Overview

The Sierra Business Council (SBC) researched the State of Sierra Agriculture (SOSA) report as part of its Working Landscapes Initiative, a program launched in 1998 to help preserve farms, ranches, and private timberland operations for future generations by conserving the land upon which those operations depend.

The goal of SBC’s Working Landscapes Initiative is to reduce further fragmentation of large private farming, ranching, and non-industrial timber acreage by providing incentives and other tools to help interested farmers and ranchers strengthen their businesses and preserve their agricultural and timber practices.

The intent of this study is to identify existing agricultural resources in the Sierra and their potential short- and long-term uses, and to develop strategies for how to continue supporting working landscapes and the variety of benefits they provide Sierra communities. For the purposes of this report, agriculture is defined as farming, ranching, and private, non-commercial timber harvesting.

The SOSA report integrates analysis of recent Census data with an examination of additional publicly available data from a variety of sources and, for the first time, presents information on Sierra-specific agriculture in a single document. This document is intended to help improve understanding among decision-makers and landowners about:

1. The economic, social, cultural, and historic values of farming, ranching, and private, non-commercial timber in the Sierra Nevada;
2. The economic and land use trends that are affecting these sectors;
3. The opportunities for farmers, ranchers, and private timberland owners to improve the sustainability of their businesses in the face of changes taking place in the region.

The economic value of agriculture in the Sierra is relatively small, especially as compared to other sectors such as construction or travel and tourism, but agriculture's non-commodity based contributions to the social, cultural, natural, and historic fabric of our region and its communities is IMMEASURABLE.

Subregional Divisions

The Sierra is large and made up of an enormously variable group of communities and places (roughly 31,000,000 acres across 2 states, 25 counties, 40+ cities and 200+ communities), yet it was necessary to have a common basis for comparing information across the region. As a result, the area was divided into five subregions characterized by common geography, environment, and human activities: Northern, Tahoe/Reno, East Side, Northwest, and Southern.

When this data was gathered, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy had not yet been established. Thus, the SOSA subregions differ from the ways the Sierra region has been divided for other reports and agencies. The lack of clear and standard regional boundaries has been an obstacle for research in the Sierra Nevada. It is our hope that the Sierra Nevada Conservancy will act as a unifying agent in the region, creating standard boundaries for conducting meaningful research over time.

Click here to download our more detailed map.

Click here to compare this map to the subregions of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy.

Geographical Boundaries

We attempted to retain entire counties within a single subregional boundary. This was possible for most counties except El Dorado, Nevada, Sierra, and Placer counties, which extend from the western foothills over the Sierra crest and into the Tahoe region — thereby occupying two regions. Several counties within the Northwest and Southern groups – Madera, Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties – extend into California’s Central Valley, where the dominant agricultural activities for each county occur. As a result we were not able to rely on countywide data to identify agricultural activities and products that were specifically Sierra-based. To accurately assess Sierra-specific agriculture, therefore, we broke each county down into its postal zip code areas, which allowed us to look at USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service’s Census of Agriculture data, the US Census Bureau’s Economic Census data, and the US Census Bureau’s decennial data within zip code areas that most closely matched the SOSA project area boundary.

The project area’s western boundary was delineated by crop types at approximately the 500- to 700-foot elevation level where large-scale irrigated Central Valley crops, such as almonds, rice, and cotton, give way to non-irrigated annual rangelands. We overlaid this rough elevation boundary on the zip code area boundaries to identify and remove any zip code areas that extended too far down slope into the irrigated agricultural land of the Central Valley.

Download the SOSA map with County Boundaries and Zip Codes

A Note on Data Sources...

The statistical resources of the Agricultural Census are generalized to avoid inadvertently divulging trade secrets. As a result, the Ag Census uses categories for numbers of farms, farm income, and various production figures. So we can identify how many farms sold products in the $1,000-10,000 or $50,000-100,000 range, but we can't identify specific farm income by farm using census data. Overall, the Agricultural Census data is suitable primarily for tracking and monitoring trends.

We have also incorporated statistics from other informational sources such as the annual agricultural and crop reports produced by the Agricultural Commissioners in each county, socio-economic reports on Nevada counties generated by the Nevada Division of Water Planning, and IMPLAN, an organization in Minnesota that collects economic data from every county in the United States that serves as a standard tool for economists studying the U.S. economy.