1928] THE AGRICULTURAL SITUATION IN CALIFORNIA 5 
What did the farmers do with their land? Many of them turned 
to the production of California specialties: crops which are grown 
only or chiefly in this state. These specialty crops are, of course, our 
fruit and vegetable crops. So we find that during the same period 
that farmers reduced their acreage of field crops, they greatly inereased 
their acreage of fruit and vegetable crops. The increases in the 
acreage of the main fruit crops are shown in table 2. You will notice 
that there was an increase in the acreage of every one of them, except 
lemons. With some of them the inereases were very large: figs, 156 
per cent; grapefruit, 103 per cent; almonds, 82 per cent; vines, 71 
per cent; apricots, 55 per cent; pears, 48 per cent; peaches, 46 per 
sent, and so on. The total fruit acreage in the state was increased 
by 573,000 acres, an increase of 43 per cent. 
The relatively high prices of fruit were the chief cause for this 
enormous increase. It will be recalled that the prices of the great 
staple crops were very low in 1921 and 1922. On the other hand, the 
prices of most of our fruit crops remained high. While the corn and 
wheat farmers of the Middle West were in many instances going broke, 
the fruit farmers of California were still riding on the wave of 
prosperity. And evidently many of us believed that this period of 
prosperity would continue indefinitely. So we went blithely on our 
way planting more and more fruit. 
TABLE 3 
PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN PRICES OF CALIFORNIA FRUITS BETWEEN 1921-1922 
AND 1926-1997 
Crops 
PIES eee 
PIUBBE sovmimmnnepon somes 
PIUMS oie eerie 
Peaches ......cccomvecmeecen. 
DIIVES ooeeeeeceeeceaceccacnecees 
Ponrs aussie 
Apricots oie 
ATMONAS cee eereeecaaesen 
Per cent 
~ 
“ 
Crops Per cent 
Walnuts cocoa. + 10 
Cherries —.o...ccooceeeoeeeeeeeeeee. += 18 
Oranges ..... + 27 
Table grapes ...........i.c.... — 64 
Juice grapes ................ —39 
Raisin graves ooo. —— 33 
Data from California Coonerative Crop Reporting Service. 
Well, what was the result? Just exactly what we might have 
expected. Prices began to drop. Table 3 shows a list of the important 
fruit crops, together with the percentage increase or decrease in their 
average prices between 1921-1922 and 1926-1927. The minus signs 
which indicate a decline in price become almost monotonous in their