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California's Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles from Bakersfield in the south to Redding in the North, has five of the state's 15 largest cities: Fresno, Sacramento, Bakersfield, Stockton and Modesto. Its population, currently six million, is projected to more than double to 13 million by 2050, largely because of immigration and internal migration from higher cost coastal areas of California.

The growing Central Valley is evolving into four components with very different economies. The Sacramento region is becoming an extension of the Bay Area, attracting well-educated natives and immigrants seeking jobs and cheaper housing. Similarly, the northern San Joaquin Valley offers cheaper housing to workers who often commute long distances to the Bay Area for jobs.

The two other Central Valley sub-regions are not linked to the Bay Area, and have growing populations despite poor economies. The northern Sacramento Valley depends on agriculture and timber, and is attracting both retirees and immigrants looking to stretch limited incomes. The southern San Joaquin Valley is losing college-educated residents and attracting immigrants, many of whom are rural Mexicans with little education.

Even though most southern San Joaquin Valley residents are not employed in agriculture, the region has been unable to create enough jobs to reduce persistent double-digit unemployment rates and to raise wages enough to pull residents out of poverty. Madera, Fresno, Kings, Visalia and Kern counties collectively gained a net of 13,000 adults without a high school diploma between 1995 and 2000, and lost a net of 3,000 college graduates during the same period.

Population growth is threatening the supply of farm land, and there are several efforts underway to preserve it, including having land trusts pay 20 percent to 50 percent of the market value in a one-time payment that keeps the land undeveloped "in perpetuity." Some 250,000 acres are protected under this plan in California, most in central coast counties. The 1965 California Land Conservation Act (Williamson Act) saves farmers 20 percent to 75 percent in tax liability each year if they forgo development for at least 10 years, and enrolls 17 million acres, saving farmers $40 million in taxes.

Jobs. The Fresno County Board of Supervisors in November 2004 considered a 45-point, 15-year plan to revive the economy of four farm worker cities: Firebaugh, Mendota, Huron and Coalinga. Some 350 Coalinga residents are among the 1,400 employees of the Pleasant Valley State Prison, and Mendota hopes for jobs from a planned 1,100-bed federal prison. Huron's population of 7,000 doubles with the spring and fall lettuce harvests, which complicates the quest for affordable housing.

Fresno's West Side cities are expected to be affected by the end of farming on 100,000 of the current 570,000 acres of irrigated land in the Westside Water District. However, the District is projecting more rather than fewer farm jobs despite shrinking acreage, assuming that remaining farmers will shift to more labor-intensive crops. Many of the year-round workers on farms that will no longer produce crops are expected to be forced to move.

In Firebaugh and several other farm worker cities there were reports of people posing as undercover Border Patrol agents during summer 2004, "arresting" unauthorized foreigners and freeing them after they paid "bail." The Border Patrol closed its Fresno office in summer 2004.

Parlier, a city of 12,000 southeast of Fresno, has been described as an overgrown labor camp because most of its residents are employed in agriculture, usually as workers. The city's government wants to attract nonfarm businesses to its new industrial park, which is raising concerns at the Kearney Research and Agricultural Center, a UC-USDA facility comprising 456 acres south of Parlier, that wants the area to remain agricultural.

Two Fresno-area firms announced major expansions in Fall 2004. Pelco, a Clovis-based designer and manufacturer of video security systems, will add over 300 employees in 2005, taking the total to 2,000, while Ruiz Foods Inc. in Dinuba plans to add 300 workers with a $40 million plant expansion.

Wasco, the 22,000 resident Rose Capital of the Nation in Kern county, is considering 10 dairies nearby that would bring 100,000 cows to the area. Kern County has 290,000 dairy cows, and 26 megadairies with an additional 237,000 cows have applied to move into the county; many are from the Chino basin east of Los Angeles.

Mother Jones in November/December 2004 reported that many of the Mexicans arriving to fill seasonal farm jobs are settling in the San Joaquin Valley, profiling a couple from Oaxaca living in Arvin with three US-born children. Immigration and settlement have changed the face of Arvin, which has 13,000 residents, and added hundreds of students to area schools, most of whom qualify for subsidized lunches because of their parents' low incomes. There are no vacant apartments, and many seasonal workers live in converted garages and back-yard sheds, paying $300 a month or more. Seasonal field workers know that, to get better jobs in nonfarm packing sheds, they must have good documentation showing they are authorized to work in the US, which most do not have.

There are by some estimates 200,000 indigenous people from southern Mexico and Central America in California, and many speak Mixteco, Zapoteco, Trique, Nahuatl and other languages rather than Spanish; most estimates are that 10 to 20 percent of California farm workers may be indigenous, although a smaller percentage do not speak Spanish. California courts, which must provide translation of charges to the accused in their own language, are scrambling for interpreters, many of whom began as volunteers for their countrymen.

Coachella. California's Coachella Valley in eastern Riverside county produces about half of the county's $1 billion a year in farm commodities. The major commodity is nursery products, $206 million in 2003; table grapes worth $116 million from 11,300 acres that produced an average 6.4 tons an acre; avocados worth $60 million; 55,000 acres of alfalfa hay, yielding almost nine tons an acre and worth $44 million, and dates worth $36 million. Bell peppers were worth $33 million, while the citrus industry includes grapefruit worth $30 million and lemons worth $26 million.

There is limited housing available for farm workers, many of whom live in trailer parks that do not have permits for basic utilities. After three tenants were electrocuted in 1998, the county found 321 trailer parks operating without required permits, and 90 percent had 12 or fewer spaces. The county turned enforcement over to the state's HCD at trailer parks housing 12 or more workers, and promised stepped up enforcement at the smaller parks. However, even when substandard facilities are found, enforcers are reluctant to order parks closed because displaced tenants often have no affordable housing to move into. In some cases, the trailer parks have moved onto Indian reservations, which complicates enforcement.

Mecca, just north of the Salton Sea, illustrates the farm worker housing problem. Many of the modest homes in this unincorporated area have additional structures, ranging from storage sheds to lean-tos, with mattresses in which often solo males who are unauthorized sleep. Legal residents provide the newcomers with services, ranging from housing to rides to the fields. On weekends, there are a variety of markets, selling everything from clothing to food. Local nonprofits such as the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition provide housing for both families and solo men in Mecca and elsewhere, including in a 32-unit complex in which each unit has two bedrooms and four beds, and rents for $100 a week.

In the Coachella Valley Unified School District, 70 percent of students are classified as English-language learners, and Coachella is one of 15 California school districts that failed to meet federal goals in standardized testing for the second year in a row. Under the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, schools must test students if they have been in the school for at least one academic year, and all students are to be proficient in reading, writing and math by 2014; California permits testing only in English.

The UFW won an election to represent Tenneco West citrus, date and grape workers in 1979, and Dole Fresh bought Tenneco's Coachella operations in 1988. There were UFW-Dole negotiations regarding date workers, but not grape workers, because Dole asserted that the UFW had abandoned them.

Air Quality. The Los Angeles basin, home to 17 million people, had its best air quality in a quarter century in 2004, failing to meet the federal one-hour ozone standard on 27 days, compared with 68 in 2003 and 150 days in the 1970's and 1980's. Ground-level ozone is formed when auto emissions and vapors from volatile compounds like paints and solvents "cook" in the atmosphere, and are worsened when warm air is trapped near the ground.

Seven of the top 10 urban areas for bad air, including the first four, are also in California, in a band through the San Joaquin Valley from Sacramento to Bakersfield. The 25,000-square-mile San Joaquin Valley violated the eight-hour or daylong smog standard 240 times, the most days of violation in the US. Some 300,000 San Joaquin Valley residents, about 10 percent, suffer from a chronic breathing disorder and 16 percent of the children in Fresno County have asthma.

Farming accounts for half of the San Joaquin Valley's particulate pollution, and SB 700 requires large farms to apply to for air pollution permits by the end of 2004. About two-thirds of the 6,400 farms applied to the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District for permits by the end of 2004 as required, even though their diesel water pumps emit large quantities of nitrogen oxides- farmers with more than 100 contiguous acres and dairies with more than 500 cows must get permits.

There is a dispute about how much methane gas and ammonia is associated with dairy cows, but environmentalists say there is no doubt that ammonia bonds with nitrogen oxides to make a potent and dangerous microscopic speck called PM 2.5. The cleanup plan proposes reducing San Joaquin Valley particulate pollution by 23 percent, or 34 tons a day, by 2010.

California's Pollution Control Financing Authority provided $66 million in anti-pollution bond money to 18 dairies in the San Joaquin Valley, which increased pollution, according to critics. The loans were made because the dairies promised not to put their waste in landfills, which none do. Instead, dairy waste is stored in open-air lagoons that, according to critics, endanger the groundwater and emit millions of pounds of smog-forming gases. Some in the dairy industry believe that methane digesters could enclose the lagoons and recycle methane gas as an energy source.

Juliana Barbassa, "In California, Some Farmers Joining War on Airborne Dust," AP, December 30, 2004. E.J. Schultz, "Rural Fresno County cities seek solutions," Fresno Bee, November 11, 2004. Fred Alvarez, "Interpreters Give Voice to the Indigenous," Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2004. Maggie Jones, "Migrants No More," Mother Jones, November/December 2004.