In case it matters, the black families of Fairmead were here before the almonds and the pistachios. They were here when the land was barren, when their Great Migration bypassed Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Oakland and came to a stop in the San Joaquin Valley. They were looking to keep alive their rural souls, right down to the cotton fields, and this gopher-and-horned-toad ground seemed as good as any. All through the Depression and beyond, they kept trickling in — cousins and uncles and aunties. What they didn’t know was that the dream of Fairmead as a place of agrarian ideal was already behind it. The high-water mark had come and gone.

“Fairmead Colony,” proclaimed the 1912 ads in the Los Angeles Times and the Pacific Rural Press. Fourteen thousand acres in small farms just placed on the market. Deep, rich sandy loam. “Abundant and cheap WATER SUPPLY .” What made Fairmead a colony and not a town? That was the genius of land speculators who controlled so many millions of acres of valley from their offices on Spring Street in Los Angeles and Market Street in San Francisco. No need for sidewalks and gutters, sewer and water systems if the place wasn’t incorporated. The earth alone was sufficient.

The dreamers of small farming took the bait, first among them, the German Mennonites. In no time rose fields of alfalfa, a Fairmead Mercantile, a Fairmead Inn, a Fairmead Herald. The Mennonites built a church. The Presbyterians built a church. The dairymen built a cheese factory. The German kids attended the local Munich School, which they renamed the Dixieland School after World War I was declared. The abundant water, pulled up from the ground by windmill-driven pumps, stayed abundant, at least for a while. Then the water table dropped, and the whole experiment withered. The wells, the land, the businesses.

“What earth isn’t parched?” is how the black families from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas greeted Fairmead. If they had an idea of living in a nearby city, it got squelched by the real-estate covenants that locked them out of towns up and down Highway 99. There was one man, a Jewish farmer named Jacob Yakel, who paid no mind to local codes. He let it be known that he would sell his acreage in Fairmead to white, brown, or black.

First came the Ameys in the 1920s and then the Wheelers, the Wards, the Bells, the Whittles, the Mitchells. They dug their wells deeper and hooked up their pumps to a new electrical grid. The Williams family, who fled Louisiana in a school bus, bought 80 acres and set to work building the largest black-owned dairy in California. By mid-century, the African Americans of Fairmead neared 400 strong.

“It was just open pasture, with maybe a few cows,” Lawyer Cooper says, describing his land when he first set eyes upon it as a young boy in the 1940s. He had driven out with his grandmother Elizabeth Miller, in her brand-new 1942 Lincoln Zephyr, all the way from Frenchman’s Bayou, Arkansas. “She was quite a lady,” Annie says. “She knew what she wanted. She saw Los Angeles and wanted no part of it.”

She bought five acres and raised cows, sheep, rabbits, peacocks that roosted on telephone poles, and chickens that she sold to the slaughterhouse. When her own well started acting up and her five-horsepower pump went kaput, she jury-rigged a system with a new pump and tank and a garden hose hooked up to the farmhouse. Right there, she opened Miller’s Store and made a nice living until the white folks who owned a nearby market burned it down. The sheriff in Madera wasn’t curious in the least. By that time, Lawyer had gone to live in Alameda with his parents, who had landed good jobs in the Bay Area. “I’d come back every summer. From 1945 to 1958. My uncles Patrick and Tommy Miller bought 20 acres in Fairmead. Raising cows.”

You could say the country life got in his blood. That year in Vietnam, those years working as a telephone-equipment operator at Naval Air Station in Alameda, he kept thinking about this place. How it felt. Annie hadn’t lived on the land since she left Lexington, Mississippi, when she was 5. She was a city girl, Oakland true. Lawyer, though, kept pestering her. He retired early due to seizures from the Agent Orange that rained down on him in Southeast Asia. When it came time for Annie to retire in 2001, after years working in the legal department at Bechtel Corporation and operating a day care, she felt the itch, too. If this wasn’t the promised land, it was something.

“I never even knew what a well was,” she says. “Until we moved into this house. I never even knew what a propane tank was. Until we moved in this house. I never even knew what a cesspool was.…”

She enjoys jabbing Lawyer this way. She considers him her best friend. That’s why she takes so long finding the right birthday card. “To my husband — and best friend,” it has to say. They have four children and a gallery of grandchildren hung up on the wall. They planted roses and St. Augustine grass, a Mississippi magnolia and a weeping willow to civilize the front yard for their family reunions.

“This yard right here was beautiful. Oh God, you should have seen it. Just like a park,” she says. Lawyer is standing off to the side, shaking his head. It’s all singed now, like some fire hit it. The nectarine and apricot and Santa Rosa plum, its sweet and sour hitting your tongue in the same burst, died months ago. “Look at the weeping willow. It’s almost gone, too.”

We’re standing not 20 yards from the new orchard going in across the rutted road. The trees have yet to be planted. Almond or pistachio, Annie and Lawyer figure. It’s a good guess given the stampede of farmers willing to satisfy the world’s insatiable appetite for nuts. Since 1994, in Madera County alone, the land planted to almonds and pistachios has tripled — to 176,000 acres. “It’s just nuts, nuts, nuts,” Annie says, laughing at her double meaning.

To our left and right, across the valley, farmers and hedge-fund managers and investors from India and China are growing more than 1 million acres of almonds and pistachios, a mind-boggling monoculture. The Nut Rush. It’s true that nowhere else on the globe do nuts grow with the fecundity and taste that they do here. It’s true, too, that if you’re going to spend nearly a million dollars sinking a new well a thousand feet deep, you might as well do it in the name of a crop that can turn you into a fast multimillionaire.

The math is simple: Each acre of nuts produces 3,000 pounds of crop. Each pound sells for more than $3. It takes only 100 acres to make a million-dollar harvest every year. So farmers have pulled out cotton and stone fruit and grapes to plant nuts. They’ve bought hog wallows and coached up the ground to plant nuts. They’ve gone into the hillsides, mostly because drip irrigation lines can take them there, to plant nuts. It’s as if middle California has undergone a change of civilizations.

The trucks rattle on by day and night, kicking up that crazy dust, Annie says. “Almond harvest is a mess. I have to get a shot every fall for my sinus.” The trucks bear names, but they’re not the names of the farmers. “We don’t know who they are,” Lawyer says.