Second Growth

Single-industry economies are not built evenly. Someone's labor and someone's land make them possible, and that someone is rarely chosen at random. California's commodity agriculture was built on contracted and immigrant Mexican and Central American labor by design, not accident — a system that goes back to the Bracero Program and has continued in different legal forms ever since. When a single-industry economy leaves — when the canneries close, when the water runs out, when an industry that organized a place for generations simply exits — the community left holding the cost is almost never the one that held ownership.

Second Growth documents what that exit actually looks like, with primary data and named sources, not inherited narrative. We research, we commission original studies, and we republish relevant work with permission — building a real record of what happens when a place's defining industry leaves, who it was built on, and what forms of ownership might have changed the outcome.

We started in California's Central Valley, where commodity agriculture's long withdrawal has displaced farmworkers for over fifty years — plant by plant, county by county, documented in the record we're building. The question driving every study is the same: who owned it, who didn't, and what ownership would need to look like next time.

What we do

• Primary research. We work from source documents — closure filings, employment data, groundwater and land-use records, county reports — rather than secondhand accounts.
• Original studies. Where the existing record has gaps, we commission or conduct new research to close them.
• A public evidence record. What we find, and the sourcing behind it, is meant to be checkable — by the researchers, agencies, and communities who need it, not just read and forgotten.

A finding, not a hypothesis

California's international trade balance in processed food has flipped from a small surplus to an $11.4 billion annual deficit over the last fifteen years — the same stretch in which the plants we document in our case studies were closing. In Kings County, food processing's share of the entire local economy more than doubled between 1990 and 2025, by the measure we built to track it. See the Index for the full numbers.

Where we're starting

Our first case study is California's Central Valley, where more than fifty years of commodity agriculture consolidation has repeatedly displaced the people who did the work of growing and processing it. See Case Studies for what we're documenting, the Index for the measure at the center of it, and Methodology for the full calculation and its sourcing.

This page is a direct statement of our thesis, not a summary of it — see About Second Growth for more on who we are and how to reach us.