I ‘ve often heard it said that it’s the soil that makes these two counties so appropriate for agriculture. Well, there are some pretty terrible soils here, as well as wonderful ones. The USDA has a classification for soils that describes all soils in the world. It’s based mainly on the rock it is formed from (the parent material), how long the soil has been sitting in place and exposed to weathering. (a recent river deposit, or ones like those in Australia that are the oldest exposed soils on earth). This determines their fertility (chemistry, pH) and texture – rocky to clay. Soils fall into 12 soil orders. There are nine in these two counties, probably the most diverse in the country. Pretty good when looking at Iowa which only has four really beautiful soils.

So, if it’s not the soil, it must be the water. Not! These two counties have some of the worst water along the coast, but to have water is better than none. It can be quite saline, with too much boron, sodium, chloride and total salts. 

The weather in these counties can be warmer in January than in May, because of the fog in the spring. So, water demand is less. It’s the climate that produces our winter rains and summer droughts, however unreliably, and the mild weather (despite occasional heat waves and frost) that reduces irrigation demand or the saline water. Average rainfall is 18 inches, but more often than not, it’s less and then comes the occasional gully washer, and that averages out to 18 - the mighty Santa Clara River ripping through ag land.

I love reading Daniel Swain’s forecasts - https://weatherwest.com/. He’s with UCCE at UCLA. The first week of November 2025, he was predicting a dry, warm winter. And in the middle of November, we had six days of rain with flooding and some small mudslides. Oops. On a recent podcast, he said our predictions are getting better, but weather is still too complex and more than a couple of weeks out it gets less predictable. Maybe AI will improve forecasts.

So, this leads me up to the point I wanted to make. This last year was forecast as dry, and it was mainly. But we had that June rain and a very mild summer. Out of the hills came stink bugs (harlequin and consperse), seed weevils, greenhouse thrips and false chinch bugs descending on avocados and citrus nesting whitefly and broad mite on citrus. These are common pests if you really nose around in an orchard, but they really presented themselves this summer and fall. I haven’t seen many greenhouse thrips on avocado, seed weevil or stink bugs in the last few years. But boom, they were there this year. And it’s all because of the weather.