He rises before the sun: the life of an Orange County farmer

McKay Smith awakens before the sun rises and retires for the day as the sun sets. As a farmer, working long hours seems to be in his DNA.

Smith, 56, has three organic farms — in Fountain Valley, Irvine and Huntington Beach. His Irvine farm is the largest, spanning 8.5 acres.

Organic farming is only for the strong of heart. These days Smith has to contend not only with hungry pests and coyotes but also with economic forces that threaten as well to devour the land. His farms, especially the one in Irvine, sit on prime acreage for real estate development.

He leases the land, so any decision to do something else with it would not be made by him.

“The property is worth so much money,” he said. “The last time I spoke with the owners, they were talking about maybe making the land into a sports park or selling it. The land is very expensive. We will just have to see.”

Although Smith has a good relationship with the owners that has spanned more than a few decades, he realizes they face pressure to sell from entities like The Irvine Co.

If that happens, he said, something very special would be lost.

Smith’s Farms is a family business. Smith enlists the help of his wife, Laurie, and his children, Marnie, 24, Courtney, 21, and Cade, 17, who all work the stand at the Irvine farmers market.

Smith’s father and grandparents were farmers. When he wasn’t in school as a kid, he would spend most of his time helping his father, Blair Smith, even making a little money for the summer by selling what he called “the ugly corn” on Harbor Boulevard in Fountain Valley.

“My dad would sell all of his number one quality corn,” he said. “Then all the really ugly corn I would sell at like a dollar a box, and that would be my summer income. It was pretty cool.”

Despite the farming lineage, Smith didn’t always think he would be a farmer.

His father opened up his first farmers market in Gardena in 1978, when Smith was attending college. Smith started to help out at the market and grew to love the business.

“It kind of grew on me,” he said. “It’s a real gratifying job. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.”

Eventually, Smith started his own farming business. He dabbled in conventional farming for a while but felt that he needed to expand his horizons. After he acquired the Irvine farm in February 1996, he looked into organic farming.

“It was kind of funny because at that time, there were a couple of organic farmers around, but my dad was a conventional farmer so that’s what he taught me,” he said. “He told me it would be too hard. Other farmers said that it would be impossible to do, so there was a lot of negativity, and I didn’t really have any people to consult with.”

In the late-1980s to mid-’90s, organic farming was not as common as it is today. Most farmers felt that it was impossible to defend crops from bugs without traditional pesticides. Smith knew of the risks but felt there was a market for sustainably grown, organic products. The only problem was he had a lot to learn.

“I didn’t even own a computer at that time,” he said. “So I went down to the library and took down organic gardening magazines, which was kind of crazy, and most of it back then was trial and error.

“That first year in 1996, I planted everything in the wintertime, and in winter you don’t get a lot of bugs and everything grows rather nice. But once summertime hit, I was just overwhelmed with different bugs, and I probably lost more than half of the products that I grew. I was right at a point where I almost gave everything up. But I talked to my mom, and I felt that I needed to stick it out.”

Smith’s initial research led him down a few odd paths. One magazine said that an organic farmer could discourage birds from eating his berries by painting rocks the color of fruit. According to Smith’s memory of the technique, the birds would then peck on the rocks, thinking they were berries, and hurt their beaks. As crazy as it may have sounded, Smith was willing to try anything.

“It didn’t work very well,” he said.

Organic farming is a very difficult practice. Just about every animal and bug on Earth wants the product being grown. Not only does organic farming require more time than conventional farming, as well as a creative imagination, expenses and paperwork add up faster.

Smith is willing to sacrifice his time and money because he believes that he is doing his part for nature and humanity as an organic farmer.

“I do attach an ethical value to organic farming,” he said. “I am doing my part as a steward in the world as far as sustainability and not harming the land or the ecosystem.”

Over the last 20 years, Smith has figured out how best to deal with pests through trial and error.

He recently had a problem with an old coyote that had a hankering for watermelons. Throughout the fall of 2015, the coyote would take a single bite out of 20 to 30 watermelons each night. Smith tried a variety of methods to outsmart the animal — from setting up a mannequin in a truck near the watermelon patch to installing spotlights nearby.

When those plans failed, Laurie ordered wolf urine on the Internet, thinking that if a coyote sensed a nearby predator, it wouldn’t go near the watermelon patch. It didn’t work as advertised.

Smith hopes that he can outsmart the old coyote this year by setting up his watermelons between two walls that will act as a bulwark.

“I hope it will work this time,” Smith said.

A pest that Smith has had success warding off is the two-spotted mite. These creatures tend to go after strawberries, which happen to be one of Smith’s Farms’ best products.

Smith buys around 60,000 predator mites at a time. These predator mites eat only one thing — two-spotted mites. He sends them in like a small army to defend his plants from the infiltrators.

“I put out these beneficial bugs and just kind of cross my fingers and hope they do their job,” he said.

While a conventional farmer will simply purchase a miticide to spray on the plants, Smith spends thousands of dollars on predator mites.

Smith’s devotion suggests that the farm is an extension of himself.

When he was engaging in conventional farming techniques, Smith didn’t spend as much time on the job as he does today. Smith now gets up when his workers get up and retires when his workers retire for the day.

Smith starts every workday around 3 a.m., going to Los Angeles with some of his employees to sell products to farmers markets. He gets back in the mid-to-late afternoon and spends most of the rest of the day walking the farms with his foremen to get a handle on the growth of each crop and any production issues. The latter part of his day is reserved for doing paperwork. Quitting time is around 6:30 p.m.

His “working with them, not above them” management style seems to have engendered loyalty in his workers. His Irvine foreman, Jaime Euenrostro, has been with Smith since he started the farm in 1996.

The farming industry has not been so stable.

On the long drive down Jeffrey Road to Irvine Valley College, many farms could once be seen. Those lands have slowly been taken over by homes and shopping centers.

Smith’s farm in Fountain Valley was almost shut down for a housing development in 2013, but dozens of community members waged a successful protest.

“I would be very upset if the farm was ever sold,” said Irvine resident Mina Darabi about Smith’s Irvine farm, where she has been buying goods for 14 years. “I have sent a lot of my friends here over the years, and they all appreciate it.”

Susan Delaney, also from Irvine, said of the Irvine location, “I have shopped here since we moved here around 20 years ago. It has been hard for us to see this part of Irvine overdeveloped.”