Farming gives cause for celebration year-round
Last week was National Ag Week. Throughout the nation, various organizations held events and put out promotional materials to recognize and celebrate the impact agriculture has on our everyday lives.
Locally, we had a huge event on Saturday that did just that: the first annual Imperial Valley Ag Expo. For many people, it was shocking that it took so long for the Imperial Valley to finally have an event of this nature because of agriculture’s prominent role here in the Imperial County.
The Imperial County Farm Bureau had a booth at the expo where we had the opportunity to talk to community members who were both involved with agriculture and some who were not.
In addition to information about our organization, part of our booth’s display included about 20 different jars of seed and more than different types of local produce and field crops. Many expo attendees who came to our booth said they had no idea how many different items were produced in Imperial County. Then when we revealed to them that these were only a fraction of the more than 100 different commodities produced here, their eyes opened even wider.
Many people I spoke with said how neat of an event the expo was because even though they may have lived in the Imperial Valley their whole lives, they had never really quite understood how large and diverse of an industry agriculture is here. While the IV Ag Expo was a great showcase, some of my conversations strengthened my belief that we need to talk about agriculture more often.
If it wasn’t for agriculture, the Imperial Valley would not be what it is. This county has been blessed with just under 500,000 acres of farmable land. The diversity in our ag commodity portfolio is tremendous.
We grow the majority of America’s winter vegetables and enough lettuce to serve a salad to 1/3 of the world’s population. We get more cuttings of alfalfa in a year than most other counties could even dream of. Cattle has been our number one commodity in gross value for the past sixty years. We have California’s last sugar beet processing plant, and we are the only county in California to even grow sugar beets. I could go on and on.
In addition to growing a large variety of crops, our growers are going above and beyond to bring innovation to their practices, such as more efficient irrigation methods to conserve water.
In just the 2016-17 program alone, more than 3,000 proposals were submitted by local growers for water conservation practices they implemented for the IID’s On Farm Efficiency Conservation Program.
According to the Imperial County Crop & Livestock Report, in 2016, Imperial County agriculture commodities had a gross value of $2.06 billion dollars.
This value made us the No. 9 ag-producing county in the state! While California agriculture’s gross production value decreased about 6.2 percent from 2015 to 2016 and eight out of the 10 top ag producing counties saw decreases as well, as shown in the 201617 California Agricultural Statistics Review, we managed to stay strong and see an increase of 7.1 percent.
This success is the result of the hard work of the thousands of people here who work every day to put food on our tables. Today, agriculture faces more challenges than ever before, and it seems like a new obstacle comes up every day.
In spite of those challenges, the wonderful men and women who work in agriculture have the some of the strongest passion and drive that I have ever seen. If you ask growers here in the Imperial Valley why they do what they do, you’ll hear many stories of family tradition, newfound passions, and a commitment to the industry’s future.
Because the early pioneers of our Valley recognized the opportunity for farming on our fertile soils, the Imperial Valley was settled, and opportunities brought by agriculture grew this county into what it is today.
Although National Ag Week is over, let us continue to recognize and celebrate agriculture in our everyday lives!
The next time you are shopping at the grocery store, take a second to think about all of the people who got those products to you.
When you drive around the Valley, pause to admire the endless fields that are a physical representation of agriculture’s strong past, present, and future here in the Imperial Valley.