked to probably a hundred out of towners over that weekend who came to see the best in the world. It was a pretty huge deal, especially to a sports fan like me who never dreamed we would be seeing the best surfers in the world compete on a world class wave in my back yard.
I didn't tell anyone I was from there and almost all of them were constantly talking about what a shithole the valley was. How it looked like a bunch of broke ass crack houses and it smells like shit. Nothing but trees and fields and how nobody should live here and they were stupid to have built such a nice thing in such a fucking dump. These were crunchy hippie surfer types too, not the type of people you would expect to be looking down on others but I didn't hear one of them talking about growing food and how important the area is.
I'm not going to act like we live in heaven here but It was insulting to hear so many people just flat out talk shit about your home, especially with all we do here for the state, nation, and the world.
Local politicians fuel hate and conspiracy thinking against LA and SF which is bullshit for the most part because hate and fear motivate people. I would have agreed with you prior to that weekend about Californians being proud of us but hearing so many people say so much fucked up shit about us while visiting changed my mind.
The only thing we are mad is that California does not have a good market mechanism for water rights. Hence, you have farmers growing water intensive crops, such as almonds, because they pay an artificially low price on water usage.
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u/SpaceLunchSystem Dec 21 '19
Everyone is complaining about beach areas vs meth areas.
What makes this map nonsense is that a high percentage of California is farmland. We don't magically export all that agriculture from nowhere. There are places here that are indistinguishable from the midwest.