Citrus History Nov 1

For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. Citrus has had a long journey to become one of California's largest and profitable crops. Benjamin Jenkins, PhD, University Archivist and Associate Professor, Department of History and Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Laverne has written a book, "California's Citrus Heritage". He explains how the citrus trees came to the United States and eventually California.

So a lot of people think that citrus is native to California, and it's really not. It has to take a pretty long journey to get here. Oranges and lemons and every variety of citrus. It comes originally from Southeast Asia, so originally it was grown by people in like Vietnam or Myanmar, Thailand down in that corner of the world. Then explorers brought it over to Africa and eventually over to Europe. And then Spanish and Portuguese explorers brought it over to the Americas, which is how it ended up here. And it really by the time it got to California, which was about in the mid to late 19th century, it really settled, particularly in the southern part of the state. There were certainly a lot of districts in the Central Valley in particular that started to adopt orange growing. Bakersfield comes to mind Porterville. But for the first 50 or 60 or so years of California's citrus industry, it really was prevalent around Los Angeles and orange counties in the southern part of the state.