Reviewed September 2026 against USDA NASS County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports and the CDFA Statistics portal.

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Fresno County posted $7.96 billion in gross agricultural production value in the 2019-2020 County Agricultural Commissioners’ Report, ahead of Kern County’s $7.60 billion and Tulare County’s $7.25 billion. By the 2021-2022 report, Tulare had moved into first place at $8.61 billion, with Fresno second at $8.09 billion and Kern third at $7.70 billion. Both reports are published by USDA NASS on behalf of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), and both are linked directly below so you don’t have to hunt for the PDF.

Direct Links: Where the PDFs Actually Live

Both editions come from the same publisher and the same report series — CDFA compiles the county-level submissions, and USDA NASS hosts the finished PDF. If you’ve been searching for “california agricultural statistics review 2019-2020 pdf” or the 2021-2022 equivalent and landing on pages that summarize the report without linking it, here are the source documents:

• 2019-2020 edition: 2019-20 County Agricultural Commissioners’ Report (NASS/CDFA, final) — this is the source for the Fresno, Kern, Tulare, and Monterey figures below.
• 2021-2022 edition: 2022 County Agricultural Commissioner Report (revised) — the update that shows Tulare overtaking Fresno.
• Ongoing statewide statistics: CDFA Statistics portal — this is where the annual Ag Stats Review PDF and total farm output figures are published each spring, and it’s the page to bookmark rather than any single year’s PDF.

These are County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports rather than a single unified “county rank by gross value” table published every year on a fixed page — CDFA aggregates the 58 individual county reports into the statewide review, and the ranking is derived from that aggregation. If you need the exact page number for a specific county within either PDF, use your browser’s find-in-page function on the county name; the reports run to several hundred pages covering all 58 counties.

County Rank by Gross Value of Agricultural Production

The table below is the comparison an AI summary can’t hand you in one line: two report years, side by side, with the actual dollar shift for each county. Figures are gross value of agricultural production as reported in each year’s County Agricultural Commissioners’ Report.

Tulare’s $1.36 billion increase is the single largest move in this table and it’s enough to flip the top spot — the county went from third to first between the two report periods. The complete top-10 to top-15 list for both years (beyond the four counties confirmed here) is not reproduced on this page; USDA NASS publishes the full county-by-county breakdown inside each PDF linked above, and that’s the authoritative source rather than any secondary summary, including this one.

What’s Actually Behind These Numbers, County by County

A dollar figure by itself doesn’t tell you why a county ranks where it does. Here’s the production mix behind each of the four counties named in this report series:

• Fresno County ($7.96B in 2019-2020, $8.09B in 2021-2022): A diversified base of almonds, grapes, and vegetables. Its value held relatively steady across the two periods compared to Tulare’s swing, which is consistent with a broader commodity mix absorbing price volatility in any single crop.
• Tulare County ($7.25B to $8.61B): Anchored by dairy and livestock alongside citrus and nuts. The $1.36 billion jump between report periods is large enough that anyone tracking “top agricultural counties” year over year should treat Tulare as the one to watch, not treat 2019-2020’s ranking as fixed.
• Kern County ($7.60B to $7.70B): Grapes (wine, table, and raisin), plus oilseeds and vegetables. The smallest dollar change of the three counties with confirmed two-year data.
• Monterey County ($4.02B in 2019-2020): Vegetable production, particularly lettuce and leafy greens for export markets. No confirmed 2021-2022 figure is available from the sources checked for this article — if you need it, it will be in the second PDF linked above.

Note what these figures are not: they’re gross value of production, not net farm income, and not acreage. A county can rank highly on gross value while operating on tighter margins than a lower-ranked county, depending on input costs, water costs, and crop mix — none of which the County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports break out at the profitability level.

Statewide Trend: The Two Numbers That Frame Everything Above

Zoom out from individual counties and the statewide pattern explains the direction all four counties moved. California’s total agricultural production value fell 2.8% from 2019 to 2020, according to CDFA Agricultural Statistics — consistent with the relatively flat or modest county-level changes in the 2019-2020 report. By 2021, total farm and ranch cash receipts reached $51.4 billion per CDFA’s statistics blog, and by 2022, CDFA reported $55.9 billion in total farm and ranch output value across 68,400 farms and ranches statewide — an 8.8% year-over-year increase from 2021 to 2022. That statewide swing from a 2.8% decline to an 8.8% increase is the backdrop for why Tulare’s county-level jump was possible in the same window.

Seven California counties exceeded $3 billion in gross agricultural value in the 2019-2020 report, and fifteen counties exceeded $1 billion, according to the same USDA NASS report. That’s the scale context that a single county figure misses: Fresno’s $7.96 billion sits at the top of a group of at least seven counties operating at multi-billion-dollar scale, not an isolated outlier.

Watch: Precision AgTech and sustainable viticulture practices in the counties that anchor these production figures, including grape-heavy Kern County.

Water Use, SGMA, and Irrigation: What the Reports Track

Water access is the operating constraint behind every county figure above, and it’s tracked separately from gross value in California’s agricultural data infrastructure. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) requires Groundwater Sustainability Agencies in high- and medium-priority basins — which cover most of the San Joaquin Valley counties named above, including Fresno, Kern, and Tulare — to file annual reports and long-term sustainability plans. This is a compliance and monitoring framework, not a production-value dataset, so it won’t appear inside the County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports themselves; operators tracking both production value and groundwater compliance need to pull from CDFA’s ag statistics and their local Groundwater Sustainability Agency separately.

• Precision Irrigation: Drip irrigation and soil moisture monitoring let growers in water-constrained counties like Kern and Fresno apply water with more control than flood irrigation allows.
• On-Farm Water Management: Reservoirs, tailwater return systems, and scheduling software reduce the volume drawn per acre without cutting yield.
• Groundwater Sustainability Plans: Read more on the mechanics of sustainable groundwater management strategies relevant to SGMA-covered basins.

For broader efficiency practices that intersect with water use, see seven approaches to sustainable productivity, and for compliance-adjacent emissions tracking, carbon footprinting tools are increasingly bundled with water-use reporting on operations that need both.

Labor Shortages and the Push Toward Automation

The counties carrying the largest gross production values are also the counties most exposed to seasonal labor availability, since dairy (Tulare), tree nuts (Fresno), and table grapes (Kern) are all labor-intensive at harvest. None of the County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports cited above publish a labor-cost or headcount breakdown alongside gross value, so the labor dimension has to be sourced separately — the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and USDA’s Farm Labor Survey are the standard sources for that data if you need it for a specific county.

• Mechanization: Automated harvesters and optical sorting equipment are displacing manual labor for repetitive tasks in high-value counties.
• AI and Robotics: Field robots and drones now handle pest scouting, targeted spraying, and yield mapping in vineyard and orchard operations.
• Fleet Coordination: Digital fleet and resource management tools, such as Farmonaut’s fleet management platform, help coordinate equipment across large operations during peak season.

For operations managing large or multi-parcel plantings across these counties, see satellite-based tools for large-scale plantation management.

Forestry and Environmental Data: What’s In Scope, What Isn’t

California’s agricultural statistics reports focus on crop and livestock production value; forestry and timber data are tracked through separate state and federal programs rather than folded into the County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports used for the county rankings above. If your interest in this report is specifically the forestry angle, note that the figures cited in this article — Fresno, Kern, Tulare, Monterey, and the statewide totals — are all agricultural production value, not timber harvest volume.

• Wildfire Monitoring: Satellite monitoring tools are increasingly used for wildfire risk assessment on and near agricultural land in forested counties.
• Traceability and Carbon Tracking: For operations layering sustainability claims onto production data, product traceability and carbon footprinting tools support both regulatory reporting and buyer-facing transparency.

Calculator: Project a County’s Value Trajectory

Use Tulare’s confirmed two-period swing as a reference and plug in any county’s own two figures to see the dollar change and annualized growth rate implied by your own data.

Assumptions: this calculator computes simple dollar change, percent change, and compound annualized growth rate between two user-supplied gross value figures. It does not adjust for inflation, does not account for acreage or crop-mix changes, and does not forecast future values — it only describes the trend between the two numbers you enter.

Farmonaut: Monitoring Tools for Operations in These Counties

Whether you farm in a top-ranked county like Fresno or Tulare or a smaller operation elsewhere in the state, the same monitoring infrastructure applies to production planning, resource use, and risk management.

• Crop Health Monitoring: Satellite-based health monitoring on Android, iOS, and Web delivers real-time NDVI, soil moisture, and drought indices.
• AI Advisory: The Jeevn AI platform provides localized, data-driven recommendations from satellite and weather inputs.
• Carbon and Resource Tracking: Carbon footprinting supports environmental compliance and reporting.
• Traceability: Blockchain-backed traceability for farm-to-table supply chain transparency.
• Fleet Management: Fleet and resource management tools for equipment coordination across large operations.
• Crop Loan and Insurance: Satellite-verification tools support lenders and insurers in risk assessment.

These tools are built for operations of any size in these counties — from a Monterey vegetable grower to a large Tulare dairy operation. Developers and researchers can access the open API and developer documentation for systems integration.

More Video Insights

Farmonaut Applications: Real-Time Insights for These Operations

Explore niche solutions: traceability, large-scale farm/plantation management, and satellite-verified crop loan & insurance for operations across California’s ranked counties.

Farmonaut Subscription Options

Whether you operate a small orchard in a mid-tier county or a large dairy in Tulare, Farmonaut subscriptions scale to acreage and data-frequency needs.

For developers: API documentation for data integration.

FAQ: California Agricultural Statistics Review

Conclusion: How to Get the Current-Year Figures Yourself

The core numbers in this article — Fresno’s $7.96 billion, Kern’s $7.60 billion, and Tulare’s $7.25 billion in 2019-2020, and Tulare’s move to $8.61 billion by 2021-2022 — come directly from USDA NASS’s County Agricultural Commissioners’ Reports, linked above rather than reconstructed from memory. That’s the durable part of this page: the method for finding the current figures doesn’t expire even after the numbers themselves are superseded.

To check whether a county’s rank has shifted again since the 2021-2022 report: go to USDA NASS’s California publications page under Publications/AgComm, find the most recent County Agricultural Commissioners’ Report, and search for the county name. For statewide totals and the annual Ag Stats Review, use the CDFA Statistics portal directly — it is updated annually each spring and is the primary source both this article and USDA NASS draw from.

Track your own operation’s data alongside these county-level benchmarks with Farmonaut’s satellite monitoring tools.