At Bee Sweet Citrus in the Central Valley town of Fowler, forklifts beep as workers load and pack oranges, lemons and mandarins that will be shipped all over the world.

Matt Watkins runs farm operations here, and says most of his employees make above minimum wage right now. But he thinks a jump to $15 an hour will mean farmers have to pass that cost onto consumers.

“Really, all we’re doing is causing the cost of food to go up, which makes less money in your take-home check at the end of the month, just cuz you’ve got to pay more for food,” Watkins says. “So to me, it’s just a revolving circle.”

The movement to raise the minimum wage has largely come from cities, where restaurant and service workers have been pushing for an increase. But the wage hike could have seismic effects on more rural, inland areas, where poverty and unemployment rates are higher than on the coast.

Farmers in the Central Valley say they’ve already had to adjust to higher prices for water, and to the $10 minimum wage that took effect in January. In order to survive, says Watkins, farmers are just going to have to mechanize more of the work.

“You’ve got to go and have reliable costs out there every year,” he says. “It’s robots, it’s new technology in order to do some of the jobs that people used to do.”

Socorro Torres, a farmworker lugging groceries and pushing her kids in a stroller along a sidewalk in Fresno, says she’d welcome a raise for the hours she spends stooped picking garlic, or standing on a ladder to pick cherries.

“Of course it’s better to earn more,” she says in Spanish. “What we make now doesn’t allow us to pay our bills.”

Torres says it costs her to work in the fields: She has to pay for a ride, and for someone to watch her kids. At $10 an hour right now, she’s barely making it.

“It’s going to be challenging for industry in the Central Valley to cope with it, but it’s also a place that deals with the negative aspects of poverty and low-paying jobs,” Jeff Michael says. He directs the Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific in Stockton.

Michael’s analysis shows the minimum wage hike could impact nearly 60 percent of the jobs in some Central Valley counties, where agriculture is king. It also shows that most of the workers who will benefit from a wage hike are Latino.

“There’s big positives that come with this and big negatives that come with this and both the positives will be larger and the negatives will be larger in the Central Valley,” Michael says.

The same is true in areas like the Inland Empire, just East of Los Angeles.

“We have a disproportionately large number of marginally educated, lower-income workers,” says economist John Husing, who consults for local governments and private business in urban Riverside and San Bernadino County. Otherwise known as the Inland Empire, it’s a traditionally lower-income region with a blue-collar job market, home to a number of companies that pay less than $30,000 a year to most workers.

Husing supports the wage hike proposal, but says it’s a good thing it would phase in over 6 years.

“Bringing it up at a moderate pace really works for the workforce. But it also will not cause the dislocations that will would normally occur if you moved it too fast,” Husing says.

He’s talking about the dislocation of jobs: bosses cutting staff, shutting down operations, even leaving the state.

Husing believes the Inland Empire region is overdue for a hike in the minimum wage. But he also didn’t have much faith that it would happen locally, because local governments in the region are much more conservative on labor issues than neighboring Los Angeles, which passed its own $15 minimum wage, set to phase in by 2020.

But David Neumark, who teaches economics at UC Irvine, says the state should have taken a wait-and-see approach, examine the effects of local minimum wage hikes in cities like L.A. before imposing a one-size-fits-all approach.

“I actually think it’s kind of reckless to just go ahead and do that everywhere else before we learn something about the consequences in these cities,” Neumark says. “A more sober view would say, ‘OK some cities have done this, let’s get some serious research done, let’s learn more about what happens before we say that we know for sure that $15 in Fresno is not gonna do a lot of damage.'”