CDFA Professional Fellows Explained, Plus California’s Top Agricultural Counties

Reviewed August 2026 against the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) Statistics Review series and Planting Seeds blog, the USDA Census of Agriculture, and the U.S. State Department’s Professional Fellows Program records.

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Two unrelated things share the phrase “professional fellow” near the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA): the U.S. State Department’s Professional Fellows Program, which has placed emerging leaders from partner countries — including the Philippines, through its Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) track — in short U.S. work placements since 2010, and CDFA’s own Executive Fellows Program, a California state-government leadership rotation with no international component. Neither program is a household name, which is exactly why search results for both stay thin. Below, we separate the two clearly, then move to the county data that shares this page: the “California Agricultural Statistics Review 2019-2020” ranking of Fresno, Kern, and Tulare, and how that ranking has already shifted since it was published.

California’s agricultural sector generated $59.0 billion in sales in 2022, according to the USDA’s Census of Agriculture (published February 14, 2024) — up $13.8 billion from 2017. Fresno County alone outsold the entire agricultural economy of 23 individual U.S. states that year. That scale is why county-level rankings and specialized-crop comparisons, like California’s row-crop counties against Michigan’s asparagus belt, matter to buyers, lenders, and policymakers well beyond the state line.

“Professional Fellow” at CDFA: Two Different Programs, Explained

If you searched for “professional fellow” alongside “California Department of Food and Agriculture” — with or without “Philippines” attached — you are almost certainly trying to confirm one of two things: whether CDFA runs an international fellowship, or whether a specific fellow from the Philippines worked at CDFA. Here is the direct answer to both.

The State Department’s Professional Fellows Program

The U.S. State Department’s Professional Fellows Program has run since 2010 under the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, bringing more than 1,700 emerging leaders from over 80 countries and territories to the United States for short, individually tailored work placements. The program maintains a named track for the Philippines, and Filipino fellows also participate through the broader Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, which places fellows aged 25 to 35 with local governments, nonprofits, and private-sector hosts for several weeks at a time. Placements are chosen case by case; agriculture agencies are eligible hosts, but the program’s own materials do not list CDFA by name. If you are trying to confirm whether a specific Philippine fellow was placed at CDFA in a specific year, the State Department’s program page above and CDFA’s own newsroom are the two places to check — we found no public record naming CDFA as a host for this program during our review.

CDFA’s Own Executive Fellows Program

Separately, CDFA participates in the Executive Fellowship Program, sponsored by the Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento, together with the Governor’s Office. This is a domestic program: it places early-career state employees inside California agencies for a year of rotational leadership training. CDFA Secretary Karen Ross met with the 2016-2017 class on June 2, 2017 — ten fellows spread across agencies including CDFA, the Department of Business Oversight, Cal Recycle, and the Department of Finance. There is no Philippines connection here at all; the confusion between this program and the State Department’s international one is the most likely reason both sets of search terms keep pulling up agriculture-adjacent results without a clear answer.

Where the Philippines Connection Actually Comes From

The real, verifiable link between CDFA and the Philippines is trade, not fellowships. The Philippines is California’s 10th-largest agricultural export market, valued at more than $300 million, and CDFA Undersecretary Christine Birdsong took part in a USDA Agricultural Trade Mission to the Philippines on July 26, 2022, alongside groups representing California’s fresh fruit, olive, dairy, raisin, and wine sectors, according to CDFA’s Planting Seeds blog. That trade relationship, not a fellows placement, is almost certainly what pulls this query toward CDFA and the Philippines together.

California’s Top Agricultural Counties: 2019-2020 vs. Today

The “California Agricultural Statistics Review 2019-2020,” published by CDFA using county agricultural commissioner data, ranked Fresno first, Kern second, and Tulare third among California’s agricultural counties, with Monterey, Merced, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Kings, Ventura, and Imperial rounding out that year’s top 10. Fresno’s gross value that year was $7.71 billion, 2.3% below its own record of $7.9 billion set in 2018. Tulare, in third, had already topped $7.0 billion, leaving a gap of roughly $212 million between the top three counties — CDFA’s own reporting called it one of the tightest margins on record. Almonds alone accounted for $1.57 billion of Fresno’s 2019 total, grown on more than 264,000 harvested acres that produced 309,000 tons, up 29% from the prior year and close to a quarter of the state’s entire almond crop.

That ranking has not held. In 2022, according to a county crop-report review published by California Dairy Magazine, Tulare County overtook Fresno for the first time on record, posting $8.60 billion against Fresno’s $8.095 billion. The same year’s USDA Census of Agriculture — a different, once-every-five-years survey with its own methodology — put the state’s top 10 at Fresno, Tulare, Monterey, Kern, Merced, Imperial, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Santa Barbara, and Kings, per AgNet West’s coverage of that release. Two changes stand out: Ventura, present in the 2019-2020 CDFA review, is not in the 2022 Census top 10, while Santa Barbara — not in the earlier list — is.

Kern County has stayed inside the top group across both reports, built on grapes, almonds, citrus, and pistachios, but we could not independently confirm a specific dollar figure for Kern in either vintage during this review — CDFA’s full county-by-county PDF, linked below, carries the exact number. Monterey (lettuce, strawberries, broccoli — “the Salad Bowl”), Merced (milk, almonds, poultry), Stanislaus (almonds, milk, poultry), San Joaquin (grapes, walnuts, cherries), and Kings (milk, cotton, tomatoes) appear in both lists. Imperial (cattle, alfalfa, lettuce) held its spot despite being the state’s most water-constrained major county.

CDFA has published newer editions of the Statistics Review since 2019-2020, including a 2021-2022 edition, and each follows the same crop-year value ranking method. The full county-level breakdown for 2019-2020 is in the County Agricultural Commissioners’ Report, and every edition CDFA has archived — 2019-2020 through the most current one — sits on CDFA’s Statistics page. That page, not this article, is the place to confirm which county currently holds the top spot.

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California Agriculture by the Numbers

Zooming out from individual counties, the 2022 Census of Agriculture put California’s total agricultural product sales at $59.0 billion — up $13.8 billion from 2017’s $45.2 billion, an increase driven by both commodity prices and consolidation. The number of farms fell to 63,134, a 10% drop from 2017, while the average farm grew to 383 acres, up 10%. Total farmland dipped only 1%, to 24.2 million acres, meaning the acreage mostly moved to fewer, larger operations rather than leaving production. The average California farmer was 59.9 years old in 2022, up slightly from 59.2 in 2017. On the sustainability side, 16,699 California farms reported using renewable energy systems, mostly solar, according to the same Census.

That scale is exactly where satellite verification earns its keep. Farmonaut’s blockchain-based product traceability lets exporters document a shipment’s field-to-port path — relevant for growers selling into markets like the Philippines, where buyers increasingly ask for sourcing proof before wiring payment. Crop loan and insurance verification tools use the same satellite record to support financing decisions without a site visit for every parcel, and fleet management tools help operations that have grown to the 383-acre state average, and beyond, coordinate equipment across more ground with the same headcount.

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Calculator: Your Farm’s Value Per Acre

Enter your own acreage and gross sales to see how your operation compares with California’s 2022 statewide average.

Assumes your sales figure covers the same acreage you enter, and compares only against the statewide 2022 Census average of $2,438 per acre ($59.0 billion in sales across 24.2 million acres of farmland). It excludes leased land you do not operate, off-farm income, and government payments, and it does not adjust for crop type — a strawberry parcel and a rangeland parcel will land very differently on this scale.

Agricultural Spraying and Precision Tools in the Top Counties

California regulates agricultural spraying more tightly than most states, with restrictions tied to water quality, soil health, and proximity to homes and sensitive sites. In the top-ranked counties, that regulatory pressure has pushed adoption of variable-rate sprayers, aerial drones for targeted pest control, and integrated pest management (IPM) programs that combine biological controls with reduced-risk chemistries. Fresno and Kern, with their heavy almond and grape acreage, have been early adopters of drone-based scouting paired with variable-rate application; Tulare’s dairy and citrus operations lean more on precision nutrient management and low-drift equipment near populated areas.

Satellite monitoring fits directly into this shift. Real-time crop-stress detection lets growers time interventions instead of spraying on a fixed calendar, cutting both chemical volume and the number of passes across a field. Farmonaut’s carbon footprinting tools let operations document the emissions side of that reduction for buyers and regulators who ask for it, and the Farmonaut API — detailed in the API developer docs — lets larger operations or ag-tech integrators pull the same satellite and weather data into their own spray-scheduling systems rather than working inside a separate app.

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Michigan Asparagus: A Specialization Case Study

“Michigan Agricultural Statistics 2018-2019” and its neighboring editions track a crop California barely competes in: asparagus, where essentially all U.S. commercial production sits in Michigan, California, Washington, and New Jersey. In a 2015 cost-of-production study, Michigan State University Extension found the state’s growers harvested 22 million pounds of asparagus from 8,900 acres, valued at $19.7 million, and ranked Michigan second or third nationally in production. For scale, national asparagus figures cited by the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center put U.S. harvested area at 19,200 acres in 2020, with an average yield of 3,875 pounds per acre and a total crop value of $85.2 million — meaning Michigan’s 2015 acreage, on its own, covered close to half of the national footprint measured five years later.

The MSU study also shows why asparagus rewards specialization rather than scale. Establishment cost per acre fell slightly between the 2009 and 2015 studies, from $4,282 to $4,082, while peak-year net cash flow per acre nearly tripled, from $509 to $1,422 — reflecting better-yielding varieties and tighter production practices rather than lower land or labor costs. Growers needed a minimum of $0.64 per pound just to cover cash expenses, and $0.72 to $0.80 per pound to hit a 7% return, depending on whether peak yield ran 4,000 or 3,500 pounds per acre. Michigan’s growers lean on seasonal rainfall, mulching, and cold-protection timing rather than California’s year-round irrigation infrastructure — a genuinely different playbook for a genuinely different climate, not a lesser one.

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Farmonaut’s Role in Tracking This Data

Whichever county or crop you’re comparing, the underlying question is usually the same: is this field performing the way the regional averages say it should? Farmonaut’s multispectral and hyperspectral satellite imagery tracks NDVI-based crop health, soil moisture, and pest or disease stress at the field level, so a grower in Fresno or Tulare — or anywhere else — can see how their own ground compares to the county-wide numbers cited above without waiting for the next statistics review. The Jeevn AI advisory layer adds weather forecasts, spray-timing guidance, and anomaly alerts tuned to each field’s location and crop.

All of it runs through the same web, Android, and iOS apps, or through the large-scale farm management platform for operations managing many parcels across counties or states at once.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a CDFA “Professional Fellow” program connected to the Philippines?

Not one we could confirm in CDFA’s own records. The State Department’s Professional Fellows Program (including its YSEALI track) does include the Philippines and places fellows with U.S. host organizations, but CDFA is not named as a host in that program’s public materials. CDFA’s separate Executive Fellowship Program is domestic-only. The confirmed CDFA-Philippines link is agricultural trade: the Philippines is California’s 10th-largest ag export market, valued above $300 million.

Which counties led California agriculture in the “Statistics Review 2019-2020”?

Fresno, at $7.71 billion, followed by Kern and Tulare — Tulare had already topped $7.0 billion that year, a roughly $212 million gap from Fresno. Monterey, Merced, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Kings, Ventura, and Imperial completed that year’s top 10.

Are Fresno, Kern, and Tulare still California’s top three counties?

Fresno and Kern remain in the top group, but Tulare overtook Fresno for the #1 spot in 2022, at $8.60 billion against Fresno’s $8.095 billion — the first time that’s happened on record, per California Dairy Magazine’s review of the county crop reports.

How does Michigan’s asparagus industry compare to California’s crops?

Michigan specializes rather than competes on scale: 8,900 acres produced 22 million pounds valued at $19.7 million in a 2015 MSU Extension study, with peak-year net cash flow near $1,422 per acre. California’s top counties instead spread risk across almonds, grapes, dairy, and vegetables at a scale — $59.0 billion statewide in 2022 — that no single specialty crop state can match acre for acre.

How does Farmonaut support growers in these counties?

Through satellite-based crop health and soil moisture monitoring, AI-driven advisories, carbon footprint tracking, blockchain product traceability, and fleet management — accessible via web, Android, iOS, or API for larger integrations.

How do I access Farmonaut’s tools?

Sign up through the web, Android, or iOS app, integrate data via the API, or select a subscription plan below.

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Conclusion

“Professional fellow” near CDFA points to two distinct, verifiable programs — a State Department exchange with a real Philippines track, and CDFA’s own domestic leadership rotation — neither of which has a confirmed direct link to the other in public records. California’s top agricultural counties are equally concrete but not static: Fresno led at $7.71 billion in the 2019-2020 review, and Tulare had overtaken it by 2022 at $8.60 billion, with Ventura falling out of the national top 10 and Santa Barbara moving in. Both stories reward checking the primary source — CDFA’s Statistics page or the State Department’s program listings — over trusting any single year’s snapshot, including this one.