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The richness and complexity of the history of agriculture confound attempts at generalization. While this chapter highlights a vast body of secondary literature, its aim is to be suggestive and informative rather than comprehensive.

Despite the crop’s prominence, there is only a fragmented history of wheat farming in California in the secondary literature. Historians have examined in considerable detail the development of the wheat belt on the western edge of the Midwest, from the Dakotas down to Kansas and into northern Texas, particularly in the 1880s. But for much of that decade, no state produced more wheat than California. Nearly all the state’s famous valleys—not only Sacramento and San Joaquin, but also Napa, Sonoma, Santa Clara (now Silicon), Salinas, San Fernando—were planted in wall-to-wall wheat at the time. Moreover, California began establishing its reputation as the “granary of the world” as early as the late 1850s, a full generation before wheat gained prominence on the Great Plains. Yet, two of the best books covering California’s wheat era—Michael J. Gillis and Michael F. Magliari, John Bidwell and California (2003) and Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (1984)—address the subject in considerable depth, but only as a secondary issue.

Much of the literature draws from the traditional themes of agricultural history—production, distribution, technology, and government policy. In this regard, there is no shortage of secondary sources. The three classic articles published by Rodman Paul (1958a, 1958b, 1973) and the three less well-known but equally valuable by Morton Rothstein (1963, 1969, 1975) provide an abundance of sources, information, and interpretations. Rothstein’s short study, The California Wheat Kings (1987) and Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier (1966), chapter 9, should be consulted as well—along with a number of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from the 1950s and 1960, all of which are frequently cited in these sources. Rarely cited but very informative is Forest G. Hill, “Place of the Grain Trade in California Economic Development” (1954). On technology, see Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “An Overview of California Agricultural Mechanization” (1988), Reynold M. Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm (1953), and Wik, “Some Interpretations of the Mechanization of Agriculture in the Far West” (1975). And on labor in the wheat fields, see Richard Steven Street, “Tattered Shirts and Ragged Pants” (1998) and Mark Wyman, Hoboes, Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps (2011). See also the innovative work on bound Indian labor in the early statehood period in the two articles by Magliari (2004 and 2012) and especially Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier (2013).

Land policy in particular has drawn considerable scholarly attention. No one has understood California’s highly complex land system better than Paul Wallace Gates, whose many penetrating essays on the subject have been collected in one volume, Land and Law in California (1991). Gates’s California Ranchos and Farms (1967) is also very useful. Pisani has deepened our understanding of several of Gates’s main themes in two pathbreaking articles of his own: “Squatter Law in California, 1850–1858” and “Land Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century California,” both in his Water, Land, and Law in the West (1996). Also valuable are Christian G. Fritz, Federal Justice in California (1991), Ellen Liebman, California Farmland (1983), M. Catherine Miller, Flooding the Courtroom (1993), Richard H. Peterson, “The Failure to Reclaim” (1974), and David Vaught, After the Gold Rush (2007).

For a few others, the primary objective has been to write “new” rural histories—that is, books and articles that examine wheat farmers in their social and cultural contexts. Much of what we know about farm life in California during this period comes from contemporary critics, most notably land-reformer Henry George (of “single tax” fame) and muckraking novelist Frank Norris (The Octopus). That approach has focused scholarly attention on the largest farmers, especially Hugh Glenn and his empire of 66,000 acres in the northern Sacramento Valley. In the process, the state’s thousands of much smaller wheat farmers have all but disappeared from view in the literature. An insightful work, though it is concerned primarily with the tail end of the state’s wheat era is Magliari, “California Populism” (1992), which demonstrates that wheat growers could be modernizing and wealthy yet so steeped in Jeffersonian values that they joined the Farmers’ Alliance. Gerald Prescott also analyzes small grain farmers in their social and cultural contexts in “Farm Gentry vs. the Grangers” (1977/1978). The most recent and comprehensive treatment is Vaught, After the Gold Rush (2007). Other social histories of wheat farming in the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, remain few and far between. For that matter, even Glenn has received minimal attention, the only full-length treatment being Ann Foley Scheuring, Valley Empires (2010), a useful but non-scholarly volume. For an explanation of why rural social history has flourished in the Midwest but not in California, see Vaught, “State of the Art—Rural History, or Why is There No Rural History of California?” (2000).

There was more to California agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century than wheat. On cattle ranching, particularly during the 1850s and 1860s, the essential study is Hazel Adele Pulling, “A History of California’s Range-Cattle Industry” (1944). Four sources that supplement Pulling nicely are Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (1993), David Igler, Industrial Cowboys (2001), Ray August, “Cowboys v. Ranchers” (1993), and Gates, California Ranchos and Farms, chapter 2 (1967). On the transition to specialty crops, Rhode, “Learning, Capital Accumulation, and the Transformation of California Agriculture” (1995), provides the most sophisticated analysis. See also the appropriate chapters in Paul, The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition (1988), and Vaught Cultivating California (1999).

There are a number of fine environmental histories of California’s wheat era. Two pioneer studies by Kenneth Thompson—“Riparian Forests of the Sacramento Valley” (1961) and “Historic Flooding of the Sacramento Valley (1960)—are still immensely helpful, as are several chapters in Elna Bakker, An Island Called California (1971). Robert Kelley, Battling the Inland Sea (1989), was an instant classic on the Sacramento Valley. Steven Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson, The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland (1993), document their observations with beautiful photographs.

Much of our understanding of California specialty-crop agriculture comes from farm labor studies. Most follow the “factories in the field” paradigm established by Carey McWilliams over three-quarters of a century ago. Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest (1981) argues that “the erosion of agrarian ideals” and the simultaneous evolution of “industrialized agriculture” in the last half of the nineteenth century provided the foundation for class conflict in the twentieth century. Linda C. Majka and Theo J. Majka’s theoretically oriented analysis of farmworker unionism, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State (1982), asserts that “large-scale production has dominated California agriculture virtually since statehood.” In This Bittersweet Soil (1986), Sucheng Chan astutely criticizes scholars who have misrepresented and/or undervalued the role of Chinese farm laborers in the development of California agriculture but does not question the assumption that “factories sprang up in the field” during the late nineteenth century. Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold (1994), Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community (1994), and Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Worker and American Dreams (1994) all analyze Mexican farmworkers with deftness and imagination, but for the most part portray their employers in monolithic terms and with minimal documentation. Other histories that stress the agency of farmworkers and provide brief chapters or statements regarding the factory nature of the state’s agriculture include Lori A. Flores, Grounds for Dreaming (2016), James Gregory, American Exodus (1989), Masakazu Iwata, Planted in Good Soil (1992), Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Workers, Cannery Lives (1987), and Street, Beasts of the Field (2004).

There are important exceptions, however. Several works challenge, or at least modify, the factories paradigm. In addition to Magliari (1992) and Prescott (1977/1978), Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmers’ Benevolent Trust (1998), challenges conventional wisdom about farm size in California to demonstrate the leverage small growers in the raisin industry held in marketing cooperatives. Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage (1998), emphasizes regional specialization and small-scale farms in the state’s fruit era. Several essays in a special issue of California History (Orsi 1995) enhance our understanding of citrus growers by examining original sources rather than relying on standard accounts. Paul J.P. Sandul, California Dreaming (2014), analyzes agricultural colonies (or “rural suburbs”) in southern and northern California. Kevin Starr’s chapter on California’s “georgic beginnings” in Inventing the Dream (1985) emphasizes the high ideals of the turn-of-the-century specialty-crop generation, as does Vaught, Cultivating California (1999).

In addition, there are a number of studies of Asian and other non-Anglo farm communities whose economic and cultural complexities bear little resemblance to the factory-based agriculture of McWilliams—and thus have been deemed “lost stories” by Linda L. Ivey, “Ethnicity in the Land” (2007). Cecilia M. Tsu, Garden of the World (2013), through extensive and painstaking research in county records (court, mortgage, lease, assessment, coroner), census manuscripts, Chinese and Japanese language newspapers, and multiple English language newspapers and trade journals, among numerous other sources, deftly analyzes the experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino farmers in the Santa Clara Valley, paying close attention to their ethnicity, gender, class loyalties, family networks, and community relations. See also, among many other excellent works, William J. Bauer, We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here (2009), Valerie Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place (1993), Sally M. Miller, “Changing Faces of the Central Valley” (1995), Kazuko Nakane, Nothing Left in My Hands (1985), and Miriam Wells, Strawberry Fields (1996).

Perhaps most suggestive of all is the rich literature on early promoters of modern irrigated agriculture in California. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (1984), Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire (1985), and Mark Arax, The Dreamt Land (2019), among others, have demonstrated that William Smythe, William Hammond Hall, Elwood Mead, and other “crusaders” believed that water could be utilized to promote family farms, break up the state’s baronial wheat farms, and still encourage economic development. They saw no contradiction between agrarian ideals and the emerging industrial capitalist order. But irrigation scholars have not examined the worldview of the farmers themselves with the same originality. Pisani, oddly enough, falls back on the agrarian-industrial dichotomy to conclude that nineteenth-century specialty-crop growers “saw themselves as businessmen, not community builders.” His brief assessment of grower culture stems from a single source—Factories in the Field.

Economists have provided many additional insights, only a few of which can be mentioned here. William S. Hallagan, “Labor Contracting in Turn-of-the-Century Agriculture” (1980), demonstrates that risk sharing, the enforceability of contract terms, incentives, supervising concerns, community relations, and a number of other variables factor into how specialty-crop farmers—Anglo and Asian alike—assessed their particular labor needs. Keijiro Otsuka et al (1992) surveys agricultural contract choice in developing economies in “Land and Labor Contracts in Agrarian Economies” (1992), many of which are directly relevant to the California specialty-crop era. And Olmstead and Rhode, Creating Abundance (2008), emphasize the paramount importance of biological innovation in the transition from wheat to fruit in California, with farmers experimenting with new crops and gradually matching them to soils and microclimates, reshaping the landscape to better accommodate labor-intensive agriculture, and combating pests and diseases—all by undertaking collective action under the guidance of a vast array of new state and federal laws and institutions.

Readers interested in cooperative marketing should begin with Woeste, The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust (1998). Her study is the first to analyze the subject in its legal and social, not just economic, contexts. Previously, scholars relied heavily on the works of agricultural economist H. E. Erdman (e.g. 1958). Mansel G. Blackford (1977) and Grace H. Larsen (1958) clash over the role played by Harris Weinstock, the most significant non-grower in California’s cooperative movement. Other important works include Vaught, Cultivating California (1999) and Street, “Marketing California Crops at the Turn of the Century” (1979). A number of doctoral dissertations on the cooperative efforts of growers of specific crops, most of them conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1920s, are cited in these works.

Though most analyses of the specialty-crop era contain elements of environmental history, several scholars have placed nature and ecology at the forefront of their studies, most notably Benny J. Andrés, Power and Control of the Imperial Valley (2014), Christopher J. Castaneda and Lee M. A. Simpson, River City and Valley Life (2013), Igler, Industrial Cowboys (2001), Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies (2007), Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (1986), Sackman, Orange Empire (2009), Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage (1998), Ian Tyrell, True Gardens of the Gods (1999), and Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California (2016).

With regard to cotton production in California, the two best overviews are John H. Turner, White Gold Comes to California (1981) and Moses S. Musoke and Alan L. Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry in California” (1982). In Creating Abundance (2008), Olmstead and Rhode continue their analyses on biological innovation with an emphasis on the San Joaquin Valley’s extraordinary one-variety community movement over a 40-year period in the first half of the twentieth century to its subsequent demise in the late 1950s and 1960s. On the Imperial Valley, the essential work is Andrés, Power and Control of the Imperial Valley (2014). Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost (1987), offers a comparative perspective with the American South. Prior to mechanization, the focus necessarily turned to labor; see especially Daniel, Bitter Harvest (1982) and Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold (1994). Despite its flaws, Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California (2003) is a must-read.

Finally, there are a number of useful broad, general works on California agriculture available, including Walter Ebling, The Fruited Plain (1980), Lawrence J. Jelinek, Harvest Empire (1982), Joseph A. McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley (1961), Scheuring, A Guidebook to California Agriculture (1983), and Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread (2004). The best textbook on California history—and the one that offers the most and best insights on agriculture and related topics—is Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, Mary Ann Irwin, Michael F. Magliari, and Cecilia M. Tsu, The Elusive Eden (5th ed. 2020).