The Land of Green Winters
HOLTVILLE — California is supposed to be different. This was the fundamental premise from the start, the main draw. Why leave Iowa for simply another Iowa? Come instead to California, the land of upside-down seasons and outrageous dreamers, where rivers run with gold and the deserts are for farming, and be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. And all that.
Over time, many of California’s more remarkable edges have been whittled down, the myths exposed and discarded. On too many days, the “great exception,” to apply Carey McWilliam’s phrase of a half century ago, hardly seems exceptional at all. Rather, it could be any old state--a place overrun with sullen people eating the same fast food, escaping into the same television shows, airing the same, stale complaints as everyone everywhere else.
Happily, this trend is not yet universal. A few pieces of bona fide California exotica remain, and none more exotic than right here, in the far, southeast corner of the state. Here is where the winter farmers of the Imperial Valley can be found. These farmers, they are different:
It is the middle of January. For most farmers in America this is a dead season. The fall harvest is finished, the spring plantings months away. There is not much for them to do. Maybe they’ll go out to the barn and fiddle with a broken tractor. Maybe they’ll stay indoors and watch snow fall. Or maybe they’ll pack for Florida. Here, the prime harvest season has begun.
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The lettuce has started to come off, along with broccoli and carrots and cabbage and onions and asparagus and cauliflower and a whole bunch of other crops--enough vegetables to keep the nation in greens through the winter. The roads that crisscross the valley floor are crowded with huge trucks and harvest equipment. Farm workers come and go in caravans, creating agricultural rush hours. Growers gather before sunup in coffee shops, swap a few white lies about the deals they’ve swung with produce buyers, and then head to their fields or, just as likely, their offices.
The main reason Imperial Valley growers harvest in the winter is because they can. It was 80 degrees here Monday, and to a head of lettuce, apparently, warm sunshine is warm sunshine. With a few exceptions--parts of Arizona, Mexico--no other farm region can harvest vegetables in the winter, creating a virtual lock on the market.
Within this niche, Imperial Valley farmers compete with one another through the selection of crops and the precise timing of harvests. Last year, those who planted Romaine lettuce made a killing. No one can really explain why. Flowering kale is said to be looking good this year. With lettuce, the main event, it can be a matter of knowing just when to pick. Field prices vary from day to day, driven by individual deals struck between growers and buyers. This lends a certain tension to seemingly loose coffee shop chatter.
“If I hear that Jones is getting six-and-a-half,” explained one grower, “I want to try and maybe get seven. Of course, everybody lies a little bit.”
Lettuce growers don’t fret much about rain or frost delaying a harvest: “We want as tough weather as possible--to limit supply,” said Jon Vessey, a third-generation grower. “It all boils down to supply and demand, and supply is dictated by weather. As for rain, rains never help the Imperial Valley. We don’t need rain. . . . How many farmers have you ever heard say that?”
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What boosters a century ago named the Imperial Valley, the early explorers who preceded them called the Colorado Desert. Visionaries who proposed cutting a canal to the Colorado River and then cultivating the desert were laughed off the scene. Then, around the turn of the century, came an engineer who actually did the job. No one here has ever worried much about rain since.
However, in the earliest years of this audacious feat of engineering, there was a blunder. Flood waters surged from the irrigational canal. This turned a salt flat known as the Salton Sink into a vast and stinking evaporation pond now known as the Salton Sea. What to do about the Salton Sea is one of the exceptional problems that goes with the exceptional decision to turn God’s own desert into a California farm belt. There are others.
Life for Imperial Valley farmers is not one big happy salad bar. They have had notorious relations with farm labor. There is a nagging infestation of whiteflies, a coming battle over water rights. Non-farmers are moving in, and these newcomers happen not to enjoy crop-dusters buzzing fields near their suburban neighborhoods.
Well, these problems will be there tomorrow, too. Today, let it be enough simply to celebrate a great exception. They are picking the nation’s greens in the middle of a desert in the dead of winter. That is something. That is California.
