man: los angeles as a region is th most fascinating place i can think of. it's not where you'd put a city, and yet there are 10,000 urbanized square miles. so we put a city here. the question is, how did we convince people to come here? woman: i came across these statistics that said that los angeles county was once the largest farming county in the nation. that is crazy. this urban place was once a center for farming? second man: it makes me sad to see that all the building and the concrete, the highways have

taken this prime farmland out. years ago, they should have established green belts and kt that land in production. second woman: it's important to know that to this day our region continues to be a place that provides fruits and vegetables for the nation. third man: if you are to take los angeles county and count up the number of food-insecure individuals in that space, that could constitute a state in the united states all by itself. fourth man: with all the hundreds of thousands of tons of food that we throw away, r there to be any place that people are malnourished, it's for the lack of political will to solve that particular problem. fifth man: we have enough food in the l.a. market to feed everybody in l.a. and possibly to feed everybody in southern california. we have this pile of food, and we have this much need, but we don't have the bridges. third woman: to understand los angeles today, you have to

understand its past. it started as a farm town. fox: many people don't realize that l.a. was the largest agricultural county in the country up until the 1950s. and now we're home to the largest food-insecure population in the nation. we've really gone from extremes here, where this place was once of agricultural bounty. where is that bounty now? woman: we have so many areas that are food deserts, where there's a lack of affordable, healthy food, but they used to be abundant farmlands. some of the places in los angeles that used to be amazing farmland surprise people today when we tell them watts and compton used to be abundant farming communities.

gerber: the san fernando valley at one time had 60,000 acres of farmland. that included encino, van nuys, north hollywood, sherman oaks. woman: there were wheat fields, there were citrus orchards, there were vegetables produced of all kinds. this was the heart of agriculture in los angeles. man: mfamily's been farming in california fo3 generatis. my greatreat grandparents came here--i think 1852 is when they came here from maine. when my grandfather and his partner bought this in 1921, this whole thing was a dairy and all the properties around here, adjacent and as far as you could see were dairies. it wasn't very long after that--i don't know, it was a few years--but not very long before my grandfather decided that he hated-- [laughs] he hated cows and he hated the

dairy business. so be bought out his partner and tore down the dairy, sold off all the cattle, and turned this into a vegetable farm. the things that he grew most here--potatoes, onions, cauliflower. so he was in the vegetable business the rest of his life. my dad was in the vegetable business. my uncle was in the vegetable business, me, my cousin. that all started here when my grandfather decided he hated cows. boule: the dream of california has always been that 's a place of opportunity, abundance, as a place where you can reinvent yourself. and the people that came to california in the 1800s came for that very reason. the place already had this reputation as a place where they could be successful, where they could lead a healthy, satisfying life. surls: thousands of people came as tourists to che this place out because boosters such as

the l.a. chamber of commerce were already promoting los angeles as a paradise. "come visit the land of sunshine, the mediterranean of the united states." they made it sound like a very exotic place. boule: california early on was recognized as a place where agriculture was going to thrive. but exactly what would be grown here was open to experimentation. and many things were tried, from the conventional, to wheat, to things quite exotic like kiwis. there were no oranges in the americas, and there were no oranges in california until the spanish brought them in the late 1700s. and the first grove of oranges was at mission san gabriel. and it was from those very first trees with the seeds that the spanish brought that the california citrus industry began. the first commercial grove of oranges in california were planted by a

fellow named william wolfskill, and like many things in california, he was an immigrant. he came from kentucky. man: william wolfskill obtained some citrus from mission san gabriel-- mediterranean sweet oranges--and in fact, provided citrus for miners in the gold rush. there was this outbreak of scurvy in the mines, and the citrus can combat scurvy. ule: wolfskill had the concept that if he could ship his crop to where people were, he could make this successful. so he put his oranges on trains, and he shipped them to san francisco. moses: william wolfskill was really the progenitor of this whole business of citrus as a commercial enterprise. it provided a model for how this regional commodity could aually make money. woman: suddenly there was a market for all that los angeles farmers could grow, and slowly, this professional agriculture

began to develop. man: people who fashioned the myth of southern california did a really fine job in selling to those folks health and wealth. "come to this climate, and it'll cure what ails you, and it will also make you rich without having to work." this is the key to an orange tree. you don't have to plow it. boule: this is at a time when the orange was still rare and still exotic and still very expensive. and in fact, even in the early 1900s, most americans had never seen an orange. the california orange, particularly the washington naval orange, became the true second gold rush of california. man: the 1880s was this concatenation of factors that allowed people to come to los angeles in vast numbers. it allowed them to arrive and find something waiting for them--streets and water and power and roads and jails and government. it also coincides with a big population boom in the mwest. people were looking for somewhere else to go. so land developers did two things very, very well. number one, they found water supplies, private water supplies that

made their acreage valuable. and number two, they provided transportation. this was before the car. so if i contemplate buying a bean field over here and putting a city on it, i need water and i need a railway to it. and those were--those re the magic ingredients. [train whistle blows] [steam rushing] surls: the train created vast markets for farmers in los angeles because suddenly they could do more than just ship things out of the port on very long sea voyages. they could get fresh produce to market in cities across the u.s. by rail. and especially once refrigerated railcars were invented, they could get their oranges and all the vegetables that were growing in los angeles. all these could be grown in the warm los angeles winter and shped and sold for a premium in cold cities like chicago and new york, where they were so thrilled to have lettuce or celery or artichokes in the middle of the winter.

man: you're here at limoneira ranch. the company's been in business for 124 years. and we're here at the old packing house, which is about a hundred years old. so we're going to take you through, and then later what we're going to do is show you the new packing house, and you'll be able to see a hundred years' difference with respect to technology. edwards: the company was founded in 1893 by two gentlemen--wallace hardison and nathan weston blanchard. he and wallace hardison created the united states' first large-scale citrus operation to bring more reliable supplies of fresh citrus to the east coast markets where most americans lived at that time. as the citrus was being distributed, a lot of the end panels on the citrus cartons were used as ways to promote the lifestyle--the great weather, the great living that exists here in california. so you can imagine what is was like in some february in new york city when it's -5 degrees and you're looking at 80-degree temperatures next to the beach

in california. it really began the migration of people from the east to the west coast. moses: the engine behind it all was the kind of new corporate, professional, managerial industry that took hold in agriculture through the citrus growers. it might have been masquerading under the guise of the jeffersonian ideal, you know, the yeoman farmer. but these were managerial corporate thinkers, and they saw things in systematic terms of transportation, refrigeration, financing. and then as a result, what we call the northern middle class invested in citrus. and these were professionals from accounting houses, from law firms, from corporations. and because they didn't understand agriculture so much themselves, they brought business practices instead and hired professionals, experts in their fields.

boule: these early pioneers were many times people who were wealthy, and they invested in citriculture. they invested in oranges. but they didn't see themselves as dirt farmers. quite the opposite. they ked to call themselves orchardists and horticulturalists. and they truly, sincerely believed that they were making the world a better place by a product that they were growing--this beautiful orange that smelled great, that looked terrific, and was healthy for you. moses: these growers formed the california fruit growers exchange we better know now as sunkist. unlike what most people believe, florida did not invent breakfast orange juice. sunkist invented it out of their advertising department and promoted it as "drink an orange," becausenstead of eating one, you have to use 16 to produce a pitcher of orange juice in the morning. and it became a breakfast staple.

edwards: sunkist actually went out and hired an advertising agency to sell the california dream, and that whole advertising campaign today we look back on as instrumental, i think, in developing the state of california, but also selling an awful lot of oranges and lemons along the way as well. [mechanical clacking] chamberlain: so here we are. we just came from the old packing house. this is a hundred years' difference. we're in the new packing house now. but you can see the difference with the amount of volume and the amount of lanes that they're doing here. it's much better technol--i shouldn't say better technology--newer technologies, moving everything around and figuring out what's got to go where. and it's all computerized, that every aspect of it is controlled. it's so much more efficient. moses: one thing that's very

important to remember about this industrial enterprise of citrus is that it was built on the backs of an industrial labor force, from native american to chinese to japanese to mexican-american. and this is another one of the ironic issues, the relevant issues of history and our contemporary conditions today. the citrus industry, because of its need of intensive labor, created a diversity in southern california, made this region one of the most culturally-diverse regions in the entire world. and because of that constant need in agriculture of inexpensive or cheap labor, the story sort of culminates or is expressed in the problems we see today. history in that way is extremely relevant. we're also now still fighting for the ability to deal with the fact that so many people have arrived here that are hungry, that need food in the midst of this multi-billion-dollar agricultural powerhouse

of california. that in some ways is the result of this extremely successful citrus enterprise of the early 20th century, because all of the surrounding infrastructure was built in a way to fuel growth, to sell land, to build cities, to bring water to those cities, and in turn, to bring people. boule: as the california citrus industry grew, by 1895 the people in riverside had the highest per capi income america from growing oranges. and by the 1920s, the california citrus industry was the number two generator of revenue in the state of california, only behind oil. mani'm 92 years old, and i've been in agriculture all my

life. i'm actually a third generation from both sides of my family. oh, i see the seat is wet. both of my families started farming in the inglewood, playa del rey area at the turn of the centur when i was growing up, this general area was still agriculture. there were a lot of farming going on. i had a friend of mine, he had an extensive vegetable operation going on in compton. leverit: in watts where we lived, everybody had a little old garden. we got water from my next door cousin. he had a windmill, and so that's where we had water. it was dirt roads. everything was dirt. even imperial highway was dirt road. i think most of the blacks just lived in watts,

'cause we couldn't even live in compton. we might come through here. [chuckles] man: there was a lot of open land, so we as children were able to wander and see a loof nature. you could see corn in people's backyard. you could see strawberries. you saw just so much. woman: there were raspberries, some blackberries. and across the street there was a pomegranate tree. my father used to grow peaches and apricot trees and all kinds of things that was around. man: when you reached manchester--let's say manchester and avalon--all that area was alfalfa fields. uninhabited, no homes, just fields as far as you could see, like you're going through iowa or somewhere looking at cornfields. nothing but alfalfa fields.

pursche: i was farming the howard hughes land. at jefferson and centinela boulevards was the heart of the operation. i was farming barley and lima beans. i farmed that land for approximately 10 years. that soil, as far as i'm concerned, was as good a soil as anyplace you could find in the world. alderson: this soccer field used to be a potato field. dig down here a tiny bit and you can see--you can see how easy that comes up. this beautiful, super fine texture, that is perfect potato ground. the thing about this soil and why this ground was so perfect is just over there is the san gabriel river. and it's all a concrete flood channel now, but before they built that concrete flood channel, this was a flood

plain. and all of this beautiful, silty soil is stuff that has come down out of the mountains over generations, centuries, millennia, i suppose. and during flood events that would come along every once in a while, this beautiful soil would be deposited by those flood waters. and so this is exactly perfect potato ground. and now it's perfect soccer ground. [whistle blows, shouting] announcer: for the tremendous development and progress of this amazing area, coupled with its usually pleasant climate has brought a never-ending stream of population pouring into los angeles and the surrounding communities, mass production of modern... man: images of an idealized california drew increasing numbers of people to california to live. as a consequence, we began to grow houses in the fields instead of agriculture. announcer: ...loved the way the homes and streets were laid out so neatly around the super modern shopping centers. pursche: because of world war ii, people in the military seeing what a great climate southern california had then

and still has, they told their families, "let's move to california." gerber: they discovered all the wonderful things that were here, the land that was lots of open space that was flat, that was good for development, a good place to have businesses because there was an international airport developing. and a lot of these developers who had gobbled up some of the land during the war to sort of hold on to it wer n able to market it. and so by the end of the 1950s and surely by the mid-60s, there was little if any farmland left here. graham: ultimately, to make a city in thismprobably place, you had to keep reinventing what w going to be economically viable. and so there's been a series of successful gambits. ultimately, what was most valuable crop here was front lawn. what we're doing is growing real estate. pursche: i'm looking across the

street at the new bank of hope. that was formerly a hatchery for baby chicks and geese and ducks. to my left over here was what's left of an old walnut orchard. that was open land right he where nissan is. they put the freeway through one parcel that i was farming there, where the high-rise buildings are on the south side of the freeway today. the two large japanese farmers who actually owned land adjacent to where i was farming, they couldn't resist the high offers, so they sold out and then moved their operations to orange county. when the price became too exorbitant to

resist, i never heard of anyone saying no. alderson: in 1921, my grandfather and his partner bought this 15 acres, which was a dairy at the time. so buildings, dairy herd, the whole thing, 200 bucks. 30 years later, he was able to parlay this 15 acres into 200 acres over in anaheim right on euclid and katella, which is about a half a mile from where disneyland is now. the story goes that walt came down to meet with my grandfather at the house there on katella, sat down in the kitchen, at the kitchen table. my grandmother made sandwiches for them, and walt and my grandfather worked out a deal. walt offered him $1,600 an acre, which s an enormou profit over what he hadust spent to buy the place a few years earlier. so they came to a handshake deal, and then apparently the guys down by the

freeway, or the soon-to-be-built freeway, got really agreeable at that time and walt was able to put the park where he wanted to. because walt put the park where he did, all this old farmland around there began to be developed. and within a couple years of the park opening, some developers came and offered my grandfather $4,500 an acre for the same property. and that's true for a lot of guys around here that sold to developers. the world changed really, really fast. surls: one of the remaining remnants of our agricultural past in los angeles is this amazing sycamore tree in compton. it's a very old tree, and it was one of the boundary markers of the rancho san pedro, which was one of the original ranchos in los angeles county. it was a huge expanse of land. [dog barks]

man: channe28, i hear, you kno this tr like landmark between mexico and united states. it's landmark. i was looking for a house, you know, and the realtor show me this property. i see that tree, very nice tree, big tree, maybe around 90-feet ll or 100-feet tall. all my family, they enjoyed the shade for this tree. graham: it's part of our history. obvious takes us back to a past that--incommensurate. it's hard to really imagine a landscape where we needed to use trees miles apart to know where we were. you know, we've laid a grid over the entire place. it's literally a link to the deep past of this region. [thunder]

graham: so we did this--we paved the river, we paved over those water courses so that we could have a stable real estate landscape. and the irony is, of course, when you pave the ground, the water runs off and you have an even bigger flood threat. you have to pour more conete. also, you dry out that ground. a sycamore growing in that part of compton, ultimately the groundwater is going to disappear and that tree's going to die. [engine sputters] pursche: we are at seal beach, california, at the naval weapons station. they've had agriculture here since the station was established during world war ii. and i've been here for a little over 30 years now. presely i am still

working 6 days a week with my farming operation, which consists of 2,000 acres of garbanzo beans, barley, and lima beans. since i'm at the seal beach weapons station, as long as it is the only weapons station on the west coast, it's not likely that it will be downsized or discontinued. schallmann: it's a win-win for the navy because e navy makes a little bit of money from the outleases, but also, all of this land does not need to be mowed, it doesn't need to be maintained because the rmers are taking good care of it. it's one of theew places where there's open space where we can actually do agriculture these days in orange county. there's not many green spaces left, and naval weapons station seal beach is 5,000 acres, but it's 5,000 acres of open space. moses: the success of the industry, i think, was in some ways too good to be true. it

generated such a growth machine in southern california, so wildly successful, that it produced what we are today. boule: it could be argued the things that came later, like the aerospace industry, the entertainment industry, biotech, silicon valley, those things might have eventually migrated to california 'cause the weather was still the weather, but it might have taken a much longer time. the marketing of california to the rest of the country opened people's imaginations to what was possible there. announcer: all night long trucks travel from the farm, bringing food to the city. their journey ends here, at the

wholesale produce market. surls: in the early 1900s, th central produce market developed. this had to be close to the train, of course, so that farmers could come to one central place where they could sell their produce and easily ship it to market. alderson: my grandfather had this old model "a" flatbed truck, and they would load up boxes on that model "a" truck, and my dad would drive it up telegraph boulevard into downtown l.a. to the wholesale produce market. woman: most people don't even know the wholesale produce market exists. they've been living in los angeles their whole entire life and they've never come down here. and it's a huge, huge business. it's a huge part of l.a., it's a big part of their history, and it is the largest in north america. nothing compares to the los angeles produce market. morris: my name is morris shandler. my uncle haskill gilmam was a partner in what was then known as h. gilman produce.

i started working in the wholesale produce market in december of 1933. the first 3 years that i was there, i learned how to work on the floor, i drove a truck, and we went to the team track to haul potatoes, apples, and other items back to the store. l of this was done my hand, everything was by hand. you stacked by hand. there was hand trucks. now it's different. it's mostly stuff that's coming in by truck, it's palletized. so the amount of physical labor is practically nothing compared to what is was at the time. woman: just like our company, the growing families are generation after generation--4, 5, 6 generations. the people that my great uncle was doing business with are still doing business with us. and they rely upon us to do the best possible job of getting their product sold for them. [indistinct chatter]

talia: my growers feel like family to me. i take pride in what they produce. i take pride in knowing that i'm giving it the best home possible, that getting it to the most people possible at the most accessible price possible so that way it can be affordable for people that need it. man: farmers and brokers, they distribute food to wholesalers. high-end supermarkets like whole foods and bristol farms and all that, they pay very well, so they get the top-of-the-line product. the rest of the product, which is still very good, goes into the wholesale market to be sold to anyone that is willing to buy bulkwhen the product is not good enough to be sold in primary markets, it gets sent to a wholesale market as consignment. we're talking about food that is as good as the one in primary markets. maybe it's sghtly older, maybe it's not the right size, maybe it has a

little spot. after reasonable time, if they don't sell it or they see that it's starting to have a little bit of decay, they call food recovery organizations and we collect that food and we distribute it. talia: there's no point in food ending up in the trashcan. that's just a waste. it's a waste of food, it's a waste of energy, it's a waste of water and power and gasoline to transport it. the work that food recovery in general does is really beneficial to the entire cycle because it gives food that might have otherwise ended up unused in a few days, it gives it a home. working with food forward, a food recovery company, has really helped us move a lot more product to people that wouldn't normally be in the channels that we would be selling to. man: the impetus for food forward personally came from post-2008 election results. i