California’s Emerging Third Force

California, classically divided into north and south, is developing a third force--its agricultural interior, from Bakersfield to Sacramento and beyond.

The emerging interior California, which statistics show as the most dynamic region of growth in the state, extends from the Tehachapis over the San Joaquin Valley, northward through the Sacramento Valley (together making up the Central Valley) until it encounters the alpine regions that traverse California’s northern edge.

With the exception of a few exploratory expeditions, the Spanish never settled the great Central Valley. Hispanic California, Spanish and Mexican, was a coastal affair; and this pattern of coastal settlement continued into the American era.

During the Gold Rush, Marysville and Sacramento functioned as gateways, but the major American urban settlements grew up on the coastal regions. Touring inland California in 1859, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, wondered where all the people were. Not until the 1870s was there any systematic settlement of the Central Valley. Not until the citrus boom of the 1880s and 1890s was there similar growth in the inland areas of the south. When Frank Norris wrote about the San Joaquin Valley in his memorable 1901 novel, “The Octopus,” he had to transpose the social structures of San Benito County, adjacent to Monterey County--including two cities and a Franciscan mission--to the as-yet empty interior, in order to provide a sociologically sophisticated background.

Today’s Central Valley supports an axis of interior cities that includes a deep-water port, Stockton, and a four-county area--El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo--that Wells Fargo economists in their recent forecast, “California 2000,” consider one of the most dynamic metropolitan areas in California. The valley’s 15 million acres--an area roughly equal to New Jersey, Massachusetts and Vermont combined--holds three-quarters of California’s irrigated crop land, and a sixth of the irrigated crop land of the United States.

Why this new growth in the 600-mile corridor between Bakersfield and Redding? In the case of metropolitan Sacramento, now past the 1.3 million mark, in part it is logistics--the area is graced with a first-rate highway and railroad network, proximity to both San Francisco and the rest of the Central Valley, affordable housing and the spinoff effects of UC Davis, one of the state’s most important research institutions.

With land and construction costs low and highways readily available, the interior cities are capable of supporting the shipping infrastructure of the entire Pacific Coast--and this means, eventually, that the Central Valley will service the forthcoming Pacific Rim economy of the state.

“Urbanized coastal land is too expensive for anything more than high-ticket housing and office space,” said Fresno trucker and attorney Terry Fortier, president of Commercial Transfer Inc., a major inland carrier. “We’re the California in reserve. You can store it here, stage it here and ship it from here at costs you can afford.”

By the year 2000, according to the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, Pacific Rim countries will not only be investing in interior California but they could emerge as the primary consumers of Central California’s agribusiness products.

If, that is, interior California agribusiness can remain competitive. Foreign countries are already beating out the Central Valley in the race to feed, not just the world, but the United States. Spain and Portugal, for instance, are wreaking havoc on Fresno’s raisin industry (which will soon gain unaccustomed nationwide attention through a satirical TV miniseries now in production: “Fresno: the People, the Passion, the Produce.”) Mexico might have its oil problems but its cauliflower, broccoli and tomatoes are giving nightmares to California farmers faced with labor costs that can soar 10 times or more higher than those to the south; 1986 may mark the first time in 16 years that the United States imports more food than it exports.

Interior California is now at a point where transformed and transforming industries reflect the condition of the larger American economy. Metropolitan Sacramento can grow as a center of high-tech manufacturing, warehousing and shipping, and research industries affiliated with UC Davis. Fresno, by contrast, hardest hit by the current agribusiness revolution of technology and markets, suffers a downtown lined with empty office buildings awaiting a boom that never really happened.

In Norris’ “The Octopus,” the wheat ranchers of the San Joaquin Valley spend as much time at their ticker tapes monitoring international commodity markets as they do out in the open planting their fields. Interior California agribusiness today is faced with the same necessity to key itself competitively to world markets; otherwise the eerily empty blocks of Fresno’s once-flourishing downtown might be replicated up and down the state’s interior.

The innate strength of interior California agribusiness remains; yet farm exports have dropped by more than a third in the 1980-85 period, and not since the Depression have there been as many foreclosures and bankruptcies. Interior California, meanwhile, is scrambling fast to find both the production and marketing techniques to feed the Pacific Rim before the rim learns to feed itself even more efficiently.

For all its problems, interior California is a dramatic elaboration of the California Dream. The same motivations--the chance for home ownership, a better job, a more expansive round of days--that first brought settlers into the state now lures people to consider the interior.

As in the case of the emergence of Southern California, self-awareness and myth-making go hand in hand with fostered growth. A Department of Commerce ad urges tourists to take a leisurely trip up Highway 99 from Bakersfield to Chico, via Fresno, Merced, Modesto, Stockton and Sacramento. “It’s a hundred towns out of “American Graffiti,” the ad says, referring to the George Lucas film that represented Modesto as personifying small-town America. “Even if you’ve never been here, there’s an inescapable sense of community, of extended family, of having grown up here.”

And interior California is American home country, sophisticated enough to be interesting, but remaining close--closer than a polyglot coastal culture can tolerate--to American things: homes in small towns, county fairs, pickup trucks, nights in the backyard over corn on the cob, baked potatoes and steak on a picnic table, talking about who went off to college and who stayed home, who went steady and got married and who’s now getting a divorce.

Like Australia, which it resembles in appearance and social texture, interior California is Country--touched and energized by global forces. You feel this walking along the shores of the Sacramento or the San Joaquin rivers. You feel it driving down the main streets of countless inland towns. This is home country, California without the polish and glittery surface of the coast--but without the social confusion as well.

No wonder the current state and national leadership--personified by Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced)--is playing such a major American role. Coelho is at once Californian as the nation sees Californians: trendy, sophisticated, neo-liberal, even a former Jesuit seminarian like former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., capable of hard-edged analytics and zero-based budgeting. But Coelho was also raised on a dairy farm and still wields a mean milking stroke.

Interior California asserts that California is more than the sum of its eccentricities, that something broadly based and mainstream has survived, flourishing just behind the exotica of the coast. Interior California is the state’s gesture to mid-America, and the gesture has been acknowledged and appreciated.