Mar 20, 2009

Who’s No. 2?

When it comes to agricultural diversity, most people seem to agree that California is the No. 1 state in the nation. What they can’t seem to agree on is the No. 2 state. Apparently, there are several contenders for the runner-up position.

There could be more than one reason for this. Competition among the remaining states could be so tight that it’s too close to call. Or, people from different states could be defining a term as vague as “agricultural diversity” in different ways, to a particular state’s advantage. I suspect both reasons are true, and the first reason leads to the second. Bragging rights are at stake, after all.

Still, whenever I hear somebody claim their state as the “second most diverse” or something like that, it gets me wondering: Are they talking about the entire range of agricultural activity within that state, or are they talking about diversity within one particular sector, such as livestock?

Even when they do figure out what they’re talking about, how do they measure it? By number of units? Acres? Dollars? Variety of crops? The possibilities seem endless.

Since I’ve heard more than one answer as to who is the true No. 2, I decided to find out for myself. I had a helpful tool in USDA’s 2007 Census of Agriculture, but in order to cut through the wealth of data, I was forced to make some arbitrary decisions. Here’s the short version of how I did it, followed by the results.

The first decision I had to make was how to define “agricultural diversity.” Our readers helped me with that one: VGN and FGN are about vegetable and fruit growing, so it seemed like a waste of time to focus on anything outside of that. Vegetable and fruit crops are listed in three separate categories in the 2007 Census: Vegetables, potatoes and melons; fruits and nuts; and berries.

I decided number of acres would be a better measuring tool than number of farms, but wasn’t satisfied simply with adding the total acres within each category. Idaho, for example, had the second highest number of total vegetable acres after California, but the vast majority of that was in potatoes. Not much diversity there.

So, I went through every crop (minus the nuts) in each of the three categories, ranked the states with the most acres in each, then added the rankings together. Apples counted as much as artichokes in this study.

I could go into greater detail about my methods, of course, but I’m running out of space, and nobody really cares anyway. You just want the results. Well, here are the most agriculturally diverse states in the United States, when it comes to vegetables and fruit:

California, of course, was No. 1, far ahead of any other state. Florida was a solid No. 2, followed by Washington, Oregon and Michigan, in that order. Arizona, Texas, Hawaii, Georgia and New York rounded out the top 10.

So, there they are. Feel free to discuss. And before you write me an angry e-mail questioning my methods, remember: I conducted this highly unscientific study for my own satisfaction. If you don’t like the results, come up with your own. Seriously. Then send them to me, so I can see what you’ve found.