Santa Clara River at El Rio and then due south to where the town of Oxnard was being established. The Oxnard Brothers built the American Beet Sugar Company factory on land in the middle portion of the plain that they bought from James Saviers. He became a judge and an honorary justice of the peace: Saviers Road was named after him in the new city of Oxnard that arose around the factory. The railroad continued with tracks heading east out of Oxnard and eventually being extended to Santa Susana in Simi Valley. Traffic on the coast railroad line was rerouted through Oxnard in 1904 with the completion of the Santa Susana Tunnel as this became the most direct route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Agriculture as an industry, as differentiated from family farming, began with the access to the railroad network. In 1903, this transition in agriculture labor practices found Japanese and Mexican sugar beet workers and labor contractors united in protest as the growers, backed by financiers, slashed the wage rate by 50 percent and sought to eliminate independent labor agents. The workers formed the Japanese Mexican Labor Association to press their concerns. While one ethnic group can often be pitted against another to undermine labor solidarity, the Oxnard Strike of 1903 unified them, as their efforts brought the industry to a standstill until their demands were met. In 1911, J. Smeaton Chase noted the "prosperous fields of beans and beets" as he descended from the Santa Monica Mountains onto the Oxnard Plain during his horseback journey from Mexico to Oregon. In his book about the journey, he describes the "sleepy little coast village of Hueneme" as a "ghost of a once flourishing town" due to the establishment of a beet sugar factory. The once busy port had drastically declined as passenger and freight traffic shifted to the railroad. Postwar and modern development Although agriculture has long been important to the economy on the Oxnard Plain, the booming growth in the 1960s of the cities located on the plain expanding by building housing, highways, and associated infrastructure over the rich agricultural land. Several methods were tried to encourage the building in compact, connected ways and reduce urban sprawl into the agricultural lands. "Guidelines for orderly development" were adopted in 1969 by the County of Ventura to encourage urban development to be located within incorporated cities whenever or wherever