This Is Where America Gets Almost All Its Winter Lettuce

Unless you're a homesteader, a Sunbelt resident who eats only food from your local farmers market, or an extremely devout carnivore, you've almost certainly eaten lettuce from Yuma, Arizona, a city of 93,000 at the nexus of Arizona, California and Mexico. The Yuma area, including the Imperial Valley across the California border, produces about 90 percent of all the leafy vegetables grown in the United States from November to March, when it's too cold to grow produce in most of the rest of the country. If you're familiar with the geography of the American Southwest, you're probably scratching your head right now. Because Yuma is in the middle of the desert. It's probably most famous today as the sandy setting of the 2007 Western "3:10 To Yuma." So you may think Yuma looks something like this: Or this: And you'd be partially right. Both of those photos were taken on the outskirts of Yuma -- the first in the middle of Yuma Proving Grounds, a military testing site, and the second on the eastern edge of the Yuma Mesa. However, Yuma also is on the eastern bank of the Colorado River -- a rich source of water and fertile soil for thousands of years. Over the past couple of years, the city has established a vast park along the riverfront, illustrating its heritage as a kind of oasis in the desert. Here's a view of the park from near the center of Yuma: The river -- along with almost constant sunshine, warm weather and ready access to a deep pool of skilled farm workers fro...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news