Data

Every number we publish is meant to be traceable back to a named, public source — not a proprietary dataset or an unsourced estimate. This page lists what we draw from.

Employment and wages

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). County-level food-manufacturing (NAICS 311) employment and wages for Kings, Fresno, Tulare, and Stanislaus counties, 1990–2026, alongside matching California-statewide and U.S.-national benchmark data. The backbone of the Sector Dependence Index.

Trade

U.S. Census Bureau, state exports and imports by NAICS code. Monthly, state-level, international trade data for California's food-manufacturing sector, 2010–present — the basis for the real trade adjustment described in Methodology.

Output

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Economic Accounts (SAGDP2). State-level GDP by industry, used as the output denominator for the trade adjustment.

Closures and layoffs

California Employment Development Department, WARN Act filings — the formal notices employers are required to file ahead of mass layoffs, 2014–present. Paired with original news reporting and, where available, company records, for the specific closures in our case studies.

Land and water

California Department of Water Resources / Land IQ, Statewide Crop Mapping. Field-level crop and idle/fallow land classification, 2014–2024. DWR SGMA groundwater level measurements for the Kings and Tulare Lake subbasins. Used to document the structural land- and water-use pressure behind the closures we study.

Agricultural statistics

USDA Census of Agriculture (county-level, every five years, 1974–2022) and county Agricultural Commissioner annual crop reports, for the longest available run of farm counts, acreage, and labor figures in each county we track.

Historical record

Primary and contemporaneous sourcing for Central Valley/Sacramento commodity-ag processing events going back to 1912 — cannery foundings, the 1966–67 United Farm Workers ownership precedent at Delano's Forty Acres, and documented plant closures from the early 1980s forward — used to test whether the current wave of closures is part of a genuinely continuous, decades-long pattern rather than a recent, isolated event. See Case Studies for the timeline built from this record.

Photographs

Historical photographs on this site are drawn from the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection and Historic American Buildings Survey — U.S. government works, confirmed public domain on a per-item basis before use, not assumed from a collection's general reputation. Several other candidate images (1966 Delano UFW photographs, Sacramento cannery interior photographs) were identified and explicitly excluded after turning out to be under copyright.

A note on completeness

Several of the sources above have real, documented gaps — some county crop reports are missing for specific years, some historical events are more thinly sourced than others. We'd rather name a gap than imply completeness we don't have. As our methodology page notes, this is a working record, not a finished one, and we update it as the gaps close.