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Tucson is adding 1,000 to its population each month, Phoenix even more. Las Vegas' Clark County claims 80,000 permanent newcomers since 1940; Yuma, Ariz, more than 20,000. On California's Mojave Desert, population has soared 360% (from 32,000 to 147,000); one of its new cities, Ridgecrest, not even an entity in 1940, already counts 6,700 residents and is steadily climbing. The fertile Coachella Valley, north of California's Salton Sea, has doubled in population (from 16,000 to 32,000) since 1950, and Henderson, incorporated in 1953 twelve miles out in the desert from Las Vegas, has become Nevada's third largest city (after Las Vegas and Reno), with a population of 11,500.
Water by Phone. The changing face of the desert reflects the great migration. New cement plants have sprung up in the Mojave's Ivanpah, Oro Grande and Tehachapi. There are a new steam plant and expanded manganese mine near Las Vegas, Molybdenum Corp. of America's new 50-million-ton "rare earth" mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., a $28 million Hughes guided-missile plant and a Douglas Aircraft experimentation plant at Tucson, industry" new plants at aviation, Phoenix, electronics and a and brand-new, "smokeless $120 million Magma Copper mine, mill smelter and town at San Manuel, Ariz., to mine the newest and biggest proved deposit of copper ore in the U.S. (see color pictures).
Fancy new all-year resorts, surrounded by high-priced desert estates, have risen in California's Apple Valley, along the 30-mile-long Salton Sea (239 feet below sea level) and at Arizona's Scottsdale and Paradise Valley near Phoenix. New housing subdivisions have mushroomed into the desert at Palmdale, Lancaster, Hesperia and Lucerne Valley in the Mojave, at Indio, Coachella and Twentynine Palms in the Colorado Desert, across the floor of the Las Vegas Valley and out for miles on all sides of Tucson and Phoenix.
Great areas of the desert have turned green with new water wells and hundreds of miles of new irrigation canals. The fertile soil and year-round growing season give desert agriculture an intensity and diversity undreamed of by the Midwest dirt farmer. In California's rich, 650,000-acre Imperial Valley, grains, cotton, lettuce, sheep, flax, cattle and carrots can be raised side by side. Farmers change their crops to meet changing market conditions, and, when water is needed, a telephone order brings it sluicing through laterals from the All-American Canal, which stretches 80 miles to the Colorado River.
In the Coachella Valley, the land is so fertile that most ranchers double-crop, producing two yields a year from the same acreage. On an intensively worked ranch of 80 acres, Henry Sakemi, a Nisei farmer, raises tomatoes, peas, corn, beans, romaine lettuce and squash. His overhead is steep: four tractors, cultivators, disks, plows, subsoilers, harrows, planters and bed-shapers, besides the cost for water and labor (up to 90 field hands during harvest). But his yields are immense: 200 crates per acre of sweet corn, each crate holding five dozen ears, and tomatoes that net a steady $500-a-year-profit per acre. On his relatively small ranch he grosses $100,000 a year. "In a good year," says Rancher Sakemi, "my profit margin has hit as much as 30% to 35%."