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The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor.
The agricultural products that Central Valley and Mediterranean climates produce are very difficult to mechanize. Cereal crops are quite simple - while John Deere and Cargill are making it harder to eke out a freehold living as a farmer or dairy owner, it has been possible to save, invest, and eventually own your own farm through mechanization for decades.
Almonds, olives, strawberries, cherries, apples, oranges - all of these have been notorious for difficulty of mechanizing. Fruit trees, even monoculture and hybridized ones, will have fruit ripening at different times. By the time the fruit falls to the ground, it's not salvageable.
A dark, open secret on the West Coast is that our agricultural richness is only possible through subverting minimum wage laws. The only way we can have Fujis for $2/lb is because of shared common interests between the Democrats and Republicans in power. Democrats in Washington are heavily-union backed, and the unions have their roots in perpetuating marginalization of immigrants. They turn a blind eye to the poverty wages and intimidation tactics that enforce an underclass of Mexican and Central American laborers that destroy their bodies to give us cheap fruit.
Excuse me but...what?
And a massive coastline in itself means nothing. Indonesia also has one, Greenland as well.
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