California has lots of well known places like Los Angeles, home of Hollywood.
Silicone Valley where you find the headquarters for well-known companies
And of course the Golden Gate bridge, welcoming us to the beautiful and progressive city of San Francisco.
But, what about the important areas for food production?
Well, one of my favorites is the Salinas Valley in Monterey County on the central coast region of the state.
This is one of the most agriculturally intensive and productive regions in the world
And it's an area that's sometimes called the "Salad Bowl of the World".
It's called this because about half of the lettuce that's produced here is exported out of the U.S.
and the rest of it is eaten throughout the country.
Farmers here also produce lots of other delicious, high-value crops.
Now another thing that makes the Salinas Valley unique and interesting to me
is that it's the only place in the world
where I've ever seen lettuce
growing in cracks in the sidewalk,
and billboards promoting organic produce with interesting and often humorous slogans.
Speaking of organic,
there's been a large growth in the organic industry here over the past several decades
and here's a figure that shows that.
This growth is the reason that scientists like me were hired
to do research to help organic farmers to develop more sustainable systems
My research is focused on organic vegetable and strawberry production
in systems that are tillage-intensive and require lots and lots of inputs.
Let me explain that a little bit more.
So the high cost of agricultural land rent in this area puts a lot of pressure on farmers.
for example vegetable farmers typically have to grow at least 2 to 3 crops on each field annually to be profitable
and to do this they use some of the most advanced agricultural techniques and tools in the world
For example, much of the land has been laser- levelled to a uniform slope to reduce drainage problems
The crops are then grown a precise spacing on beds using GPS guided tractors
and there's a heavy reliance on drip irrigation to conserve the precious ground water
that's pumped from aquifers far below the soil surface.
Now to help with irrigation management and reduce excessive fertilization which has been a problem here for decades
many farmers are starting to use an online irrigation and nutrient management tool
that links data from satellites to the soil
This is a great tool to improve the sustainability of organic and conventional systems here.
While there are differences between organic conventional systems in this region,
there are also lots of similarities.
For example, while a conventional farm can use synthetic forms of nitrogen fertilizers
organic farms rely heavily on the use of pelleted fertilizers
made from waste products from animal production systems in other parts of the state.
Winter cover crops do tend to be more common on organic than conventional farms
but many organic farms here also leave their fields fallow during the winter
and rely on compost, usually made from yard waste, as a more convenient way to add organic matter to the soil
While there are small- to medium-sized organic farms with more diversified rotations in this region,
a lot of the production that's organic occurs on relatively large farms like this romaine lettuce field.
one of the ways you can tell that this field is organic is by these white patches
These are sweet alyssum flowers that are interplanted with the lettuce to attract beneficial
insects like hoverflies that help to control pests like aphids.
Now, another critical part of these intensive horticultural systems is the large number of people
that are needed for planting weeding, and doing a lot of other things,
and then finally harvesting the crops before they're shipped off the market
So the next time you sit down to have a delicious and healthy salad,
don't forget to think about the hardworking people
in complex and intensive systems in places like the Salinas Valley
that may have produced what you're eating.