(Bloomberg) - In the early 1860s Henry Miller and Charles Lux, a pair of German immigrants who had established themselves as butchers in San Francisco, began buying land along the San Joaquin River in the Central Valley about 100 miles (as the crow flies) southeast of the city. They assembled large herds of cattle on the property, and from time to time vaqueros drove the creatures out of the Central Valley and over Pacheco Pass to a ranch near the town of Gilroy, where they could be loaded onto the train to San Francisco when needed.

Miller, who ran things in the field while Lux stayed in the city, also began digging irrigation canals to drain swamps and divert river water to pasture for grazing and fields of alfalfa for hay. As University of California-Irvine historian David Igler tells the story in his book “Industrial Cowboys,” the Miller & Lux partnership grew into one of the nation’s 200 largest businesses, with 100,000 cattle grazing on 1.25 million acres of land in California, Nevada and Oregon and control of meat sales along the Pacific coast.

A few things have changed since then. Pacheco Pass is now clogged every weekday morning and evening with Silicon Valley workers making what Forbes a couple of years ago deemed America’s second-worst commute. Gilroy has become the Garlic Capital of the World. The Miller & Lux empire, meanwhile, began to crumble after Chicago’s giant meat-packing firms moved west in the first decades of the 20th century.

There are still lots of cows in California, though (5.2 million as of January), and lots of big, unsentimentally efficient agricultural enterprises. The land Miller & Lux assembled along the San Joaquin River has yet to succumb to exurban sprawl and still has excellent access to irrigation water, thanks to water rights established in the 1870s and a great deal negotiated with the federal government just before it dammed the San Joaquin in 1942. And while most of it has passed out of family hands, there’s still Bowles Farming Co., a 10,500-acre operation just off Henry Miller Avenue northeast of the farm-town/bedroom-community of Los Banos. It was run until recently by Miller’s great-great grandson, Philip Bowles, and is now under the charge of his nephew and Miller’s great-great-great grandson, Cannon Michael. Miller’s heirs no longer raise cattle there, but they are still feeding other people’s cattle by growing alfalfa. 

That’s not all they grow. The biggest, most-profitable crop these days at Bowles Farming, which I visited last month, is tomatoes to be diced and canned or smashed into paste. This year there’s also extra-long-staple cotton, a special breed of corn destined for Kraft’s Corn Nuts, melons, fresh-market tomatoes, a few acres of wheat that have mostly been abandoned and about 2,500 acres lying fallow because of the drought.

The crops that California farmers choose to grow and the water these crops consume have been getting a ton of attention this year (witness the New York Times’ epic spread last week on “Your Contribution to the California Drought”). That’s appropriate -- water is scarce, and California’s farms use about four times as much as its cities and industries do. But this has also led to a lot of weird hostility to California farming, to the extent that Governor Jerry Brown felt compelled to speak out last month in opposition to the idea that the state should curtail growing of certain crops. “That’s a ‘Big Brother’ move,” he said. He’s right, and it would be far better to rely mostly on economic forces -- in the form of improved water markets -- to resolve the state’s conflicts over water. Since the days of Henry Miller California farming has been, even more than in other places, a business. So it's important to consider the business reasons why California farmers grow (or grew) thirsty crops. I’ve already devoted a whole column to rice; here, with some help from Henry Miller’s descendants, is a look at some of the other biggies.