Imperial (122 page)

—Hugo Münsterberg, 1904

A
nd if
you can’t produce things the way you used to,
can we blame a farmer for getting out of the farming game? If he buys water cheap at government rates and sells his lettuce to Los Angeles for whatever the market will bear, we fondly say:
He made a success through his own efforts.
We say:
He sold out at a fancy price.
If he buys water cheap and sells to Los Angeles for whatever the market will bear nothing but that water itself, shouldn’t we say the same? Some people don’t like it.
There’s a lot of crying-in-your-beer stuff going on.

I don’t have a lot of trouble with it, said Alice Woodside. I do think it’s a shame that farmers can structure the sale of the water rights. But a big farmer that buys something and works it, I don’t have any problem with it. Brockman, now, he never did anything that was not honest and aboveboard.

The American does not prize his possessions much unless he has worked for them himself.
Do the water farmers truly work for their possessions themselves, or should we regard these people as would a Marxist—namely, as parasites, who do nothing but buy water cheap and sell it at a higher price, adding no actual value to it? A water farmer would argue that what he adds is the service of moving it from here to there. Khun Sa, the “Opium King” of Burma, once reminded me with a bitter smile that he wasn’t putting a pistol to anybody’s head; people bought his heroin because they chose to. For their part, the water farmers never told the good citizens of San Diego: Buy our water, or else!—Quite the contrary; San Diego
needed
the water.

In 1959, eight point three percent of American farms happen to be irrigated. In California, that figure becomes seventy-four point seven percent. In Imperial County, unless we count hypothetical range-cattle operations on the edge of a river, it’s got to be a hundred percent. Won’t Imperial’s farms always need that water?

But in 1960-61, San Diego receives the lowest rainfall on record: three and a half inches. (The high occurred in 1883-84: twenty-six inches.) Water farmers, take note! “Moisture Means Millions.” Meanwhile, crop prices ride up and down as usual. Thus the old story: The more successfully farmers master their lands, which is to say the more they produce, the worse they accordingly devalue their produce. Rousseau thought it
easy to see, from the very nature of agriculture, that it must be the least lucrative of the arts; for, its produce being the most universally necessary, the price must be proportionate to the abilities of the very poorest of mankind.
The farmers had thought to control the prices they got by limiting production; but agriculture resists Sovietization; therefore, whatever we do over here in Imperial they can undo over there in Florida.

Water, however, is different.

Do you remember what was supposed to happen? I invoke the prophecy of Mr. Robert Hays,
circa
1930:
As the increasing population of the seacoast cities in California encroaches annually upon the adjacent lands, Imperial Valley, with its assured supply of Colorado River water, its perpetual sunshine, its twelve months’ growing season, its perennially green fields, will be called upon more insistently to feed hungry mouths. She will respond. In so doing, wealth will come to her.

The cities are encroaching, all right. In 1967, Paul S. Taylor, who we’ve encountered before in these pages, reminds the National Commission on Urban Projects that
what is agricultural land today is urban land tomorrow. It’s becoming urbanized at about the rate of three to four hundred acres per day.
Well, doesn’t scarcity translate into value? As the decades pass, won’t Imperial be sitting prettier and prettier?
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

And haven’t they? According to that most unbiased of sources, the El Centro Chamber of Commerce, in 1970, Imperial County ranks fifth in agricultural production among all American counties, and first for the number of pen-fed cattle.

But wasn’t Imperial County supposed to sew up the early lettuce market? In 1974, a good mid-range year of our “dissolutions” epoch, we find that Imperial comprises a respectable eighteen percent of California’s three hundred and thirty-three head lettuce farms, and nearly twenty-nine percent of the state’s acreage for that crop—but against Imperial’s not quite forty thousand acres, one must set Monterey’s more than sixty thousand. For romaine and other lettuce, Imperial makes a still duller showing—better than San Diego and Riverside, to be sure, while Los Angeles cannot muster up any recorded lettucescapes at all; but didn’t the boomers of 1922 insist that Imperial County had become America’s number-one lettuce producer?

What about her other signature crop, cantaloupes?—About the same.

Remembering my friend Lupe Vásquez, who has passed so much of his life in harvesting Imperial County broccoli, I am shocked to find that in that department also Imperial’s way behind Monterey—nine hundred nineteen
versus
eighteen thousand six hundred acres.

Imperial’s showing amongst the great champions of California asparagus is likewise poor in 1974.

In 1971, the Irvine Company, based in Santa Ana, owns five hundred and twenty-five acres of asparagus in the Imperial Valley and another thousand and fifty acres of the same crop in Orange County (four hundred and twenty-five acres
direct farmed
and the rest leased). The Irvine Company complains about a weed problem everywhere. If they could sell their water allotment for more than they sell their asparagus, why wouldn’t they become water farmers?

In 2003, a resident of Holtville writes in to the newspaper:
The crops in the Valley are only 1/27 of the total farm output in the state. I have heard the Valley feeds the world. What a joke—maybe if you eat Sudan grass or alfalfa.
²³¹

In that case, why shouldn’t Imperial County feed thirsty mouths instead of hungry mouths? Especially since
WATER IS HERE
?

In 1947, a farmer in Coachella named Ray Heckman
²³²
wants a marketing order
to provide for an even flow of corn into the Los Angeles market.
In 1958, Norman Ward, sales manager for Farley Fruit in El Centro, informs a meeting at the Barbara Worth Hotel that he is proud to have achieved
a more orderly flow of melons to the consuming public.
In 1967, a grape farmer who identifies himself only as King
(I’m . . . a small grower—real small)
stands up at a public hearing in Coachella to express a pretty metaphor: Grapes are water! He speaks of
a pipeline of grapes that can go to market . . . It’s a good deal like a district water supply which has to be flowed out in advance.

So why not flow out everything else, too? Why not flow out the water itself? (So many times in Imperial I have seen a field whose sole production seems to be the white waterspouts elongating and crisscrossing at a great height, bowing toward one another like grass-heads in changing winds; they issue from silver pipes in the raw brown soil; they grow up and up, eternally, bearing rainbows. Isn’t this a water farm?) I’ve never been cheated out of a dollar in my life, and if I can get more for my water than for my grapes, why should I grow grapes at all? “Moisture Means Millions.” Of course, if I sell every last acre-foot of water that belongs to me, then my piece of Imperial will just have to dry up.
THE DESERT REAPPEARS
.

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
. In celebration of that fact, here come two grinning girls past
FRESH MEATS
; in their matching skirts they march down the center of the street and support the banner of our Imperial Tigers. In material advantages they are very well supplied. (This photograph, which seems to have been taken in the early 1960s, must depict the town of Imperial.) Yes, it’s a parade! At the head of a marching band’s quintuple uniformed columns, a confident, pretty girl in white shorts raises her right arm up so high that her outspread hand almost occludes the sign
LIQUORS
which lurks between the two American flags. Citizens watch, some of them shaded by the arch of the snack shop (
Drink Coca Cola
). If
THE DESERT REAPPEARS
, all the way, I mean, then the Imperial Tigers will perish of thirst; the water farmers will stay in Los Angeles or San Diego, getting rich; meanwhile, only dust devils will march in our small-town parades.

EXCERPT FROM A REPORT

1. Imperial is TOO HOT. In the summer, it’s too hot for people, too hot for dairy cows to produce milk, and too hot for feeder cattle to gain weight. With average soil temperatures peaking near 106 degrees, it’s too hot for a wide variety of temperate-climate plants (obviously, desert and oasis plants will do just fine). Even in those cases where Imperial’s climate gives it a comparative advantage (winter melons, numerous vegetable crops, alfalfa thanks to irrigation), being too hot for people is a big problem: labor productivity is lower, available labor pool is smaller, the list goes on and on. Despite endless promotion of itself from the 1900s forward, ultimately Imperial’s growth will be limited by its high heat and its high humidity (a nasty side effect of being below sea level). Absent climate change, it’s hard to see how Imperial will suddenly “take off”, especially compared to the rest of Southern California.

2. Imperial was over-promoted by its boosters. This is true for many agricultural communities, but seldom have the promoters been more enamored of their own PR. When a region is virtually uninhabitable for 3 months of the year and everyone who can afford to flees, it’s hard to see how you maintain your stable base for economic growth. Imperial is that rare California county that suffered a population
decline
in the 1930s and virtually no growth in the 1940s. This is more like counties in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, than California, and this is despite the fact that Imperial had a stable agricultural water supply. Of course, part of this was undoubtedly simple in-migration to coastal urban areas, but it’s a stunning fact nonetheless: people who moved there based on the press releases actually
left.

3. The sturdy, independent, agriculturist of Rousseau never really existed in Imperial. A startlingly high proportion of farmers even in the 1920s were tenants, and water rights established a caste system that exists to this day. To the extent that tenant farmers gave up and moved to LA, this is probably a good thing.

4. The remaining sturdy, landowning farmers were too conservative (small-c) in their adoption of new farming practices and crops. Dairy farming died a slow, agonizing death in Imperial, and livestock farming is likely to remain a marginal contributor to profitability (most likely via boom and bust cycles) even as it maintains its position as a significant (though no longer major) contributor to the ag economy. It may also be that the bankers were too slow to lend to these farmers (this is a common failing of rural banking) to allow them to invest in new crops and growing methods, so it might be more fair to say that the region suffered (suffers?) from the lack of a clear vision of Imperial’s comparative advantages and how best to exploit them for permanent, sustainable, agricultural advantage.

5. This leads to a fairly direct materialist explanation for water farming. Simply put, if I can’t make money anymore (or can’t afford to continue slowly losing money) raising dairy cows or feeder cattle, or wheat, or barley, or milo (only feeder cattle look viable from recent statistics), and I have to learn to raise a new crop and borrow lots of money for the equipment to raise it, why shouldn’t I just take money for my water allocation? All these other things are risky and expensive, while with no investment whatsoever, I can earn an assured return on something I own (water rights). Lots of farmers would resist this, since it defies the values they were raised with and contradicts their general experience of the world, but enough years of barely scraping by farming the same things, combined with a lack of capital to learn how to do something new and risky, and water farming looks like a way to keep from losing what you’ve got, at least financially.

6. Sustainable agriculture with irrigation is a very tricky thing to accomplish, and very few civilizations have succeeded in doing so (one could argue that none have, given Egypt’s experience with the Aswan dam). Soil salination, erosion, invasive pests, and a variety of environmental ills are likely consequences of industrial-scale irrigation methods. I feel bad for the people faced with these choices, but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that in the long run decreased reliance on flood irrigation methods might be better for the Imperial Valley environment.

So why not be a water farmer?

I remember one old man in El Centro saying to another as he prepared to pay for coffee with a roll of dimes: One time when I was still working at the bank, I got two rolls of
silver
dimes; every dime in every roll was a genuine
silver
dime! And the way he expressed his reverence for rarity and purity, perhaps even for silveriness, was sweet to me, because back in the old days, when all dimes were silver, the value of a dime was exactly ten cents, but now a silver dime was a concretion of the good old days; far more precious than a silver ingot of equivalent weight, it epitomized Imperial’s tarnished glamour.

And closing my eyes I can almost see, instead of silver drops of water springing out of those rainbirds over the brown fields, silver dimes jetting up to heaven.

Chapter 136

COACHELLA (1975)

Welcome to the Coachella Valley. Desert scrub is the dominant habitat here, but the influences of nearby agriculture, urbanization and natural and ornamental oases add to the richness of the avifauna.