As one of the nation’s agricultural powerhouses, California’s farming industry stands at a critical juncture. Climate change, labor availability and migration, and rapidly evolving technologies are reshaping the landscape of agriculture in the Golden State.
This panel, recorded on January 30, 2025 and presented as part of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series, brought together experts to analyze these changes and explore their implications for agricultural communities and rural economies. The panel featured Federico Castillo, Lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and Project Scientist at the College of Natural Resources; Julie Guthman, Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz; and Eric Edwards, Assistant Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. Timothy Bowles, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS); the Berkeley Food Institute; the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI); and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).
Podcast and Transcript
Listen to this event as a podcast below, or on Apple Podcasts.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WOMAN’S VOICE: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
CORI HAYDEN: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Matrix. My name is Cori Hayden. I’m the interim director this semester of Social Science Matrix, and it’s a real delight to welcome you all here for our inaugural panel of the spring semester. As I don’t need to emphasize to you all in this room, California agriculture is at an absolutely critical juncture right now between climate change, shifting labor dynamics, and rapid technological change.
We’re seeing a real reshaping of the landscape of one of our most vital industries. We’ve assembled here a really wonderful panel to help us navigate these transformations and their far-reaching implications not just for agricultural communities, but also for the economy writ large. So we’re going to explore how farmers, policymakers, tech innovators are grappling with the changing climate and are embracing or questioning new technologies.
So together, as a panel, we’re going to examine how these trends are reshaping the fabric of California agriculture and what it means for the future of food sustainability and our collective livelihood. Now, this event is cosponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, the Berkeley Food Institute, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Thanks to all of our partners in bringing this event to fruition.
Now, before I turn it over to the panelists, I just want to give you a quick preview of some other events we have coming up at matrix. Next week, in fact– starting February 4, a new directions panel with emerging research from advanced graduate students on the study of fringe politics. On February 10, an Author Meets Critics Panel on society, despite the state reimagining geographies of order with the author, Jeronimo Barrera de La Torre in geography. Matrix on point event on Los Angeles wildfires and more.
So we were just saying here with Tim that there are very few things right now that are not timely in an emergency footing. But I hope you will join us for a bunch of these events, and we’ll see where we’re going in this world of ours right now. Let me now introduce the moderator for this panel, Professor Tim Bowles. Tim Bowles is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, a member of the Berkeley Agroecology Lab. And by virtue of sitting at this table as a moderator, an honorary member of the social sciences.
His research focuses on supporting transformations of our agricultural system from one that is currently reliant on intensive synthetic inputs to one based on ecological processes. He’s interested in how diversified biologically-based farms affect soil health, resource use efficiency, and resilience to environmental change, especially drought. He has a PhD in Ecology from UC Davis and a BA in Molecular and Cell Biology from Vanderbilt University. So without further ado, I will turn the panel over to Timothy– Tim’s capable hands.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Thank you Cori, and welcome everybody. In many ways, agriculture in California is really a study in apparent contradictions and extremes. It’s where water makes crops blossom in the desert but leaves behind soils too salty to farm. It’s where some farmers can get rich growing high value crops, but farm workers are left as among the most vulnerable and marginalized people in our society.
Where the largest synchronous bloom of flowers occurs in the world in the Central Valley with almonds every spring, but where the loss of habitat and pesticides make much of the landscape too toxic for bees. And where some of the most advanced and innovative agroecological farmers, who have inspired generations of other farmers and activists are neighbors with some of the most intensive, chemically-dependent farms in the world. So I could go on.
And so but the question we have for us today is, what does the future hold for California? Do the seeds of a more sustainable and equitable future for California agriculture lie somewhere in all of these contradictions and extremes? Is it waiting to germinate and grow? So I think our panelists will help us answer these important questions.
And just to give you a little bit of a preview, we’ll have three presentations from each of our panelists in turn, and then we’ll have time for questions and answers after that. And so I’ll introduce each of them prior to their presentation, and I want to start with Dr. Federico Castillo. And Dr. Castillo is a lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies here at UC Berkeley and a project scientist in the College of Natural Resources in my same department– environmental science, policy and management.
And he is an environmental and agricultural economist with graduate and undergraduate degrees, all from here at UC Berkeley so a long time, Cal Bear. And his research interests center on the socioeconomic impacts of climate change, particularly as it relates to the agricultural sector. He currently serves as deputy director of the University of California Planetary Health Center of Expertise, and is co-lead of Latinx in the Environment Program here at UC Berkeley. So with that, I’ll turn it over to Federico and hopefully get your slides launched, too.
FEDERICO CASTILLO: Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for taking the time to be here with us today. A brave Thursday at the end of the day, at the end of the week, so to speak. We know that some of us probably want to do something else, but I’m glad that you found this interesting enough to be here.
I would just say that, yes, I’m a project scientist here. My research centers on labor issues, agricultural labor issues– I’m also part of an evaluation team for the Farm to School program– California Farm to School Program. There I look a little bit more into ag production rather than the labor issue, although, of course, labor is an important component of AG production, as I will share with you.
I took to heart the issue of the future of California agriculture, and I will talk about that but probably– and I know, basically, from a labor– agricultural labor perspective, what’s in store for labor and what are the implications of issues related to climate change, for example, in regards to labor for California agriculture? So further ado, we’ll– this is the outline of what I will be saying.
Basically, we’re just going to spend a couple of minutes looking at what agriculture in California means. We will talk about what farm labor, what the hazards the farm labor face. What are the socioeconomic conditions of farm labor? And then we will get on to talk about climate change and the compound impacts of the different environmental hazards the farm labor faces.
By the way, I say farm labor because that’s what I do, but other outdoor labor folks face similar situation. Construction workers and folks who work on the highways, fixing potholes or whatever they do, they are also exposed to these environmental hazards. And then we’re just going to close with a few remarks. OK. So this is what California agriculture looks to you– looks nowadays. These are the principal crops in California, the California Rural sector so to speak.
So milk and cream is the biggest value. These are at least by value. Cattle and calves is number three. Pistachios is– I don’t know, number 6 or something like this. But the most important thing that I want to point out is that on the right column, it looks pretty much like the left column. So California’s main crops have not vary greatly over the last few years. They remain pretty steady. Pistachios– they were– they’re number six. There were– now, they’re number five.
And so some– did you have a new comer? Carrots, for example, or one that left the top 10. But basically, California Agriculture looks very similar. Why is it relevant? Because there is labor associated with these crops. And some of these crops are labor intensive, where others are not. And so it just set the stage. These are the counties with the highest value on agricultural production. And as you can see, a lot of these ones are– well, in fact, except Ventura and Imperial, they all are in the Central Valley or the North part of the country. Right? Yolo County– or Yolo is not even there. San Joaquin, Merced.
And so, again, if you were to look at this table 20 or 15 years ago, it would look very similar. The Central Valley has remained the main agricultural production section, geographical area, together with Imperial. So what does agricultural labor look like in the state of California? And by the way, if you were to look at North Carolina or you were to look at other states, it would pretty much look like this. Most of the farm workers are from Mexico.
There is a fairly significant number– 7% of Central Americans. Although I will say Central Americans are probably heavily undercounted for all kinds of reasons. And then there is a few United States, but in these United States citizens, there is a bunch, of course, Latinos and Latinas present in that labor force. It just means that they were born here. This is what the demographic picture looks like.
Most of the folks are fairly young– between 20 and 50 years of age– as you can see here, I will say that– that said, the agricultural labor force in California is becoming older for all kinds of reasons. The militarized border implies that there is less flux of individuals coming in. And so that means that there is no– that renovation, that revolving door that used to be from the rural areas to Oakland or to San Francisco to do something else is just not happening. Folks are pretty steady there.
The agricultural labor force is becoming less first generation. Meaning children don’t want to work in the fields, where their parents worked. And so they go elsewhere, and that also contributes to an older labor force. The average age is 41 years old. If we had taken that number, if you look at the agricultural census about 20 years ago, that means that’s about 10 or 11 years younger. I mean, for the– although it doesn’t look like a big change, demographers will, like, blink at this, right? Change of that.
And about 50% do not have authorization to work in the United States. And that probably is also– that number is probably an undercount. With all the implications that we have today with the new administration– I mean, we can talk about that. There is a big debate whether Trump actually is going to go after labor in agriculture because his constituency is farmers, and he didn’t want to mess around with that or say that, yes, he will do that. That’s a different conversation, of course.
This is the research team that I work with. One of them here present, Michael Wehner, in the hat, but I like to work with a lot of different folks. So we work with demographers– Professor Carr on the left, and Armando Sanchez, an economist. And of course, we have our stellar undergrad student working with us, Montserrat Hernandez on the top– on the bottom right.
Most of my work is funded for these folks– by Alianza and the University of California Global Health Institute. But again, I do a lot of work with the state of California through the grant on the Farm to School Evaluation Team. So this is the– I’m going to share with you, and then talk about the future here. These are some of the top producing counties in the state of California on the left, and on the right, you see the heat incidence.
And as you can see, heat incidence matches almost to a tilt where the most agricultural production in California is. That means that the labor force is very exposed to heat in those states. So what we did there was we looked at how agricultural production. And you will see a progression and what it means, in my opinion, for California agriculture. Here we look at how heat impacts agricultural productivity through a measure called a metric that we call the farm labor requirement.
And what does it mean for agricultural production? In other words, farm workers are exposed to heat. They in turn become less efficient for obvious reasons. They are more prone to accidents. They might even miss days of work. And so that means that there is less tons of stuff being harvested out there. And we did this. This is the method that we did– a very simple thing. And what we find is that for crops that are highly labor intensive, there is a 5% incidence in agricultural production. Meaning if there is a lot of labor use on these crops, they are impacted the most. That kind of makes sense. We just happened to quantify the obvious from an economic perspective.
For crops, this means onions, watermelons. And 5% doesn’t seem a lot, but when you start adding things up, it’s on the millions of dollars. And for other crops, less labor intensive, such as say, onions that are now being mechanized and others– the impact is less. So what does it mean? It means that with a very steady labor force in the future, with the current steady labor force, farmers can expect to become less and less able to hire, and that the only salvation for agriculture will be technological change. Meaning some crops will have to become more capital intensive in terms of machinery.
And if that doesn’t happen, then there’s going to be some adjustment because you cannot even– even if you have more land available to you, you don’t have the labor to satisfy that, then you cannot just produce. And we do that in another study later. But the most important thing for me is the farm workers are exposed to double whammies– double, double threats. In this case, we did COVID and heat because COVID we did a study in year 2021.
Early 2021, we surveyed 380 farm workers, and we asked them if they have been impacted by COVID and by heat and if they have reduced the number of hours and whatnot. We were surprised. We thought that farm workers were just going to decrease the number of hours due to disease, either COVID, or due to heat exposure. It turns out that that is not the case. Workers and– we did a lot of focus groups here and whatnot. Workers went on to work with COVID, and workers– even in the temperature or the heat index, which is what we use– was reaching, say, 105 or something. They were still out there.
And this is important to understand. Farm workers are in a very disadvantaged position. So although this seems contradictory– oh, well, farm workers are not reducing the number of hours. Well, guess what? They have to. They’re already low income. There is a power difference between the relationship– between either the labor contractor or the farmer and farm workers. In theory, they’re supposed to leave the field the moment the temperature reaches 90 degrees. But generally speaking, that is not the case.
So what that means is that the labor supply due to the occurrence of these two phenomena doesn’t change, and that has a social cost and a health cost, of course. You would think that this is good for agriculture. I argue that given the static supply of labor coming from other countries that that is actually not good for agriculture in the future. We’re now moving to heat and wildfires. I mean, all this happens because wildfires– they don’t stop because there is a heat day or heat doesn’t stop because there is a wildfire.
These things happen in conjunction, and farm workers are exposed to both of these. And we are actually writing a proposal at this point in time. We don’t know if with the new administration that’s going to happen, but we’re writing a proposal, where we move from COVID and heat to wildfire and heat. And we use a statistical method, the Heckman model, that I don’t have the– I have the results for COVID and heat, but I think they’re boringly numeric, so I will skip them.
The other thing with agriculture and the future of agriculture is information. And so I’m part of a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One of those climate action grants, where we generate information with the idea the providing that information to communities and to farm workers, they will be able to adapt better to climate change. And so you have not seen the naive– the kind of wishful thinking here. You probably should.
We develop a series of tools, and we realized that this was going to be the case, by the way. But we developed a series of tools, like maps and other digital things on cell phones, where people can check, OK, I’m going to be working in this area. It’s 95, right? So I probably shouldn’t be there. But do people really don’t go there. Of course, the answer is they go. They need the money. They have to pay the rent. They have to do stuff to make a living, like most of us, except that they’re in a very perilous, disadvantageous situation here.
And so we are developing a series of tools. We’re now trying to work heavily with communities. We have met with Promotoras de Salud. Thank you, Tim– and so on and so forth– to come up with ways that actually farmworkers can use these tools. We also have anonymous reporting tools. All this is about information. So in the future, information comes through all kinds of sources nowadays. Information used to be a privilege thing.
Farmers will have weather information, but now, farmworkers have weather information. Everybody has weather information. You actually look at your phone. It’s going to rain today. Should I take my raincoat? And one things that everybody acts on is information. So what’s the future for California in that sense? The future is that unless we empower some sections of society– some sectors of society– to act on that information, doesn’t matter what amount of information is there. Right?
So I don’t have a clear answer for that. We had a meeting today. And again, we’re consulting communities and our ministry of information and so on and so forth. This is one of the tools. It’s a map. It’s in Spanish and English, so this is the Spanish page. And you can go and check on air quality, heat conditions, water issues, and so on and so forth. And you can actually make a choice in terms of– I mean, you can think of actions that you can take, but not necessarily taken.
I always like to put this picture up because this is what the future of agriculture looks like. On the left, on the two graphs on the left, you have chemical use in agriculture. And as you can see, the change between 1991 and 2017 is not much. And if we were to have a 2024 map, it will look exactly like that. Probably redder. And on the right, you have a map that was developed by my colleague, Michael Wehner here, showing heat incidents in California. And as you can see, the redder areas of heat coincide almost to the tilt with the redder areas on pesticide use.
That means that farm workers, again, are exposed to a double whammy, if you will, and that is not likely to change. We know that organic, for example, production has increased steadily. The value of organic has increased as well. But that doesn’t mean that you change much in the future. I am a big believer in community-oriented solutions. That’s what we’re doing at the project that I just mentioned in regards to information. This is one example.
These are mobile stations that clean air and provide shade for farm workers. These are prototypes, of course. You can see there are solar power, and they help to cope with that double whammy. This was a product developed by the Leap institute– I’m almost done here– together with the California Department of Energy. And this is the kind of solution that will be into the future, where you have to come up with things that, otherwise, wouldn’t have been thought of in terms of solutions on climate change adaptability.
So what are the pros moving forward? What do we need to do with California in terms of policies and farm workers, which are a key component of the agricultural sector, of course? Must be grounded in community needs. In other words, consult, consult, consult. Sacramento is great with regulation, but in terms of what needs to be regulated, the matrices, the numbers, they need to be consulted. They need to be practical. Farmworkers need to be consulted about, hey, is 80 degrees OK to stay out there? Is 85? We don’t know. And the farmworkers tell us.
And we need to empower communities. In my case, farmworkers is a tough battle. Nobody wants to give up power. And empowering farm workers through one way or another is something that the folks don’t think too much of– either at the county level or at the state level. But that’s just the only way here to go about. And with that, I want to thank you, and I hope you didn’t go to sleep. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
All right. I don’t know if the QA–
TIMOTHY BOWLES: We’ll wait till–
FEDERICO CASTILLO: Until the end. OK. Well, thank you very much. And you know how to do this.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Yeah. Thank you, Federico, and thanks, everybody. So next up we have Dr. Eric Edwards, who is an Assistant Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics just down the road at UC Davis. And he holds a PhD in economics and environmental science from UC Santa Barbara and an MBA from the Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester.
And some of his recent publications include “The Capitalization of Property Rights to Groundwater” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. “Creating American Farmland, Institutional Evolution and the Development of Agricultural Drainage,” as well as another one, “Water, Dust and Environmental Justice, the Case of Agricultural Water Diversions.” And so let’s welcome Dr. Edwards, and I will get your slides launched.
[APPLAUSE]
ERIC EDWARDS: I’m a economist and agricultural economist, environmental economist, and also an economic historian. So you’re going to get some history, and you’re going to get economics, and you have to sit through it for 15 minutes. So taking the topic of the panel of the Future of California Agriculture, I thought, what a great way to start to just look at what’s happened since California started and think about what changes have happened since the mid-1800s and use that to motivate where we’re going.
So in my ag policy class, I talk about I’m from Northern Idaho. I’m from the region that has the largest wheat producing county in the country. And I asked my students, why don’t we produce much wheat in California? And of course they don’t know what we produce. But the answer is, well, we used to, right? 1878, 1889. California was actually number two, I think, in wheat producing behind Minnesota in those years.
And the question of what happened– and you can see the evolution over time from wheat and these other basic commodity crops that you see growing in the Midwest now to super high value crops essentially for export. And this change corresponded with dramatic changes with how we managed one particular resource in the state, which is one I study extensively, which is water.
So we have– I just drove from Davis, which is in the middle of this giant old floodplain that doesn’t flood anymore. Really rich soils that required extensive work to move into agricultural production. So diversions for irrigation, levees to prevent, protect against flooding and drainage to get these really flat soils to get the water off. And so when you look at what’s happened to California agriculture now– it’s a little small over there, but you can see these– prior to being at Davis, I was at North Carolina and then Utah before that.
They don’t grow this many of this type of crops really anywhere else in the world. So you can see the variety and just the kind of that– those colors are really representative of just the value and the sheer magnitude of the economic engine that agriculture is in the Central Valley. So there’s debate in the economic history, as it always is, of when this happened, why it happened, right? But I want to break it down in basic economics terms.
So we think about agricultural production via production function. And you take inputs, land, labor, capital, and you combine them, and you get wheat, grapes, whatever. And land is really a general term for all the fixed inputs that occur at a place, right? And so that’s going to be the climate of California, the water resources, and the soil. And so I want to emphasize– I’m going to talk about later is the climate and the water.
California is hot and sunny, which is really good for crops, provided you have enough water. And it turns out California also has a lot of water. And so the problem was just saving it up and reallocating it at the right time for agricultural production. The other thing that we talk about in economics always is markets. And if you think about where markets come in, firms are trying to maximize profit. Profit– revenue minus cost. The revenue side is price times quantity.
Wheat has a price. It’s a generic commodity. It’s a low price. Differentiated grapes from Napa have a different price, and its price is much higher. Almonds and pistachios have much higher prices. And then, of course, we get into, well, where are we going to go? What’s going to happen in the future? And there we can think about some of these cost factors.
California has really benefited from the abundance of natural resources and also human resources. The labor that we just spent 15 minutes talking about– that’s a distinct advantage. California employs about a third of the agricultural labor in the country. And that’s because a lot of these crops are very labor intensive. So that labor cost but also the water costs are important factors in production.
So I hadn’t really thought– when I agreed to do this in the early fall, I had thought I’ll just talk all about water. That talk has been preempted by events a little bit. So what do I see going for the future? Well, we have the underlying water and climate issues that you’re all already aware of right. But then we have these big looming issues that are maybe more near term issues of potential trade wars and potential changes in immigration policy.
So I’m going to talk about those two quickly here and then get into the water stuff. So we talked a lot about ag labor. I just want to emphasize a couple points from an agricultural production side. One third of the US agricultural workforce is employed in California. And part of the reason is– and I just ran by some vineyards being right hand trimmed yesterday. A lot of these high value crops are more labor intensive than growing corn in Iowa, right?
And so you have a lot of ag labor here. And a lot of that ag labor is what we would call undocumented, right? And you can see that evolution over time. And I was discussing this and trying to explain it like– it seems to me that this is not just in terms of who’s being hired, but these are all due to policy changes, right?
The demand is there. There’s labor there, but over time, the forced use of this undocumented labor force, which, as Federico pointed out, puts the labor in a very vulnerable position for a variety of reasons. So what happened during the last Trump administration? What’s going to happen to this one? There was a pronounced effect on immigration during the last Trump administration. We expect that to probably happen again.
That raises the cost of agricultural production. In the long term, that’s less clear what’s going to happen. But these are important, large underlying factors that are changing in terms of markets. And we’ll go through this quickly. Last Trump administration starts a trade war with China. Don’t import certain things from China. What does China hit back at? Well, the US is the largest agricultural exporter in the world. So of course, if you’re in a trade war with the US, the thing you put tariffs on are agricultural products, right?
So China hits back with tarriffs on ag exports. And you can see the total cash receipts from California’s ag production are about $60 billion. The export value is about 20– almost $24 billion. Right? So a huge value added of California agriculture is the export, right? Almonds, pistachios, things like that are almost exclusively grown in California.
And so some economists in my department did an analysis and say, well, under certain tariff scenarios, retaliatory tariffs scenarios, California agriculture could lose up to $6 billion, so up to a quarter in some cases– more extreme cases of agricultural export value due to these tariffs. In the short term, again, that’s bad. What happens in the long term? Well, generally, other countries are going to shift away from US imports, and that’s going to be problematic for California agriculture.
All right. So moving beyond– those are the standard economist things, open markets. Better flow of labor makes everyone better off. Let’s talk about water, which is really what I study. I think as this image points out, you can see these circles on the right of the amount of water used for urban uses, agriculture, streams, and rivers. California is not a dry state, right? That’s 65, 74, 82 million acre feet of water.
An acre foot of water in California is going to be two, three, four person households it would support. That’s a lot of water. It’s just the timing and location isn’t necessarily where you want it. Most of the water comes in Northern California. A lot of the population– a lot of the agriculture is in the Southern Central Valley or in Southern California. So we move the water around. You see all that infrastructure there.
So the other important factor– and I’ve slowly come to appreciate this over time– is how important water is to adapting to heat in agriculture. From a crop physiology point of view, water and heat are inextricably linked. Water is how– just like us, water is how plants cool down. Water helps plants grow. If you spray them with water, it cools them off. You can even spray them with water to warm them up if it’s going to freeze.
So water’s a great way to be resilient to climate, but that means having water. And so in California, a lot of times we talk about markets, and the reason for that is because water was allocated back in those early times in 1878. And allocated under a variety of different doctrines but mostly under a prior appropriation doctrine of first in time, first in. Well, not necessarily the first person who started using water is the highest or most important use today– or highest value or most important use.
And so there needs to be a way to reallocate water. In particular, we’re thinking how do you reallocate scarce water resources during a drought from maybe senior water rights holders who are doing some low value agriculture to maybe higher value agriculture, trees, grapes that need water, or else they’re going to lose their full investment? Or to cities or to environmental uses, right? How do you maintain stream flows for salmon during the dry times and things like that?
All those later uses I’ve talked about tend to be higher value than the typical use in agriculture, even for productive or productive agriculture in the Central Valley. And so some of the work I’ve done on the Salton Sea offers an example. So water markets and markets in general work to reallocate goods and services in mutually beneficial exchanges. But the Salton Sea offers a key example of some of the risks associated with this as well, right?
So in the Salton Sea, which has one of the largest irrigation districts in the country, the Imperial Irrigation District near it, right in Imperial County, has been diverting water, owns a majority of California’s water rights to the Colorado River– about 3.1 million acre feet. And from that, those water rights, they irrigate a large amount of Imperial County. A portion of that– maybe about a third of that water that they irrigate– runs off the cropland and into the Salton Sea. And it’s been maintaining the Salton sea’s elevation for 100 years or more.
Well, imperial is under a lot of pressure because California is using too much Colorado River water to reallocate some of the water. So they conducted a huge water transfer to the city of San Diego, San Diego County. And after doing that, the way they did that was they upped the efficiency of their water use, which meant they lined their canals. They reused tail water that ran off the fields to irrigate again and became very efficient. That also meant the water went to crops, not to Salton Sea.
So Salton Sea has been shrinking. And what we’ve been showing is that there’s increasing dust pollution as a result, and that dust pollution disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities in the region. And so water– great adaptation to climate change, but there’s risks with reallocating water. And then groundwater, and I think in the near future, the implementation and whether it’s implemented of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is going to be the key driver of agricultural change in California.
So this figure over here shows the potential land flowing in the Central Valley as a result of the need to pull agricultural production out to reduce water use, to meet sustainability goals under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. So the blue on the right is without trading. The dark blue is without trading. The light blue is with trading. And so there’s going to be a reduction in farmland acres, and with that, a loss of agricultural jobs.
Reallocation of cutbacks using some form of market will reduce the economic effects. So the low-value agriculture will sell their water to the high value agriculture. There are key empirical questions. There’s not a theoretical answer. There’s key empirical questions of how these affect some of the equity goals you might have– maintenance of– wells for small communities, which size farms lose their water or gain their water and so on.
There’s some evidence that for certain– and to what extent do markets– we know that they’re going to increase value because that’s what they’re designed to do. To what extent do they increase or decrease the amount of agricultural jobs? These are all empirical questions because we don’t know. Does the water switch from low productivity to high productivity, low labor force to high labor crops or not?
And so there’s a lot of open empirical questions to understand in groundwater. And I’ll just add as a concluding remark here that we’ve done some work on the history of irrigation in the US. And groundwater has really been the key throughout the country to climate resilience. So you see areas that were able to put in wells– like the areas that were affected by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. See virtually no losses, even in the most severe droughts because they’re able to tap that groundwater year in and year out. And that’s going to be true in the Central Valley as well because that’s a key adaptation to climate change is the accessibility of groundwater. All right? Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Our last panelist, Dr. Julie Guthman, is a distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator in the UC Agrifood Food Technology Research Project. Her interests include California agriculture, alternative food movements, food and agricultural technology, international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental health, political ecology, race and food, and more.
And so some of her past books and publications include things like the Problem with Solutions, Why Silicon Valley can’t Hack the Future of Food, Agrarian Dreams, The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. So during my own PhD, that was a critical book that I read. Wilted Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry. And Dr. Guthman received a PhD in Geography from here at UC Berkeley.
And she was the recipient of a 2023 Distinguished Career Award from the American Association of Geographers, as well as a number of other awards for her work. And so with that, I’d like to welcome Julie.
[APPLAUSE]
JULIE GUTHMAN: Thank you. I just retired, and I hear panel I think, OK, I get to sit. I don’t have to do slides. I have to get out of my sweatpants to be sure. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to sit here. Is that all right? OK. Thanks. And you can hear me. So Tim just mentioned a few of my books, and what I want to do today is position my thoughts in relationship to these three major research projects. Not the only research projects, but three major projects I’ve done over my career that really represent three different directions for California agriculture.
So what I’m going to do is just briefly review some of the findings, and then from each of those– and then do a little bit of prognostication for the future, for what it’s worth. So my first research– this feels loud to me. OK. OK. My first research project was on organics. It was my dissertation project that I conducted here at Berkeley. Now, it just went away. OK. I guess it turned out. And I did that research in the 1990s when organic had just evolved from being a more hippie social movement into more of an industry.
And at the time, I came in very empathetic to agroecological practices and still am, but as I found not a lot of organic growers, particularly those transitioning to organics, were really abiding by those practices. And I really identified two reasons for that. One is the whole system of regulation that developed around organics, about which I could talk for a very long time– but namely, standards and certification really encourage the least common denominator of organics.
And so a lot of– particularly the newer growers would find inputs that could substitute for their disallowed inputs in organic systems. But the other thing is it was really hard for organic growers to escape the legacies of industrial agriculture in California, and that includes high land values that keeps coming up in all of my research projects because crops are– I mean, agricultural land values are based on what kind of crops you can grow there.
And so over time, land values have become very high. Plus, with all the urban pressures on land values as well. Use of marginalized labor– this is how– this is also baked into organic agriculture. Low wage, politically marginalized labor. Crop specialization for historically– California agriculture was divided into different zones, where you’d grow different crops, and different marketers developed around those crops.
And so growers have worked with particular marketers and particular crops, so that’s anathema to a more diversified farming systems. So lots and lots of like legacies of industrial agriculture have made it really hard to do agroecology just because of these common existing relationships. But that said, I mean, some farmers have shown us a different path. And those that– and there’s quite a few organic growers in California. And those that are farm truer to agroecological ideals tend to have to really break those constraints in different ways.
They may farm in areas that are lower land values out of the main agricultural zones. They may have more diversified farming systems, and so that allows them to employ labor differently. Still often low wage undocumented workers, but maybe there’s more variety in the work patterns. They sell differently. They’ll sell– they sell more to restaurants and to direct farming to direct market. It’s like farmers markets and CSAs and so forth.
So and their own commitments have made them farm differently. So organics has been a mixed bag. Lots of industrial organics, as I’m sure you’re aware of, but lots of people showing different way. And even those who practice industrial organics at least are reducing their use of toxic pesticides. So the organic movement and industry has shown us better ways to farm– not perfect ways to farm, but better ways to farm.
But right now, it’s only 9% of farmland in California, which is actually quite significant compared to the US, which is only 1% of farmland or less is an organically produced crops. So that’s all I can have time to say about organics for now. Industrial– so as an agrifood scholar, as an agrifood geographer, I’ve studied and taught a lot about the history and political economy of industrial agriculture, and particularly in California.
My most intensive direct research on this topic has been a project– was a project on the strawberry industry and its dependence on highly toxic soil fumigants. So soil fumigants are used before you plant any crops to kill soil borne pathogens. And because farmers– fumigation was widely adopted in the 1960s. And it allowed farmers to grow strawberries that are very prone to pathogenic organisms.
They allow them to grow on the same blocks year after year, rather than rotate other crops around or just give the soil a rest. So fumigation really, really intensified the strawberry industry and allowed it to become the industry it is today. You saw on a slide that it was the seventh major crop in California. At one point, it was up to number four. Other things bestowed advantages to California strawberries. The coastal climate which creates this eternal spring, so strawberries can keep growing for a very long season.
It’s a three-week season in Massachusetts. It can be a 10-month season in Salinas or Watsonville and Santa Cruz County. The use of fumigants, of course, allowed the industry to intensify a breeding mechanism built in for productivity. Again, marginalized labor. Strawberry harvesting is one of the worst jobs in California agriculture. If you’ve ever driven through strawberry country, you see people running through the fields with crates because they’re paid on piece rates because the growers say that’s what the workers like.
But the workers like– only the workers that can pick fast enough to make a good wage actually like that at all. But it’s extremely intense labor. So they’re paid on piece rates, and that means as much as they pick they can get a decent wage, but it’s not a full time wage. So they end in five hours. Anyway, so all these things that bestowed all these advantages to the strawberry industry have now turned on their head.
Oh, yeah. And I already said it’s an intense pesticide regime. So there’s now tighter restrictions on these soil fumigants, and I’m actually working on a committee that’s sponsored by the Department of Pesticide Regulation, looking at maybe further restrictions on two other fumigants, which is totally freaking the strawberry industry out. Labor shortages– I mean, when I was doing my research five or six years ago, growers were bitterly complaining of labor shortages. And the labor shortages exist in part because they don’t want to pay decent wages but also because of our strict border policies.
And we’ve all been following the horrific news this week, and this is obviously going to get a lot worse. Land prices and shortages– there’s only– strawberries do really, really well on the Coast. They don’t do so well elsewhere, and the coastal land competes with housing. Strawberries are often seen as the last crop before housing. So that’s bearing on that. And climate change is bearing on the strawberry industry as well. And particularly hotter climates bring in those– the salt or make more salinization in the soil, but also make the strawberries less resistant to these soil-borne pathogens.
At the same time, it’s really hard to change these practices. Not because there’s a lack of options or ways to grow strawberries differently– and growers do it. They do it through very diversified systems. But again, these expectations of the monocropping of strawberries, which are a very high value crop, are built into the land values. So the system’s baked in. OK. Next project, my most recent project that gave birth to the problem with solutions– was on Silicon Valley’s interest in food and agriculture.
And I got interested in Silicon Valley’s forays into food and agriculture while doing the strawberry project. They were talking about introducing soilless substrate as a substitute for soil because soil was hosting these pathogens. They were talking about robots as a fix for the shortages, labor shortages, and they still are. But silicon– so that’s what got me into the project. And that was a big collaborative effort.
So the question became, what could Silicon Valley bring to agriculture writ large to a sector that’s long been subject to technological innovation, including innovations like soil fumigants that have caused all these problems? And it’s interesting because the Silicon Valley techies were all saying, oh, agriculture is under-invested, and there’s not enough technology here. It’s like, are you kidding? This is like one of the most technically– agriculture is highly technical, particularly in California agriculture. The technologies have come often from the land grant universities, not from the techies, who I’m really particularly mad at right now for all the reasons you understand.
So the tech people were, at least– at the beginning felt like they were presenting a third way. They used the language of sustainability and of course, disruption. Presumably wanting to disrupt big bad ag, but in practice, most of the technologies that Silicon Valley has brought to bear are either uninteresting or are completely far fetched, like protein made from air. Seriously. I should have brought the slides. I can show you that stuff.
Anyway, or they are really much more of the same in terms of supporting industrial agriculture. Federico mentioned these digital technologies. Digital technologies provide information. It’s great that they can provide information to farm workers, but they’re also providing information to farmers that are supposedly supposed to make things– encourage them to reduce their pesticide use. But that hasn’t borne out.
I mean, what farmers need to reduce pesticides, for example, are better treatments or to be able to rotate their crops. Information technologies don’t do that. And I could say a lot about alternative proteins, but that’s just completely different ball of wax. And it turns out that a lot of the startups are getting bought out by big agribusiness, and that’s what they are looking for anywhere. They want their exit. And so Silicon Valley is not very disruptive at all. Oh, God. I just– oh, I’m just so angry at them.
[LAUGHTER]
So given these dynamics, what is the future of California agriculture in my opinion? Well, it depends. It depends on how much of the existing fixes are going to continue to fail. That’s what my last book was about. These solutions are problems that create new problems for new solutions and new problems. They fail. How much the public resists and asks for something different?
I mean, when you do see major changes in California, agriculture is often come from the public. The specifics– how this Trump administration is going to play out, particularly the deportations. Obviously, so much hinges on that. But my crystal ball says that with– that, basically, things are going to be more of the same. Drawing from a little bit of each of these past technologies to create the future. So I think industrial agriculture is really cheap.
And one of the reasons that some of the Silicon Valley technologies have not taken off is they actually can’t compete with that cheapness. They’re banking on the system to fail, and it actually doesn’t fail very easily because it’s subsidized in all sorts of ways. And the tech sector, again, is just delivering more intensification in partnership with incumbent corporations– basically replacing or trying to– maybe usurping a little bit what universities have been doing.
But no, I don’t think we’re going to be eating food created in vats or meal in the pill again because I don’t think it can compete yet with the cheapness of industrial agriculture. And I do think the alternatives will continue to thrive. I mean, there is a significant alternative food sector that creates great food, in my opinion, sells beautiful produce– farmers market, et cetera. Raises cows differently– I like all that stuff, but it still depends on high end markets.
And so basically, there’s no regulatory or state mechanism to drive widespread adoption. So it’s all depending on people willing to pay more for their food. And what’s interesting about juxtaposing the organic sector from the tech sector is organics have gotten so much attention over the years. Everybody talks about organic food, but it’s still a small percentage. While the tech people, they got money thrown at them to do silly stuff.
So in short, no, I don’t think the new technologies can save us. We have to– we have to find ways to address the long-term legacies of industrial agriculture that are built in, are baked in. We have to find ways to address highly valued land. The use of politically vulnerable labor, specialized marketing arrangements. So we really can’t address any of that without some pretty dramatic policy changes. And we all know that and here we are. Here we are in this moment in 2025 trying to hold on to a sliver of humanity. So that’s not a very optimistic look, is it? But there you have it.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Thanks so much, Julie. We’ve heard about so many of the challenges– water, heat, justice for farm workers, land values, the lock-ins that keep the legacy of industrial agriculture in its place here, constrain our options for change. And I think at least one thing is clear. There’s not an easy pathway forward. I certainly have plenty of questions, but I don’t want to be selfish. So let’s open it up to our audience. And my first hand I see is back there. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. Good afternoon. My industry specializes in consulting for cannabis in Northern California. And since this seminar is about the future of agriculture in California, I didn’t hear you mention cannabis at all. Just a rough cut. What do you guys think the future is? Crystal ball.
JULIE GUTHMAN: Take that briefly. I mean, the future is now. We’re already seeing the similar dynamics. Is a lot of the Industrial players are kind of– now, it’s legal. Now, the industrial players are taking over and squeezing out the craft producers, who were growing in Humboldt forests years ago. I mean, that’s what I know. I don’t know a lot about it, but I think that’s already happening.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So many questions. [LAUGHS] But I will just say this one first. I guess certain people within the government would say that the future of agricultural labor lies in H-2A visas. And I wonder, maybe a brief explanation of those is worthy for the conversation. But I am curious about both your opinions of H-2A visas, but also whether they objectively could fill the gaps that certainly are going to come with much greater restriction on immigration.
FEDERICO CASTILLO: I could just say something quick about that. These visas what they do is they formalize, so to speak, in theory, in the paperwork sense. There’s a person who comes in with a particular contract and then performs a contract for a particular amount of time and then leaves. In theory returns and so on and so forth. Of course, the devil is in the details here.
Number one is what are the conditions that you leave that you actually you’re dwelling, but you are here? Housing for farm workers is a disaster to put it mildly. It’s actually an embarrassment. I have been on many– farm worker conditions in the Northern Central Valley. And it’s just that it’s unbelievable that folks live under these conditions, right?
Peeling paint with lead, critters of all kinds, shapes and forms, but water quality, sharing kitchens on families, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it’s just a water quality is very bad. The buildings are not up to code and so on and so forth. So you’re bringing an H-2A visa folks to live under these conditions. Then there is not much change here, except that the person has a paper, and in theory is not undocumented.
So I have interviewed several farm workers, who have these visas. They place them in big hotels. So they basically– a labor contractor gets the whole 100 rooms in a motel in the Central Valley, and they live there. But again, they are living five to a room and so on and so forth, so the conditions are not that good. So I don’t think that those visas solved the problem in terms of quality of life. And if we want to see any precedent to that, that will be the Bracero program, which was a visa type of situation, where my wife’s relatives came with the Bracero program, and most of them passed away, but they tell a lot of very ugly stories when it comes down to entering the United States and the living conditions.
So I think that the visa program if done properly, yes, because you come with a contract guarantee salary and so on. But the living conditions and so on and so forth, in my opinion, are not necessarily there because of the visa program or that particular program. That’s just my– yeah. I don’t know if that helps. You want to say something?
JULIE GUTHMAN: We should take another question.
FEDERICO CASTILLO: OK. Sorry it took forever. Sorry.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Red shirt, right here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. I’d like to thank the panelists. I’ve learned a lot today. And I also have a lot of questions. Federico, I’ll hit you up later. My question is for Eric. And you talked about groundwater, and my impression– and I can be very wrong on this. Is that a lot of the groundwater is ancient from aquifers, and it’s not really sustainable. Am I mistaken about that? Is groundwater a sustainable resource?
ERIC EDWARDS: So in California in general, yes, but basins vary. So for instance, in the Central US, the Panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma is over the High Plains or Ogallala Aquifer. That’s basically fossil water. So everything they’re pulling out– maybe a tiny bit of recharge. But there’s no way to make it sustainable and do agricultural production.
In California, a lot of the Central Valley aquifers are recharged from the overall hydrologic process coming off the Sierra Nevada. And they could be managed sustainably. They’re not in part because it’s difficult to reach agreements among all the users in a basin on how to do that. And so what you see is and– but it’s very spatially heterogeneous. So what you see is these areas where there’s rapid depletion.
And what a hydrologist will tell you is, yeah, those– essentially to get the water levels back up, you might have to wait 100 years. So the scale of our lifetimes maybe some of those are being mined essentially down, but other areas manage recharge. There’s much more potential to bring things into sustainable management. But I think overall, especially South of the Delta, there need to be cutbacks across uses to bring them back into sustainable levels of use.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Up towards the back there I see a black sweater maybe.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. We’ve talked obliquely about the federal government, but it strikes me that the state government is actually really, really important in all of your presentations. And it seems like– I really appreciated you saying, oh, Sacramento is good at creating regulations. They’re really bad at enforcing them, right?
On the one hand, they’re really good at enforcing at least somewhat the rules around pesticides and strawberries, right? Labor regulations, terrible. And so it seems like the real question about sigma and its eventual impact on California agriculture really comes down to, do you think the state will actually enforce it? It seems to me like the real unifying question for all of your presentations is, is California going to continue to have the get rich now strategy, or are they going to try and enforce regulations that would make California agriculture more sustainable?
ERIC EDWARDS: I guess I will just address that Sigma aspect. I think there is an open question of whether there’s a stick and so to speak of getting different basins to collectively manage their groundwater. And I think in some sense, the way Sigma is set up will make it difficult in the long run for California to enforce things because they’ve essentially said that basins get to choose what sustainability means.
But then they have an extensive set of rules that define what sustainability is. So be it’s not going to be clear IS a basin in sustainable use or not, which will leave a lot of questions unanswered. I think in my own research we’ve looked at what are the drivers of difficulties in managing groundwater basins across the US and across the world. And fundamentally, it’s that there’s just a lot of heterogeneity in what people want to do with the water.
And what you see with Sigma is what you see in a lot of cases, where you get fractionation across these basins. So you have one groundwater basin, but they split off into different groups, who want similar things. And maybe within their group they can choose we want to pump this much. We want to pump this much, but they’re trying to manage the whole basin together, and that makes it very challenging. I think the opportunity of sigma is to figure out a way to compel some negotiation and forced agreement, but whether that or how that will happen– I’m like, I’m with you. I’m not optimistic that it will be enforced in the way that I think that creators of the law intended.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Just one quick editorial. So also we have to keep in mind that regulations have trade offs, and the cost of regulatory compliance will fall disproportionately for small and mid-sized producers. And it’s also harder for non-English speaking farmers to comply. So regulations, part of the mix but not everything. Sorry. I saw this hand here with the blue sweater.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: This question– I’m curious all your takes, but I think Julie would feel more impassioned about it. But I think we’d all like a future, where cost of this alternative food market is accessible and also regionally more accessible. But I wonder, what are your takes on– do you think that somehow in some mechanism, like, reducing the cost to grow food in a better way will actually be like one of the end solutions to improving its uptake or improving Consumers’ Perspectives on it, for example?
JULIE GUTHMAN: Well, sure. I mean, it has to be both from the supply and demand. I mean, if people have better wages, they can afford it. But I mean, the fact of the matter is that alternative systems are more expensive. For instance, if you’re using a diversified farming system, or you’re growing strawberries that way, you have to rotate it. Broccoli works really well as a fumigant, but broccoli doesn’t get as much in the market as strawberries do. So you have to rotate broccoli.
So the only way to break– maybe not making those kind of ways less expensive to grow but making– it’s like industrial agriculture is very cheap to grow, and it’s cheap because of the water subsidies. It’s cheap because of the subsidies of our immigration and border system. It’s cheap because of– it’s not cheap because of land. So it’s cheap because of the University has provided technology, not for free.
I mean, there’s patents, but develop the technology. So I think it’s really about finding the cheapness of industrial agriculture that’s the problem for the proliferation of alternatives. So I mean, that’s one of the things that’s so interesting to me about tech. Is that they think we need new technologies. We actually have the technologies. We know how to do this. We don’t have an economic system that supports it. I mean, I’m not saying there’s not things that you could develop that would be useful from time to time, but it’s not a technological problem. It’s a social– economic problem.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: This might be unfair, but I was dying to ask your thoughts on technology. This might cause a shock in the room, but I’m a dual major in agriculture and CS here, so my biggest question is how do we understand small farmers with diversified systems and try to make their lives a little bit easier if possible? So I’m curious from the perspectives and stories of you all. Is there a way we can make technology do that? Just help in any way, or should we focus our resources elsewhere?
FEDERICO CASTILLO: I just wanted to add something to the issue of breaking the logjam between supply and demand and cost and this and that. I’ve been doing some reading about institutional buyers, for example. So that’s one way to increase demand. Schools, districts, and the Farm to School Program, The Department of Defense– we don’t know Donald Trump– what’s going to happen there.
And other big large buyers could very well help to break this logjam, where there is not enough demand for products that are produced under our ecological system. So they could start demanding good quality food for our school kids, for example, which is something that can happen. But also the prison industry and so on and so forth. So that would be one way that probably some of the costs because of economies of scale could come down, if that applies for some particular crops.
I want to say about technology and small farmers. It is very difficult for a small farmer to adopt a technology, particularly if that technology is strictly tied to farm size. For example, irrigation systems. They are very proportional to the acreage, so you cannot buy more piping than you need or whatever. But for example, you look at– the other day I was looking at a apple harvester– a machine that actually goes along farm trees with suction cups and with sensors picking the right thing– the right apple.
Turns out that thing is 90% efficient. I saw it at a video during a conference at UC Davis. And it’s 90% efficient, but farm workers are 98% efficient. So they’re still not good enough against the farm worker. But when it becomes available. Say, suppose the machine becomes 98% efficient. It’s just definitely going to be a small apple growers– this thing costs money. It has patents. It’s just crazy to adopt. And so I don’t see a small farmer. So it really depends on the technology. So we have to be mindful of that.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: We have time for one more question. I think there was somebody maybe in the middle. Yeah, here. Had your hand up for a while. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. It was a very informative talk. And I’m a layman in the issue, but the two– all three of the panelists mentioned labors repeatedly, and I had two questions related to the labor issue. Number one, what is the labor productivity in the agricultural sector, particularly the industrial sector, compared to other economic sectors? And how is it trending through the ages? And what are the predictions on that?
And the other one was when– I’m quite old, as you can see. When I was young, we heard a lot about the unions in the United Farm Workers. What is the unionization environment today in the agricultural sector? Thank you.
ERIC EDWARDS: I’ll just make a quick point, and that is from a historical perspective. That first year, wheat year, I put up, probably over 50% of the labor force at that time would have been employed in agriculture. And in California today, it’s probably less than 3%. And so with substantially more production and more valued of production today. So maybe more than almost any other industry, agriculture has moved away from labor towards other means.
FEDERICO CASTILLO: I would agree with that. Technology has become far more– I mean– for example, you take onions. Used to be harvested by hand only. Now, you have some onion harvesting machines out there. Lettuce is another case. So of course, cotton, and tomatoes needless to say. But again, I think more and more agriculture will be more capital intensive if that’s the word to say here– more machine intensive, if you will, over time.
There are some crops that I don’t envision, right? Watermelons, for example. I just don’t see a machine picking big watermelons and putting them in crates or even the small– I don’t know how to call it the small melons, the water ones, the pink ones.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Cantaloupes. Cantaloupes.
FEDERICO CASTILLO: Cantaloupe. Yes. Thank you. And so more and more– yeah. Historically, it has been declining. Absolutely correct. But we can see it in some of the crops. Citrus is by hand still. I don’t see citrus being mechanized anytime soon. But grapes are. Grapes are now becoming more mechanized. The trend is– the writing is on the wall.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can I abuse the fact that I have the microphone in my hand to ask a follow up? So policy regulation came up, but at– what you’re all pointing to is that for there to be actual change, something different needs to happen. And the question about unionization, I think, is pointing us there. What kind of coalitional politics do you see being possible? I mean, obviously, undocumented labor is quite politically vulnerable. What kind of coalitional politics are in the mix here to push things? Because it’s not going to come from the top down. I don’t think.
FEDERICO CASTILLO: Well, it’s interesting. I’m sorry. I have to say this. When you look at the legislature, the California legislature today, I was talking to a member of the California legislature some time ago. And this person pointed out to me that the California legislature– meaning the state Senate and the assembly– were run by folks, White folks from the Coast– LA, San Diego, San Francisco folks were running the show.
Nowadays, you have far many more members, who are not White, who are Brown folks, mostly Latino and Latina members, who are from the Valley, from Imperial Valley, or from the Central Coast, whose parents were actually farm workers. There’s quite a few of those– or whose parents were janitors or something like this. So I think it doesn’t mean that these politicians are going to be more friendly to whatever it is that the farm workers go through, but they certainly are aware of the issues that janitors and farm workers go through. It’s not that they are not majority now, but some of them are president pro tem of the Senate or whatever.
So I think that there is a potential for a different kind of understanding between the policymakers, and the unions, and others in California. Of course, Oklahoma or whatever is a different ballgame. But I will say that at least, here, there is a potential for that kind of coalition, given the composition of the state and the [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah.
TIMOTHY BOWLES: Let’s thank our panelists and Social Science Matrix….
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WOMAN’S VOICE: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
