The Last Harvest

In the next few days, Carroll Vaniman will harvest his last row of safflower plants, maneuver his aging combines off the fields and end 31 years of farming in Simi Valley.

His retirement will mark the end an era for a city that once was a hub of agriculture.

Vaniman, 70, is the last big farmer in Simi Valley. His 12-hour days of planting, tending and harvesting at the Big Sky Ranch, in the northern hills of Tapo Canyon, are a throwback to a time before the construction boom of the 1960s and ‘70s transformed rows of grain into rows of tract houses.

“Carroll is the last one. No one is farming on a large scale anymore,” said Simi Valley’s official historian, Pat Havens.

Like other farmers in the area, Vaniman leases the 1,000 acres where he works and lives from W & B Builders of Santa Monica on land that will eventually be used for housing.

“When they get the houses out here, this will be the Beverly Hills of Simi Valley,” Vaniman said as he lubricated his combine to prepare for another day of harvesting his remaining 50 acres of safflower. Ernest Gomez, Vaniman’s “strong right arm,” was oiling the joints of a second harvesting machine.

Safflowers and Barley

This year, Vaniman and Gomez, 57, are harvesting 330 acres of safflower and 670 acres of barley. For their labor, they’ll earn $4 per sack of barley and $16 for each sack of safflower.

“I hate to see it come,” Vaniman said of the inevitable progress, “but you can’t stop it. People always come first, and that’s the way it should be.

“The only thing that bothers me is that we are putting so much of this good ground under cement and blacktops that somebody might get hungry in the United States.”

Vaniman is retiring and moving into town because, after three decades, “I’m getting tired of those 12-hour days,” he said.

Farming was not his original life’s work. His wife, Phyllis, and her family had farmed the same ranch since 1934. When his father-in-law suffered a heart attack in 1955, Vaniman took a leave of absence from his job as a high school teacher in La Canada-Flintridge to help with the barley harvest.

‘My Kids Loved It’

“My three kids loved it,” he said of life on the farm. The Vanimans never left.

From modest beginnings, Vaniman began to lease more land over the years. By 1975, he was farming 2,500 acres, up from 750.

He has had only three years when he didn’t make a profit, and he blamed them on the weather. “The only thing wrong with farming is that the income is so sporadic,” he said. “A good deal of farming is luck.”

Looking forward to retirement, Vaniman and his wife are buying a home in Simi Valley. He said he plans to read.

“I’m not going to be bored with city life because I like books,” he said. “With farming, you can only read when it rains.”