VISALIA, Calif.  After nearly 90 years on the farm, Virgil Rogers has suffered through all manner of agricultural agita, from colicky cows to oscillating milk prices to drought, both past and present.

But Mr. Rogers’s newest source of consternation, he says, is some fellow Californians.

“Those Hollywood types don’t have any idea what’s going on out here on the farms,” said Mr. Rogers, a retired dairyman from Visalia, the county seat in a Central Valley region where cows far outnumber people.

So it is that in recent weeks Mr. Rogers, whose previous political involvement amounted to little more than writing a check to a favored candidate  has suddenly become a leader in a secessionist movement bent on cleaving California in two.

But while the plan is not new  the idea of two Californias has been floated dozens of times  the motivations and geographical scissor-work are. Frustrated by what they call uninformed urban voters dictating faulty farm policy, Mr. Rogers and the other members of the movement have proposed splitting off 13 counties on the state’s coast, leaving the remaining 45, mostly inland, counties as the “real” California.