Cal Ag Roots Podcast

Picture your produce aisle: Strawberries. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Celery. Onions. These crops fill shopping carts across the country and a full third of them come from California. There was a time, though, when California fields grew mostly wheat. Huge tracts of the land we now know as the salad bowl of the world were then pumping out massive quantities of grain, not fruits or vegetables. In the early twentieth century California farming underwent a major transformation that created the abundance you can see in your produce-aisle today. And one particular group of California farmers really laid the foundation for that transformation. We don’t often hear their names and many of their stories have been long-buried. According to Isao Fujimoto, "The early success of the Japanese farmers led the Japanese to be productive farmers, but instead of being praised, they got attacked. And the attack came in the form of Alien Land Laws." In a lot of ways, you could say Japanese immigrants started California’s produce in