History

By Brian Milne, Vice President, Director of Marketing & Communications, The Holloway Group The agriculture industry has done some remarkable things over...

By Mike McCoy, Executive Director, Kern County Museum  Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum When the Laxague Family decided to build a new...

By Mike McCoy, Executive Director, Kern County Museum  Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum More than a million Americans were forced to move...

Audrey Hill, Valley Ag Voice The year was 1922 when the Giumarra Companies began. Since their start at the Los Angeles Union...

By Mike McCoy, Executive Director, Kern County Museum Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum One of the oldest cultivated fruits in the world,...

By Andrea Compagnoni Wright, Valley Ag Voice Jane, the youngest of nine children, was born June 30, 1930, in a farming community...

By Scott Hamilton, President, Hamilton Resource Economics Environmentally, the San Joaquin Valley is very different from what it was 170 years ago....

By Mike McCoy, Executive Director, Kern County Museum  Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum Anyone who has owned a country house or lived...

By Mike McCoy, Executive Director, Kern County Museum Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum If you drive out highway 58 west from Bakersfield,...

By Mike McCoy, Executive Director, Kern County Museum Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum I was nosing around in the museum’s archives the...

By Mike McCoyExecutive Director, Kern County Museum Mike McCoy Executive Director, Kern County Museum The story of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley is...

By Mike McCoyExecutive Director, Kern County Museum Digging through the Kern County Museum’s Library, one of my favorite old books is A...

By Mike McCoyKern County Museum Mark Twain once famously said, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.” With the increasing...

By Mike McCoy, Kern County Museum While Hollywood has traditionally celebrated the cowboy in motion pictures and television, there is a strong argument...

By Mike McCoyKern County Museum A recent visit to the Shafter Depot Museum, with a long lunch with curator Stan Wilson, yielded...

Four young easterners came out to California in 1849 following the siren call of gold. John Tone, David Hudson, Charles Valentine and John Stevens planted a vineyard North of Stockton remembering the vineyards of New York. Although the early Spanish missions of California also cultivated grapes and had significant wine production, this was the first effort of Anglo-Americans to bring wine grapes to the southern San Joaquin Valley. This effort was soon followed by brothers William and George West who established a nursery and vineyard in Stockton in 1852.

The general public is blissfully unaware of how much science is involved in agriculture and how science defines the industry. With...

An amazing woman has come to my attention. Her name is Jean Hardy and she was the daughter of a farmer,...

By Mike McCoy, Kern County Museum If you drive out Highway 58 west from Bakersfield, you will see a line of ancient...

By: Mike McCoy Kern County Museum Providing housing for seasonal agricultural workers has been a traditional obligation of the employer or at least...