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Most of the farm land in California is in the Central Valley. Do you guys know how big this valley is? Try 450 miles.

Driving from Sacramento down Hwy 5 you have one large city (Stockton) before you reach the turn off to the San Francisco bay area. If you were to continue driving south, you would need to drive to the end of the valley and over the grapevine to reach another large city. About six hours (of some of the most boring driving you will ever do). Except for farms and a few small cities there is nothing on Hwy 5 for hundreds of miles. Did I mention, except for farms.

If you decided to drive down Hwy 99 (Hwy 5 and 99 meet at both ends of the valley but for the most part they run parallel about 20 miles apart. Most of the land between the two roads is farm land.

Driving 99 south from Sacramento you hit a large city about every hour, Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno and then Bakersfield. Everything between the cities is farm land.

The Central Valley is 450 miles long, and most of it is farm land. I don’t think we will be running out of land any time soon.

The mindset expressed in reply 15 is precisely the problem that California's agricultural industry faces in its attempt to preserve one of the nations strategic assets.

Those observers of California's least productive agricultural areas perceive an abundance of supply and ignore the immediate consequences of unregulated immigration on its most productive farms lands located in the Santa Clara and Salinas Valleys, the eastern 2/3 of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and the delta of the Santa Clara River.

If you decided to drive down Hwy 99 (Hwy 5 and 99 meet at both ends of the valley but for the most part they run parallel about 20 miles apart. Most of the land between the two roads is farm land. Driving 99 south from Sacramento you hit a large city about every hour, Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno and then Bakersfield. Everything between the cities is farm land.

That may have been true fifteen or twenty years ago, but it's certainly not true today. Drive south out of Sacramento and you'll hit Elk Grove in about 5 minutes. South of Elk Grove you'll pass through a bunch of marginally farmable marshlands until you hit Lodi in 15 minutes. On a clear day, you can SEE the sprawl in northern Stockton from the edge of the sprawl in southern Lodi now. In 10 years, it'll be one city. When you leave southern Stockton, you have a short 15 minute drive to Manteca. South of Manteca, it's only 5 minutes to Ripon. From there, it's SOLID CITY from southern San Joaquin county, all the way through Stanislaus county to the Merced county line. Ripon, Salida, Modesto, Ceres, Keyes, and Turlock have ALL bumped into each other. While there are still a couple of spots of farmland along the freeway, they're all owned by developers who already have development plans on file for them. Once you enter Merced County, you'll find yourself in Delhi in under 5 minutes. South of Delhi, it's a bridge and two minutes to Livingston. Unfortunatly, every single one of these once tiny towns is now surrounded by an ever expanding ring of subdivisions. Tiny Salida, which had a population of about 600 15 years ago, now has over 14,000 people in it. Ceres, which had about 8,000 people in it when I was a kid (and I'm only 30), is over 40,000 today.

As recently as 10 years ago, most of these towns and cities had vast stretches of unbroken farmland between them and every one of those farms put food on our tables. Today, vast areas of that land have been developed, and development plans are publically availalbe showing that they plan on expanding far more.

There's considerably more land available in the southern half of the Valley, but that land has problems of its own. It's poor quality soil, it has a lot of salt in it, and there are serious limitations on the amount of water available to it. The central and northern valleys pull water from a dozen rivers and have enough water to pump to other parts of the state for drinking. As the cities expand, they're using the water from these rivers to sate their populations. And the southern half of the valley? Only three rivers that are ALREADY tapped so heavily that two of them end in dry riverbeds, and the third is shallow enough to walk across mid-summer. Empty dirt is only one of the requirements for farming, and we have plenty of that. Poor soil conditions and lack of water ensure that the southern valley cannot be made productive enough to counter the loss of farmland in the north.