FARMERS : SPECIALIST FARMERS GET RICH IN OWN BACKYARDS

Sal Gianetta’s small North Hollywood backyard is crammed with exotic basils and thymes in wide rows, pots of chervil under a screen, rosemary bushes, epazote, Italian parsley--all the herbal delights prized by the best Los Angeles chefs.

Last summer Gianetta--a gravel-voiced man with long hair and a Lucky Strike habit--sold those home-grown herbs to Camelions, La Toque, Bistango, Trumps and many other top-of-the-line restaurants. Enough of the pungent leaves to earn a more-than-decent living. So decent he’s now planning to move to France to open a restaurant in Toulouse.

Gianetta, a writer with virtually no previous farming experience, launched his herb business during a writing lull and ended up harvesting sweet success. “Two people, really working at it, can easily make $1,500, $2,000 a week,” he said. “There’s no overhead.”

Gianetta is one of a growing number of small-scale agricultural entrepreneurs whose main source of income is not the fickle supermarket or the even fickler wholesaler, but local restaurants. Small growers and chefs are creating a new, direct relationship--which is really an ancient relationship, sidetracked for years by convenience foods, brokers, agribusiness and long-range transportation.

For the past five years or more there has been a large cottage industry surrounding Northern California restaurants, with locals marketing everything from specially smoked bacon to carefully nurtured oysters. But this symbiotic food chain has only recently linked into the Southland. And, like growers up north, those down here are offering unusual items grown in small spaces.

Doug Richardson used his backyard as an experimental planting space for four or five years before launching his banana farm 18 months ago. Located on just four acres near La Conchita, the 2,000-tree banana farm is on the ocean, about 15 miles south of Santa Barbara. And several thousand miles closer to Southern California restaurants than Central American bananas.

“It’s exciting, because we have really unusual varieties that have not even been available in California before,” Richardson said. He is growing 40 varieties, recently harvesting one called Red Itholena: “The flesh is orange, just a beautiful color; it’s a Polynesian cooking banana, and the flavor is out of this world.” Two restaurants, Voila in Ventura and Michael’s Waterside Inn in Santa Barbara, peeled Richardson’s first harvests. Richardson hopes to produce 30 tons of bananas next year.

Not far from Richardson, in the foothills of Carpinteria, 16-acre Paradise Farms is no newcomer to the gourmet market. Pam and Jay North have been commercial gardeners for 12 years, but they’ve been specializing in edible flowers and culinary herbs for only three. Their flowering beauties adorn dishes at the Biltmore Hotel, Spago, Trumps and “most of the major” restaurants in Los Angeles. Pam North: “One chef is pickling roses; (others) are using flower essences to flavor sorbets, getting real creative. . . . “One chef prepared day lily blossoms by stuffing with cheese, battering and frying, like zucchini flowers.”

In spite of all the terrible news of the plight of Midwestern farmers, there seems to be no crisis for specialty growers, as these smaller farmers are called. “It’s good money,” North said. “Our business has tripled in the last four years.” North expects an even bigger year in 1987. “There’s a new item we’re going to be pushing, but we’re not releasing the name of it yet.”

The competitive edge in specialty growing is achieved by exclusively handling a desired item or by being the first to introduce a new taste treat. “You have to be constantly creative to find new and different items,” she added.

Scott Murray and partner Greta Zeit tend a three-acre organic garden in Vista, near San Diego, where they grow “exotic and unusual things aimed at the restaurant trade”--yellow pear tomatoes, cape gooseberries, purple basil. They attract a number of chefs from the San Diego area--Harbor House, Biarritz, Grand Tour--”and the chef from Bocca in L.A. comes out and picks our weeds. He takes them home to cook for his family,” Murray said. One French chef in the area visits the farm often. “He misses that (visiting growers) from when he worked in Paris,” where intensive suburban gardens have supplied some of the best restaurants in the world for decades.

In business just two years, Murray expects “We will be making quite a nice profit” in 1987. “The trend we’re working on is the future of farming.”

Murray was one of the organizers of the Summer Tasting at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in September, an event that brought together chefs and growers in the Southland for an exchange of views, needs, ideas--and phone numbers. This event was an unashamed copy of the Bay Area’s Tasting of Summer Vegetables, now 4 years old, which has established an enviable network of Northern suppliers and demanders.

That network may have originated in Andrea Crawford’s Berkeley backyard, about six years ago. As any halfhearted food maven can tell you, Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters would come by Crawford’s garden and gather up handfuls of home-grown lettuce and serve it in her restaurant. “It hit me like a bolt of lightning,” Crawford said, explaining her sudden entry into the farming business. Tall and very blond, Crawford was leaning against an old table in yet another backyard, this one in Encino.

The yard belongs to Doris and Larry Silverton (whose daughter, Nancy, is a well-known pastry chef) but it is farmed by Crawford, who has installed 15 rows, each five by 50 feet and now covered with long plastic “tunnels.” Sections of each row are crammed with lettuces and herbs in various stages of infancy: red-tinged Merveille de Quatre Saisons, Lollo Biondo, Italian green oak, Perella red, Trocadero, red romaine, several that aren’t labeled, plus arugula and cress.

A worker carefully picked the tiny leaves, some no larger than a quarter, and tucked them into plastic bags. In a few hours those dainty leaves would be tossed into salads at Angeli, Bocca, Spago, Hotel Bel-Air, Chinois on Main, Trumps, Rex and others. (Crawford says what she charges the restaurants amounts to about $1 a serving. The salads made with the lettuces--and other embellishments--can cost as much as $8.)

Crawford also has a smaller garden in Venice plus the original two in Berkeley. And she has ambitious plans: a three-acre garden in the west San Fernando Valley, where she’ll grow ever more lettuces, plus beans, “a lot of Italian beans, like anellino, finger-shaped and bumpy, delicious with wonderful bean flavor. And a special pea she wants to market. What kind? It’s a secret.

The nouvelle revolution is not limited to small farms and city backyards. There are ranchers who raise lambs strictly for the better restaurants; specialists in squab, ducks and range-fed chickens, and perhaps the hottest “new” farming, aquaculture.

Although specialty growers are happy to sell to wholesalers or to the public at farmers markets, most of them know that restaurants will compete for the new, the different, even the bizarre (blue potatoes, purple peppers, white eggplant--foods with no particular taste distinctions, merely pretty colors).

“Newness is very important” to Bocca chef Matthew Antonvich, the same man who occasionally harvests Scott Murray’s weeds. “Vegetables are very seasonal,” he added. “I plan my menus according to what’s available, experimenting with new things, not traditional. The more new things you come up with, the better.” But demand is not constant, as duck and squab growers can tell you. Two years ago the birds were on every other restaurant menu, but now fish is more the fashion.

Other problems facing farmers in the Southland may prove more overwhelming than unpredictable taste trends. The population growth threatens to appropriate every inch of arable land for residential developments, and there is always the smog. Plants, like people, do not thrive in smog.

But for now, small growers are reaping more than they sow. “I figure I get 80%,” Gianetta said. “The rest I lose to weather and bugs. That’s not too bad.”