Plowed Under by Development : Farming Fading Out in Orange County

Masao and Hiro Fujishige have raised vegetables and fruits on their 58 acres in central Anaheim since 1951, but their farming days are clearly numbered.

Once, the Fujishige brothers were members of a thriving agricultural community with roots reaching back more than 100 years. Today, they are among its few survivors and their farm is an oddity to the throngs milling about the triangle of tourism bounded by Disneyland, the Convention Center and Anaheim Stadium.

And the triangle is closing in. New buildings and developments continue to sprout up in the area. Recently, the Fujishiges agreed to provide easements to the city for two more streets to serve new developments. The streets will divide the brothers’ single plot into three separate pieces.

“It’s a rough world out there and you have to hang tough,” says Masao, 60. “A lot of the others didn’t want to and now they’re gone. . . . But we’re not ready to develop it yet, we’re not ready to give up.”

The Fujishige brothers may manage to hold out awhile yet, but for Orange County farmers in general, it is a losing battle. Once one of the richest and most productive agricultural counties in the nation, Orange County today is a place where farming is an anachronism. With few exceptions, farming is simply a way for an owner to cover property taxes on his land until the proper time comes to develop it.

“It’s pretty much past the point that it makes sense to keep agriculture,” says Fred Keller, head of farming operations for the Irvine Co., the largest landowner in Orange County.

“There’s just more and more people moving in here all the time. It’s a very nice place to live, but a tough place to farm.”

The numbers tell a lot of the story. In 1946, more than 267,000 acres--54% of Orange County’s entire land area--were devoted to farming and ranching. Last year, 30,708 acres were in agricultural production.

During the first half of the century, farming was the biggest industry in Southern California. Good soils and year-round growing seasons helped Orange and Los Angeles counties lead the country in the value of crops produced. In 1940 in Orange County, farming accounted for 20% of all jobs.

Cornucopia of Fruits, Vegetables

Almost anything could be grown. Hundreds of thousands of cultivated acres yielded a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables: lima, black-eyed and wax beans, barley, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, sugar beets, chili and bell peppers, apricots, walnuts, peaches, olives and apples.

And, of course, there were oranges. From a few seedlings brought into the area in the late 19th Century grew not only an industry, but an entire society that flourished in great manor houses surrounded by miles and miles of orchards stretching across the foothills of the Los Angeles basin.

This agricultural boom reached a peak at the end of World War II.

But even then, change was on the horizon, as another flood of immigrants--the biggest yet--began to wash into Southern California.

The weather, accessible water supplies and thousands of acres of flat, easily workable land had made Southern California, in the words of Irvine Co.’s Keller, “the perfect agricultural” area. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “it’s also a perfect place for people to live.”

Between 1946 and 1955, about 100,000 acres were taken out of farm production in Los Angeles County alone to make way for new homes and industry. It was a trend that would continue unabated into the 1960s and 1970s.

Agriculture Essentially Gone

Today, commercial agriculture is essentially gone from Los Angeles. There are but 39,651 acres under cultivation in Los Angeles County, most of it well removed from the urban areas to such places as the Antelope Valley and the Newhall-Saugus area. The county farm bureau, once headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, is now in Lancaster, north of the mountains in the Mojave Desert.

In Orange County, much the same scenario is now being played out, with many of the same results. The area’s population doubled and then redoubled between 1950 and 1970, and about 150,000 acres--230 square miles--of farmland disappeared. In 1959, according to federal census figures, Orange County had 3,352 farms, ranging in size from one to several thousand acres. Five years later, there were less than half that number and in 1982 there were only 576.

And with the face of the land changing dramatically, those who work it have had to radically alter their thinking when it comes to what they grow. Farmers are turning from more traditional crops, such as orchards, to those that make greater use of the available land and return more dollars per acre.

Increased Land Values

“As the pressure of people moving in increased, so did the land values,” says Randy Keim, head of the University of California South Coast field station in Santa Ana. “In this process, crops began dropping by the wayside simply by virtue of the gross revenue they could return.

“If you can only make $200 an acre on barley or beans, you need thousands of acre-units to survive. So what you’re left with at the present time are the high-value crops.”

Among the casualties are:

- Walnuts. Santa Ana was once the largest shipping point in the world for English walnuts. By the late 1960s, the crop had disappeared as a commercial commodity.

- Spinach. Orange County was once a major producer. Now it produces none, because the crop is too pollution-sensitive.

- Oranges. Valencia orange groves in the 1940s covered more than 65,000 acres in Orange County--more than 100 square miles--and were a mainstay of the region’s prewar economy. Today, they rank a distant third among Orange County’s cash crops, with less than 4,800 acres in production. (In Los Angeles County, oranges are no longer even accorded their own place in the crop listing, but are rather lumped into a “miscellaneous” category.) The explanation for the decline is simple: It takes up to seven years from the time of planting to first harvest.

Taking the place of these are crops such as strawberries or celery, which can be profitably grown on small scattered parcels--land that may well be rented from an owner who is just waiting for the opportune time to develop it. The investment for strawberries is high--more than $8,000 per acre--but the net profit can be as much as $3,500 an acre.

Year-Round Growing Seasons

And because of year-round growing seasons, the farmer can be more flexible in what he plants, changing his crops to meet market conditions. This, agriculture officials point out, has shielded Southern California growers from the depressed prices that afflict farmers in central California and in the Midwest.

The same urbanization that is crowding out many traditional crops has brought a surge in demand for landscaping and ornamental products, and created a new king of agriculture. Today, nursery stock and cut flowers--though more akin to gardening than farming--bring in more money in Orange and Los Angeles counties than all other agricultural categories combined.

In 1984 in Orange County, for example, the value of nursery stock and cut flowers produced was $124 million. Strawberries ranked second at $66 million, followed by oranges at $22 million.

Nursery stock, furthermore, is produced in such a way as to almost ensure its continued survival.

“You don’t need prime ag land for nursery stock,” notes Thelma Moses, head of the Orange County Farm Bureau, which acts as a lobbying organization for farmers. “Most of it grows in containers, so anywhere you can put a pot down, you can farm.

“With cut flowers,” she adds, “you double-crop on the same piece of land by having flats up on a table while you’re growing something underneath at the same time.”

And such products make maximum use of water, a commodity whose costs make it nearly as valuable as land.

“Our farmers are paying anywhere from $200 to $225 for an acre-foot of water,” says Moses. (An acre-foot of water, about 350,000 gallons, is about what a family of five uses in a year.) “And that’s agricultural water, it’s not drinking quality.”

Farmers in Kern County pay $8 to $12 per acre-foot, so it’s easy to see why new irrigation technology such as drip-watering--where precisely measured amounts of water are delivered directly to the crops with little resulting loss--finds a ready market in Southern California.

Still, those farmers who have chosen to remain in business have had other problems, beyond a dwindling supply of land, to contend with. Skyrocketing property taxes and a general incompatibility with encroaching urbanization have also played major roles in the demise of agriculture.

It was the view of government for many years that land was land, whether it was covered with oranges or houses. Property taxes were assessed on the land’s highest potential use. To a tax assessor, a 50-acre farm was no different from the 50-acre apartment complex next door. But what each property owner was earning on his land certainly was.

“There were times when our taxes doubled over the previous year,” recalls Masao Fujishige. “And each time I would go in to protest that I was paying the same as all these hotels, they would pull out profit-and-loss statements on those places and say, ‘See, here’s what you could be doing. But if you don’t want to, fine.’ What could I say?”

Because he and his brother wanted to keep farming, they started borrowing to pay their property taxes. When their indebtedness reached $600,000, Fujishige says, “The banker told me not to come back any more.”

Farmers who didn’t or couldn’t borrow often sold off their property pieces at a time in order to keep the rest of their operations going.

“Usually what happened was farmers would get up against a wall and then sell out,” Fujishige says.

First Signs of Relief

The first signs of relief appeared in 1965 with the passage of the California Land Conservation Act. Also called the Williamson Act after its author, Kern County Assemblyman John D. Williamson, the measure called for farmland to be assessed at a much lower rate--on the condition that it be left in agricultural preserve status and not developed for at least 10 years.

Large landowners were the principal beneficiaries of the Williamson Act. By 1971, 93,000 acres in Orange County had been placed in agricultural preserves and 95% of it belonged to the Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo, two firms that owned more than half of the developable land in the county.

While the Williamson Act was intended to preserve farmland, in reality, officials say, it has performed an even more valuable task for local governments that must deal with continuing urbanization.

“I think they (the preserves) were established uniquely here not only to preserve agricultural land, but also to preserve open space for as long as possible,” says Mike Ruane of the Orange County Environmental Management Agency. “That was even put in the original act when it was passed in ‘65, that the prevention of premature urban sprawl was the thing we should be aiming for.

“Development pressure has far exceeded any of the Williamson Act’s tax benefits,” Ruane adds. “What it does do is it has allowed the big ones (landowners) to stay in the ag business where, if there’s a fair market, they might even break even on their taxes.

“If their lands were not in preserves, you would be forcing them to lose money or else do something premature. Our experience is that’s where it has been a success. It hasn’t really saved prime ag land, but they’re not squandering a lot of land either,” he says.

To Ruane and many others, however, the Williamson Act can only do so much when it comes to preserving agriculture.

“Basically, everyone’s conclusion is that to save prime agricultural land, there has to be more than frozen tax assessments,” Ruane says, referring to the efforts by the state Coastal Conservancy, which has purchased land and then leased it back to farmers.

That same strategy was among several recommended to the Orange County Board of Supervisors by an agriculture preservation task force in 1977. The county could, the group said, keep agriculture alive by purchasing 10,000 acres of farmland over 20 years at an estimated cost of $145.8 million. However, the revenue-slashing effects of Proposition 13 left that idea stillborn.

Efforts to Preserve Farming

There have also been efforts on a more local level to preserve farming. Both San Juan Capistrano and Irvine have zoned agricultural areas within their city limits.

But this brings problems, too, because farming and urbanization are not a very good mix.

“There is more that pushes agriculture out than just land values,” environmental analyst Ruane notes. “There is compatibility. People do vandalize and they do intrude on farming operations, just as agriculture can intrude on them. That’s really where the problem is.”

Keller, the Irvine Co.’s vice president in charge of agricultural operations, has first-hand experience at trying to coexist with neighboring urban areas.

“One example is trying to scare the birds away from the fields when they come in to feed before dawn,” he says. “We can’t use noisemakers because that violates a city (Irvine) sound ordinance. They ask why we can’t do it at 9 a.m. Well, the birds have already come and gone by then.”

Farmers also must find ways to minimize the noise generated by their equipment--everything from tractors to water pumps--and they have to be especially careful in their use of fertilizers and pesticides.

“We get people calling in to say they have a rash or some such thing from a spray we’re using --and we’re not even spraying in that area,” Keller says. “Most of the people understand, but there are others who will billy-be-damn you no matter what you do.”

To most of those closely involved with the industry, it’s a matter of when, not if, farming will disappear from Orange County.

The Irvine Co. has 11,000 acres under cultivation, 3,000 of those being rented to farmers who mainly grow strawberries and other high-yield crops.

“Most of them do reasonably well,” Keller says. “Of course, they don’t have the high overhead that (Irvine Co.) does--land costs, taxes and that sort of thing.

“It remains viable for the company because it pays for the production costs and taxes on the land. But I’m afraid that’s about all we can do,” he says.

Keller also doesn’t see the area as a vital part of the food production industry.

“I’ve always believed that if you shut down all of the agriculture in Orange County, you’d never know it,” he says. “It wouldn’t make a ripple. In the overall scheme of things, it’s just a drop in the bucket.”

Gilbert Aguirre, vice president of ranch operations for Rancho Mission Viejo in southern Orange County, believes agriculture has another 20 or 30 years to go.

“I think it will still be around in our lifetime,” Aguirre says. “You can’t develop all the land overnight. We sold 10,000 acres to Mission Viejo in 1964 and, look, they haven’t even used that up yet.”

Rancho Mission Viejo is primarily a cattle operation, Aguirre notes, running 4,000 head on more than 30,000 acres of grazing land. There are 1,000 acres of irrigated lands where citrus and row crops, such as strawberries, tomatoes and cauliflower, are produced, along with a fledgling wine grape operation.

“Everything will stay in production until such time as they deem they need to put houses on the land,” he says.

Randy Keim, who runs the UC agriculture field station in Santa Ana, also envisions a reasonable future for farming.

“I see vegetable crops surviving for a while, but sooner or later all of the open land will be filled,” he says. “Then, maybe a lot will be moved to the hillsides, which are not prime development land, much like the Irvine Co. has done with its orchards.

“But I feel agriculture will always be here and will be a viable economical enterprise. I think we’re looking at a lot more than 30 (years) just because of the way things have been changing.

“But,” he adds after a pause, “a lot is going to happen in 30 years.”