Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  California eventually went on to lead the nation in pesticide use. The quest to deliver delicate fruit to market in pristine condition in part explains the state’s obsession with insecticides. But like a drunk addicted to alcohol, farmers found it hard, once a decision to spray had been made, to stop. As pests developed resistance to one poison, another had to be found in the ceaseless effort to keep California’s landscape from reverting back to its ecologically complex and diverse ancestry. Apart from its harmful environmental effects, increasing pesticide use also severely compromised the health of farm workers, who handled the chemicals directly.22

  With the pests out of the way, growers still had to make sure the crops were picked and packed in a timely and efficient manner. Fruit farming remained, even in the age of the tractor and combine, a very labor-intensive enterprise. One acre of tomatoes alone demanded roughly 1,000 hours of work to bring it to maturity. Growers thus yearned for a cheap labor force, especially given the already high expense of pesticide- and irrigation-based farming.23

  Growers needed lots of field hands to bring in the summer harvest, but during the rest of the year the demand for labor remained relatively low. Work on a diversified farm, like the ones in early New England, which planted a variety of different crops, employed family members year-round. One-crop farming, however, was a seasonal enterprise. In other words, the orchards wanted temporary and cheap workers, laborers who would arrive just in time to pick the crops before they rotted and then disappear down the road, relieving growers of any additional financial burden.

  The make-up of the migrant labor force changed over time. A large pool of Chinese workers tended the fields beginning in the 1870s. By 1880, Chinese workers composed a third of California’s agricultural labor force. As it turned out, the Chinese had a great deal of experience raising fruit. During the Gold Rush, they often tended produce on truck farms near mining areas. Many of the Chinese also hailed from Guongdong province, a center for citrus growing in their homeland. In 1882, however, Congress, responding to the racist fears of white workers who viewed the Chinese as a threat to their own job prospects, passed legislation suspending immigration for 10 years.24

  The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as it was called, forced California growers to turn more to Japanese workers, who had considerably less experience raising fruit. Some 80,000 Japanese immigrated to the United States between 1898 and 1907, mostly young men who wound up working in California. More problematic than their lack of experience with fruit culture, however, was that as a group, they expressed considerable interest in owning property of their own. They had no intention of toiling away forever in the fields of white fruit growers. Instead, they saved money and later went off to buy farms of their own.25

  California orchards eventually would come to rely on immigrants from Mexico, not Asia, to do the tedious stooping and heavy hauling. When the Mexican government, after a revolution in 1911, failed to live up to the expectations of workers, many headed north in search of wage labor. Nothing could have made California growers happier than a cheap and docile labor force willing to disappear back across the border when work became scarce. By 1930, some 368,000 Mexicans lived in California. Although working conditions in the fields were brutal, growers rationalized exploiting laborers by arguing that Mexicans were naturally suited to work in the blistering hot weather. The Mexican, explained one apologist, “is fitted by natural environment to withstand our climatic conditions … and able to perform work which demands hard physical exertion.”26

  No matter what their ethnicity, the workers were tuned in to the natural world. Guidelines established by the California fruit standardization act required boxed fruit to have a certain sugar content. That meant that fruit had to be picked when it was ripe and not a moment before. Workers, for instance, knew to glean the southward facing sides of trees first, where more sunlight struck, ripening the fruit most rapidly.

  Bruised and otherwise mishandled fruit, of course, ate into a grower’s profits. At the turn of the century, orange growers struggled to deal with a troubling blue mold. The mold seemed to strike injured oranges especially. This knowledge led managers to institute “careful handling” procedures to ward off the natural process of decomposition. By the 1920s, borax (and later other chemicals) was used to kill the mold. As always, the goal was to produce uniform, eye-appealing fruit that advertisers could sell to consumers—shiny oranges, seemingly untouched by human hands, that shoppers could pluck from the shelves unmindful of all the human labor that went into producing them.

  But the goodness of nature had its price. In 1939, Carey McWilliams, a lawyer and labor sympathizer, published Factories in the Field, a muckraking piece that highlighted the abuses and poverty of migratory work in California. The book turned on its head the advertisers’ image of fruit descending magically from some garden paradise. Considered by some to be the nonfiction equivalent of John Steinbeck’s Pulitizer Prize–winning Grapes of Wrath (published in the same year), McWilliams uncovered the grim tale of routinized labor and rank exploitation behind the brightly colored fruit. In the wake of labor unrest, growers organized in the 1930s to put workers in their place, a process boldly described as “farm fascism” by McWilliams, who wrote of “Gunkist” oranges and the plight of the worker under industrial farming. The growers eventually branded McWilliams “agricultural pest no. 1.” The smiling woman on the raisin label betrayed not a trace of the blood and sweat that went into the transformation of California into a stripped-down ecosystem catering to markets back east.27

  WATER AND POWER

  By the 1920s, California overtook Iowa as the nation’s leading agricultural state. Roughly nine million orange trees and 73 million grapevines spread out across the landscape, amid other crops such as alfalfa, rice, peaches, lemons, plums, prunes, beans, walnuts, cotton, beets, and apricots. These were just some of the more than 200 commercially grown crops produced in the Golden State. Most were plants that had no business being grown on arid lands and would never have survived but for irrigation.28

  At the outset, California farmers relied on surface water. But in the 1890s, the perfection of the centrifugal pump brought a vast reserve of underground water—perhaps as much as 750 million acre-feet (an acre-foot is equal to 326,000 gallons)—within reach. The pump, in other words, put growers in touch with enough water to flood the entire state of California to a depth of seven feet. In 1910, Tulare County, a major agricultural center, had 739 pumps; in 1919, it had 3,758.29

  Beginning in 1918 and lasting until early the next decade, droughts caused growers to run their pumps with abandon. The result was predictable. In the upper San Joaquin valley, the average ground water level plummeted nearly 40 feet between 1921 and 1939. As the water table dropped, great numbers of ancient oak trees and other native plants died, and thousands of acres of farmland, dependent on the stored underground water wealth, went out of production. By the 1930s, vast expanses of some of the richest agricultural land in the nation were in jeopardy.30

  Growers could have limited their water use and submitted to government control over pumping. But they felt it would interfere too much with profitability. Thus a new source of water had to be found if California was going to retain its position as the fruit basket of the nation. It had long been known that the northern reaches of the long Central Valley had two-thirds of the water but only one-third of the land fit for cultivation. Bringing the water south to where it was needed most would take, according to a state plan broached in 1933, a massive plumbing project. But with the nation mired in a depression, insufficient private money existed to finance such an ambitious scheme. So the state of California turned instead to the federal government for support.

  In 1937, Congress authorized the engineers and planners at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to begin work on the Central Valley Project, a monumental scheme that, after nearly two decades of work, resulted in four major dams, four elaborate canal systems, and a lot of federally subsidized water for California’
s growers. The bureau had been created earlier in the century subsequent to the passage of the National Reclamation Act of 1902. Established to fight monopolies and encourage the family farm, the legislation set up a system whereby money from the sale of public lands would be used to reclaim patches of soil from the clutches of the desert. Under the law, a landowner was entitled to only enough federal water to irrigate 160 acres—Jefferson’s magic number and a figure pushed by the railroads, who worried that anything smaller would discourage settlers from taking up farming in the West. When the Central Valley Project came under federal control, it too had to live up to this requirement, meaning that big-time growers with land above the 160-acre limit would have to divest.31

  California’s great Central Valley was certainly a place ripe for land redistribution, which, on the surface at least, is what the new federal water project would mean. Sixty percent of all the landholdings in the southern part of the valley were over the federal limit. Just three percent of the region’s growers controlled 40 percent of the cropland. “This degree of concentration of land ownership,” wrote the authors of one 1940s study, “is rarely encountered in the United States.” In 1946, the Standard Oil Company alone owned nearly 80,000 acres in the area slated to receive federal water.32

  But what should have been a means of redistributing land more fairly instead wound up becoming a huge federal giveaway. First, a group of liberal economists in the Franklin Roosevelt administration argued that the 160-acre figure was a minimum, not a ceiling. They proposed a maximum farm size of 640 acres instead. Then, after the New Deal liberals caved into the big growers, the Truman administration and its new Bureau of Reclamation chief, Michael Straus, came into office calling for “technical compliance” with the reclamation law. As far as they were concerned, giant corporate growers could sign land away to their employees and then lease it back, giving them the right to receive subsidized federal water in the process. By requiring growers to comply with only the letter and not the spirit of the law, the bureau reinforced the valley’s unequal land distribution pattern.33

  Did the completion of the giant Central Valley Project alleviate California’s water woes, the intent of the plan? In fact, the project actually accelerated depletion of the aquifers. Indeed, the federal government’s generosity even led farmers to plant more acreage. The inexpensive government water, in other words, spawned agricultural expansion. The federal irrigation projects, however, could never keep up with the demand, leaving farmers with no choice but to dig deeper wells. In the 1940s, for instance, Kern County farmers ventured down 275 feet to tap underground water. In 1965, they had to travel nearly 200 feet deeper to reach the much-depleted supply.34

  On the one hand, the Central Valley Project spelled more ecological trouble for California. On the other, it left agriculture largely in the hands of the corporate growers—the main beneficiaries of federal intervention. But now of course the growers had to contend with the Bureau of Reclamation, which compromised somewhat their jealously guarded autonomy. By the 1940s, California and the American West more generally had become a “hydraulic society,” a culture organized around the domination of its most precious resource—water—by growers and federal engineers. Whatever democratic pretensions remained from the 1902 reclamation act had dried up like an old irrigation ditch.35

  No scheme better suggests the sheer arrogance and imperial ambitions of the modern hydraulic West than the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). Dreamed up in the early 1960s, NAWAPA was the brainchild of the giant Ralph Parsons engineering firm of Pasadena, California. The company set its sights on the Canadian province of British Columbia, one of the most water-rich places on the face of the earth and heir to some 4–10 percent of all the freshwater available in the world. Not one to think small, the engineering firm proposed shipping that water through a complex system of tunnels, reservoirs, and pump stations south to the arid West at a cost of billions of dollars. Had the plan been carried out—inflation and the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s put the brakes on it—it would have led to the forced relocation of the 150,000 people living in Prince George, British Columbia, plus untold damage to tens of millions of acres of wilderness. “The environmental damage that would be caused by that damned thing can’t even be described,” remarked hydrologist Luna Leopold. It is hard to imagine a more grandiose plan for dominating the natural world.36

  CONCLUSION

  By the turn of the century, California, like the Cotton South, had emerged as a region founded on agricultural specialization—first wheat, then fruit, and by the 1920s, cotton, referred to in the San Joaquin valley as “white gold.”37 But the California growers took monoculture several steps further down the road of industry. Southern planters specialized in cotton, but they also produced corn and other foods for their own consumption. The fruit farmers of California, however, used virtually every acre of land to grow fruit for national and international markets. And where the southern planter tended to expand onto new soil to increase production, the west coast farmers plowed more capital and technology into what available land they had. It would be hard to overemphasize the importance of the changes that took place in California agriculture between 1890 and 1925. Large-scale operations wedded to just a handful of plant species and to irrigation, pesticides, and cheap labor—these were the hallmarks of the revolution in farming pioneered in the Golden State.

  Together such changes formed the basis of modern agribusiness. Thanks to these shifts, urbanites across the nation no longer worried where their next meal would come from. California agriculture solved the demographic dilemma posed by a culture rapidly shifting from a rural to an urban base, a society where fewer and fewer people grew food for the metropolis. In the short stretch between 1917 and 1926, four million people left farming and some 19 million acres of land went into retirement. And yet, agricultural production increased by a stunning 25 percent. Ironically, instead of a food shortage, Americans soon had a crisis of abundance on their hands.38

  Industrial farming boomed in California, accounting by 1930 for more than a third of all such farms in the nation. But if Golden State agriculture solved the problem of feeding urbanites, it also exacted a price in the process. Increasing amounts of water and pesticides kept these large-scale farms viable and protected them from the falling prices that accompanied an abundance of food. Genetic diversity declined as growers streamlined crop production, planting only those plant varieties best suited to market imperatives—species, like squarish tomatoes, that shipped well and looked good in the stores. Ecology suffered and so too did direct democracy, as corporate enterprises with large amounts of capital, and a yen for cheap labor, came to lord over the agricultural social structure. Ironically, even nutrition paid a price. Although California marketers championed the health benefits of eating more fruits and vegetables, the long distances the produce had to travel to market reduced its nutritional value. And what of the old farms outside of New York City that grew more nourishing food? These once vibrant enterprises would soon be replaced by apartments, highways, and sprawl—populated with new residents largely unmindful that the streets they traversed on the way to work once grew cabbages and other vegetables.

  12

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF MEAT

  In 1954, a 52-year-old struggling salesman named Ray Kroc, who had sold everything from paper cups to Florida real estate, traveled to San Bernadino, California, to hawk his latest item, the Multimixer milkshake machine. He headed for a restaurant owned by two brothers named Mac and Dick McDonald. Kroc sat outside the octagonal building, transfixed by the sight of customers, queuing up, one after another, to buy sacks and sacks of hamburgers. The restaurant appealed to him on a number of levels. He liked the stripped-down, simple menu centered around the hamburger. He admired the preparation process, which resembled a kind of assembly line for food. Even the building with its arches impressed him. And the name McDonald’s seemed to have a nice ring to it. “I had a feeling,” he la
ter wrote, “that it would be one of those promotable names that would catch the public fancy.”1

  No food is more closely associated with American consumer culture than the hamburger. Only the invention of the automobile rivals the rise of fast food meat eating in terms of its consequences for both nature and social relations. What Henry Ford did for the car, Ray Kroc did for the hamburger, mass producing them in accordance with the strictest of standards and placing them within easy reach of the vast majority of the American population.

  Behind the Golden Arches and the other ways in which modern Americans go about feeding themselves, however, lay a set of profound changes in our relationship with the land, more specifically, in agriculture itself. To support the masses of new consumers eager for beef, raising livestock evolved into a factory enterprise. Beef led the way, but in the years after World War II poultry and pork production perfected the industrial form. Thousands of animals were confined to feedlots and were fed corn, soybeans, and fishmeal, plus vitamins, hormones, and antibiotics. Such a diet used massive amounts of water and energy—to grow the feed; water the cattle, pigs, and chickens; and produce the fertilizers that farmers depended on more than ever before. With crops and animals raised in separate places, manure lost its role as a vehicle for transporting solar energy and nutrients back to the soil and instead became a major source of water pollution. Munching a hamburger may seem innocent enough, but the nation’s love affair with meat has had enormous consequences for people and ecosystems across the continent, impacts of which most consumers were (and are) only dimly aware.

  THE DEBUT OF BEEF

  Before the late nineteenth century, pork, not beef, dominated the national palate. The popularity of pork is not surprising in light of all the advantages there were to raising pigs. To begin with, swine are terrific reproducers. Their litters tend to be large, in contrast to cows, which take more than twice as long (nine months versus a little less than five) to give birth to just one calf. In 1539, when the explorer Hernando De Soto came to Florida, he brought 13 pigs with him; a mere three years later he had 700. Pigs are also extremely versatile. They will eat just about anything, from acorns in the forest to garbage in the city. Not to mention that when it comes to converting plant matter into animal protein, they are more than three times as efficient as cattle. Pigs also love corn, a crop that American farmers were particularly fond of raising. And finally, in the days before refrigeration staved off decomposition, pig meat took much better than beef to salting and smoking. For all these reasons, pork played a far larger role than beef in the American diet up until the end of the nineteenth century.2