California's bread basket

Headed for parts north this week, escaping the summer heat.  It was warm the first two days, but not as bad as the 115 + humidity in Palm Springs!  So, I became part snowbird and headed up to the Olympic Peninsula for a week.  Arrived today in Lacey, after 3 days of driving through  the heartland of both California and Oregon.

Corn in the Central Valley

It was awesome and disturbing.  Everywhere you looked there were fields of crops:  corn, trees of some fruit or nut, grains and other things I could not recognize from the road.  Immense watering wheels and sprinklers, field workers.  The smell of the air was hay and dust and the hot, wet smell of watered soil.

The smells of the air were so distinctive all along the way.  The smell of hay, or at least dried, cut grasses, was dominant until north of Sacramento.  There I noticed a pungent, almost bitter smell that was heavy, making breathing a bit challenging.  Not that I couldn't breath, just that I was aware of my lungs pumping.  I did not know what it was, until I made a wrong turn looking for a Wildlife Refuge.  I drove along this country road and noticed a small biplane swooping in low, banking sharply, then reversing its trajectory.  I swung my car to the side of the road, and hopped out with my camera.  Sure enough it was spraying up and down the fields south of the road.  I'll be that was the smell.  It was disturbing, because there I was, there people in their cars were, and there were the field hands laboring in the neighboring fields.

It was a bit disturbing.  This, of course, brought up thoughts of Monsanto and patented (!) seeds, loss of small farmers, monoculture, GMO foods and Monsanto, water rights and dams, and So Cal desperate for water, salmon struggling, heirloom seeds and native food heritage, agri-business and buying avocados and persimmons from Mexico when they are grown in my own back yard.

Biplane spraying north of Sacramento

And most disturbing of all, when you see this,  miles and miles and miles of it, one can't help but wonder if the things I do to try to help (buy organic, plant a desert landscape, conserve energy) isn't a pathetically insignificant thing.  What can the likes of me do about it?