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.

Gary Kazanjian for The New York Times

Virgil Rogers, a lifelong farmer, says coastal Californians “think pigs are treated mean.”

“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.

The reason, they say, is that people in those coastal counties, which include San Francisco and Los Angeles, simply do not understand what life is like in areas where the sea breezes do not reach.

“They think fish are more important than people, that pigs are treated mean and chickens should run loose,” said Mr. Rogers, who said he hitched a ride in 1940 to Visalia from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl, with his wife and baby son in tow. “City people just don’t know what it takes to get food on their table.”

The final straw for folks like Mr. Rogers was Proposition 2, a ballot measure in November that banned the tight confinement of egg-laying hens, veal calves and sows. While many food activists and politicians in the state hailed the vote as proof of consumers’ increasing interest in where their food comes from, the proposition’s passage has angry farmers and their allies wanting to put the issue of secession to a vote, perhaps as soon as 2012.

“We have to ask ourselves, Is there a better way to govern this state?” asked a former Republican member of the California Assembly, Bill Maze, president and a founder of the nonprofit group, Citizens for Saving California Farming Industries, which is spearheading the secessionists’ efforts. Mr. Rogers, another co-founder, is chairman of the board.

When he sat down to divvy up the counties, Mr. Maze said, he made sure to keep the large suburban and conservatively leaning counties east of Los Angeles on his side of the border, assuring a majority of the population. He plans to spend the next several years selling their residents on the benefits of secession.

Since statehood was granted in 1850, “there have been more than 200 serious-minded calls for the division of the state,” said Kevin Starr, a professor of history at the University of Southern California and a former state librarian.

Agitators in northern California and southern Oregon have been angling to establish a state, which they would call Jefferson, since 1941. In 1993, the California Assembly passed a proposal to split the state in three, though it later died in the Senate. Under the United States Constitution, any such plan would require Congressional approval.

These efforts at division point to California’s “cultural disjunctions,” “red-blue divide” and “sectional anxiety,” Mr. Starr said.

The mood for secession has also been amplified by a string of hard luck years in Central Valley cities like Visalia, 40 miles southeast of Fresno. California’s agricultural heartland is at the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis, and counties there have some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. A drought has farmers scrambling for water.

Some farmers are also suspicious of the political direction in Sacramento, the state capital. In January the Senate Agriculture Committee was renamed the Food and Agriculture Committee, signaling a broader, more consumer-oriented approach to agricultural policy. The committee’s chairman, State Senator Dean Florez, Democrat of Fresno, finds the secession effort emblematic of larger tensions between food consumers and producers.

“Rather than split California, come sit at the table with consumers,” Mr. Florez said. “The agricultural industry is in this mode that says, ‘You will eat what’s put in front of you,’ and that’s a very condescending view of consumers and eaters. If customers are changing their preferences, the industry needs to change its ways.”

Food and animal rights activists here agree with Mr. Florez. “It’s unfair to say consumers don’t care about farmers,” said Rebecca Spector of the Center for Food Safety. “With the increase in food-borne illnesses, all eaters, both urban and rural, have the right to demand food that is grown in a safe and healthy way.”

The secessionists have a long way to go. The group has raised only about $12,000, a meager sum in a state where ballot campaigns come with multimillion-dollar price tags. Still, since the group unveiled its Web site, www.downsizeca.org, in mid-February, at least 150 people a day have signed up to receive information and offer their services to the cause, Mr. Maze said.

Mr. Rogers contributed $3,000 of his savings. Most of that went to rent a booth at the World Ag Expo, an agricultural fair near Visalia, in January. Several thousand people stopped by the booth, and many left carrying fliers and wearing “Downsize California” T-shirts, all of which Mr. Rogers took as evidence of money well spent.

“I’m an old hound dog,” he said. “If I’m barking up a tree, I want to know how many squirrels are up there.”

www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/14visalia.html