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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.

Since I live in one of the cities you mention I can say you are wrong. While it is true, there are is some build up along the highway, there is farm land just off the freeway.

I have farms all around me. The land between Highway 99 and Interstate 5 is almost all farm land. Except for in the larger cities I mentioned you will be hip deep in farms less then a mile away from the freeway.

So while I will agree with you, that urban sprawl is surrounding Sacramento, and there are homes along side parts of 99, for the most part it is still all farm land south of Manteca until you reach the grapevine.