22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 28-OCTOBER 4, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com How mass marketing changed Salinas Valley agriculture forever. By Marielle Argueza Through John Steinbeck’s writing, readers who had never laid eyes on the Salinas Valley could see with precision the Gabilan Mountains in the east, low, green and sparkling, letting the sunshine flood through the fields. To the west, they could imagine the foreboding Santa Lucia Mountains, creating a thick wall of shadow. “He was trying to put Central California on the map,” says Susan Shillinglaw, a literary scholar, English professor at San Jose State University and former executive director for two Steinbeck centers (one in San Jose and the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas). “He’s a photographer in a way, like many of the great photographers of his time. He was like Edward Weston with words. His style was very sharp like a photograph,” she says. But writing wasn’t the only way people living in the early 1900s could experience the Salinas Valley. They could taste the produce too, and by the turn of the century, most of the U.S. and Canada had access to impossibly cold lettuce, juicy tomatoes, and fruit plucked just days before, all grown in the Salinas Valley. With a robust agricultural industry, growers turned to artists to set their produce apart from other regional growers. But first, the region had to become the world’s “Salad Bowl,” by means of agricultural revolution. In the 1860s, the Salinas Valley was dominated by the cattle industry. Dairy products and hides were harvested from Salinas and South County and shipped out from Monterey. By the late 1870s, agricultural land, if not given over to cows, was covered in large swaths of grains like barley and wheat. “Crops were much more dependent on rainfall, unlike today,” says Fiona Harris, parks museum assistant for Monterey County Parks. In the 1880s, harnessing the water of the Salinas River and the surrounding creeks and tributaries made the topsoil of the valley more amenable to a variety of crops. Then in 1886, an extension of the Southern Pacific Railroad was constructed through the heart of South County, roughly where Highway 101 is today. By 1893, a little under a decade before Steinbeck was born, the refrigerated rail car was invented. In 1938, new regulations on dairy were introduced and the local dairy industry was essentially decimated because so many local cattle were testCASH IN CROPS A display of historic produce labels at the Monterey County Agricultural and Rural Life Museum at San Lorenzo County Park in King City. Some images, like a white rabbit and a cowboy, bear no resemblance to the produce inside. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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