SOUTHLAND CALIFORNIA SUMMARIZED HISTORY, FACTS,  AND DEMOGRAPHICS 

Economic Activities

Agriculture

By a number of different measures, California has long been the nation's leading agricultural state. In 1997 California led all other states with farm sales of $23 billion. Several of the state's commodities have annual sales of more than $1 billion, including milk and cream, grapes, vegetables and melons, cattle and calves, nursery products, poultry and eggs, and cotton lint and seed. California produces a greater variety of crops, and has higher yields of those crops from each unit of land planted, than any other state.

 
California's farms are among the most productive in the world. For example, the state's highly automated rice industry generates a yield three times greater than the labor-intensive rice paddies of Asia. The high production is based in large part on the fertile soils and long growing season of the region, the widespread practice of advanced farming techniques, and the availability of water. Most of the farmlands lie in the dry Central Valley and southern areas of the state, where farmers are dependent on irrigation projects, such as the Central Valley Project, for water. With the exception of only a few commodities, such as barley, most of the state's numerous crops are grown on irrigated lands. Livestock ranching is the main activity on the nonirrigated farmlands. However, livestock are also frequently raised on irrigated pastures. California leads all other states in the total amount of land irrigated. Although many crops are grown in each of the farming areas of the state, within each area the individual farms tend to specialize in certain products.

There were 89,000 farms in California in 1999. Some 50 percent of them had annual income of more than $10,000. Many of the rest were sidelines for operators who held other jobs. Farmland occupied 11.3 million hectares (27.8 million acres), of which 38 percent was cropland. Most of the rest was used as range for the grazing of livestock. Some 75 percent of California's cropland was under irrigation.