The San Joaquin Valley ( ; Spanish: Valle de San Joaquín) is the southern half of California's Central Valley. Famed as a major breadbasket, the San Joaquin Valley is an important source of food, producing a significant part of California's agricultural output.
San Joaquin Valley draws from eight counties of Northern and Central California, including all of San Joaquin and Kings counties, most of Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno counties, and parts of Madera and Tulare counties, along with a majority of Kern County. Although the valley is predominantly rural, it has four densely populated urban centers: Stockton/Modesto, Fresno, Porterville/Visalia, and Bakersfield.
Geography
The San Joaquin Valley is the southern half of California's Central Valley. It extends from the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in the north to the Tehachapi Mountains in the south, and from the California coastal ranges (Diablo and Temblor) in the west to the Sierra Nevada in the east.
The valley contains two large river systems, divided north and south. The northern portion of the San Joaquin Valley is called the San Joaquin Basin: the watershed of the San Joaquin River and its tributaries, including parts of the Kings River, all of which drain northwest into the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and eventually out to the Pacific Ocean. The somewhat larger southern portion is the Tulare Basin, an endorheic basin centered on Tulare Lake. Historically, Tulare Lake was fed by the Tule River, the Kings River, the Kaweah River, the White River and the Kern River, but much of this water has been diverted for agricultural uses and the watershed is mostly dry in its lower reaches.
Geological history
The San Joaquin Valley began to form about 66 million years ago during the early Paleocene era. Broad fluctuations in the sea level caused various areas of the valley to be flooded with ocean water for the next 60 million years. About 5 million years ago, the marine outlets began to close due to uplift of the coastal ranges and the deposition of sediment in the valley. Starting 2 million years ago, a series of glacial episodes periodically caused much of the valley to become a fresh water lake. Lake Corcoran was the last widespread lake to fill the valley about 700,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Holocene there were three major lakes remaining in the southern part of the Valley, Tulare Lake, Buena Vista Lake and Kern Lake. In the late 19th and in the 20th century, agricultural diversion of the Kern River eventually dried out these lakes. Today, only a fragment of Buena Vista Lake remains as two small lakes Lake Webb and Lake Evans in a portion of the former Buena Vista Lakebed.
Climate The San Joaquin Valley has extremely hot, dry summers and pleasantly mild winters characterized by dense tule fog. Its rainy season normally runs from November through April. The valley has experienced a severe and intensifying megadrought since the early 2010s. This drought is not only affecting humans, with farmland taking much of the impact, but also the wildlife as well.
In August 2015, the Director of the California Department of Water Resources stated, "Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows—up to 100 feet lower than previous records." Research from NASA shows that parts of the San Joaquin Valley sank as much as in a four-month period, and land near Corcoran sank in 8 months. The sinking has destroyed thousands of groundwater well casings and has the potential to damage aqueducts, roads, bridges, and flood-control structures. In the long term, the subsidence caused by extracting groundwater could irreversibly reduce the underground aquifer's water storage capacity, although immediate and short-term needs are given higher priority and a sense of urgency than long-term sustainability.
The National Weather Service Forecast Office for the San Joaquin Valley is located in Hanford and includes a Doppler weather radar. Weather forecasts and climatological information for the San Joaquin Valley are available from its official website.
Early human settlement The San Joaquin Valley was originally inhabited by the Yokuts and Miwok peoples. The first European to enter the valley was Pedro Fages in 1772.Capace, Nancy (1999). Encyclopedia of California. North American Book Dist LLC. Page 410. .
The Tejon Indian Tribe of California is a federally recognized tribe of Kitanemuk, Yokuts, and Chumash indigenous people of California. Their ancestral homeland is the southern San Joaquin Valley, the San Emigdio Mountains, and the Tehachapi Mountains. Today they live in Kern County, California, Alt URL headquartered in Wasco and Bakersfield, California.
The Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians of California is a federally recognized tribe of indigenous people of California, Chukchansi or Foothills Yokuts, now located in Madera County in the San Joaquin Valley.California Indians and Their Reservations: Y. San Diego State University Library and Information Access. 2009 (retrieved 29 June 2010) The Santa Rosa Rancheria belongs to the federally recognized Tachi Yokuts tribe and is located southeast of Lemoore, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. Since 2010, statewide droughts in California have further strained both the San Joaquin Valley's and the Sacramento Valley's water security.
Demographics The total population of the eight counties comprising the San Joaquin Valley at the time of the 2011–2015 American Community Survey 5-year Estimates by United States Census Bureau reported a population of 4,080,509. The racial composition of San Joaquin Valley was 1,428,978 (35.0%) Non-Hispanic White, 2,048,280 (50.2%) Hispanic or Latino, 310,557 (7.6%) Asian, 193,694 (4.7%) Black or African American, 40,911 (1.0%) American Indian and Alaska Native, and 13,000 (0.32%) Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.
The educational attainment of high school graduate or higher is 72.7%.
Poverty According to the United States Census Bureau's American Community Survey, six San Joaquin Valley counties had the highest percentage of residents living below the federal poverty line in 2006 of any counties in California. The report also showed that the same six counties were among the 52 counties with the highest poverty rate in the United States.Fresno Bee, August 29, 2007 The median income for a household in the valley was $46,713. The poverty rate for individuals below the poverty level is 23.7%. In 2005 U.S. congressional researchers compared the economically distressed Valley to the traditionally impoverished Appalachia region, resulting in the appellation New Appalachia. San Joaquin Valley: New Appalachia?
In 2011 Forbes, after taking the fluctuation of median home values, five of the top twenty "most miserable cities" were located in the San Joaquin Valley. America's Most Miserable Cities Aside from the collapse of median home values, persistent crime, unemployment and poverty were common factors between Bakersfield, Fresno, Merced, Modesto and Stockton – every major city of the San Joaquin Valley.
Medical access Insufficient access to medicine in the United States, in particular prenatal and preventive care, is typified by both rural and inner city communities. Early and adequate access to prenatal care is important to maternal and child health and is another comparative indicator of community health. According to the California Department of Health Services, 37% of births in Merced County occurred with no or late prenatal care and the San Joaquin Valley average was 19.5% of births with no or late prenatal care. By comparison, the California average was 13.6% of births and the national average was 10% of births San Joaquin Valley: Land, People, and Economy
Likewise, the counties of the San Joaquin Valley have relatively high ratios of population to physicians, suggesting relatively low access, with the highest in Kings County at 1,027 patients per a physician, the San Joaquin Valley average at approximately 671 patients per a physician and the California average of 400 patients per a physician.San Joaquin Valley: Land, People, and Economy. http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/05/07/05-007.pdf Another measure of access is licensed acute care hospital beds per thousand population, where the Kings County average of 1.1 beds per a thousand and the San Joaquin Valley average of 1.8 beds per a thousand were again less than the state average of 2.1 bed per a thousand. Consequently, the age adjusted death rate is significantly higher than the rest of California.
In response the University of California with the University of California, Merced is exploring opening a research medical school specializing in rural care, in hopes that some graduates will settle in the San Joaquin Valley and provide better healthcare. UC Merced and UC Davis Partner to Begin Educating Medical Students in the Valley
Ethnic and cultural groups
Latinos/Hispanics, Chicanos and Mexicans
Currently, the Latino and Mexican descendants are a large percentage of the demographics in the San Joaquin Valley. Since not long after the onset of the bracero program during World War II, all but a minor percentage of the farmworkers in the region have been of Mexican ancestry. Ethnic and economic friction between Mexican-Americans and the valley's predominantly white farming elite manifested itself most notably during the 1960s and 1970s, when the United Farm Workers, led by César Chávez, went on numerous strikes and called for boycotts of table grapes. The UFW generated enormous sympathy throughout the United States, even managing to terminate several agricultural mechanization projects at the United States Department of Agriculture. Consequently, from the 1970s onward, landlords and large corporations have hired undocumented immigrants. This has allowed them to increase their profits due to low overhead on wages.
European groups The San Joaquin Valley has—by California standards—an unusually large number of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian ethnicities in the heritage of its citizens. These communities are often quite large and, relative to Americans immigration patterns, quite eclectic: for example, there are more Azorean Portuguese in the San Joaquin Valley than in the Azores (see Portuguese in California). Many groups are found in majorities in specific cities, and hardly anywhere else in the region. For example, Assyrians are concentrated in Turlock, Dutch in Ripon, and CroatsOn rich soil: Kern County families provide grapes aplent , The Bakersfield Californian, By Jeff Nickell, Saturday, Jun 30, 2012 12:00 AM "...Marin Caratan than he was the first Croatian to come to the area to grow grapes...said Mark Zaninovich ..., but it is also fair to mention the Carics, Jakoviches, Radoviches, Bozaniches, Buskas, Sousas, Kovacaviches, Bidarts, Sandrinis, and Paviches." in Delano. Kingsburg is famous for its distinctly Swedish air, having been founded by immigrants from that country. Ethnic groups found in a broader area are Portuguese, Germans, Armenians, Basques, and the "Okies" of primarily English and Scots-Irish descent who migrated to California from the Midwest and South. Molokan Russians settled in Fresno, Kerman, and Madera as well as other Russian settled in Fresno. Mennonite groups descended from Russian Germans settled in the areas of Reedley and Dinuba, as well as Lutheran and Catholic Volga Germans who settled in the broader Fresno area.
Asian Americans The San Joaquin Valley has a large and exceptionally diverse Asian American population; primarily from the regions of Punjab in India and Pakistan, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia, especially Laos and Cambodia.