Agricultural Land Is Growing Scarce : Nursery Plants Are Now the Top Crop in Los Angeles County

The peaceable City of Glendora, once the epicenter of the richest citrus orchard land in the nation, is getting ready to plant a five-acre grove of orange trees in sprawling South Hills Park as a remembrance of things past.

The hope is that the trees will thrive, reminding residents of a lost era when the region’s bountiful farmlands were unrivaled in citrus production.

That some would undertake such a symbolic gesture says something about what has happened to farming in the last quarter of a century and more, not just around Glendora, but throughout Los Angeles County, once the mightiest agriculture machine in the nation in terms of dollar volume.

Farming, as recently as four decades ago the principal business of this most-populous county in this most-inhabited state in the nation, today scarcely exists; what does survive bears little resemblance to what most of us think of as agriculture.

Today, the most valuable crop by far is nursery products, and most of them are grown by “farmers” on undevelopable land leased from utilities.

Older residents, however, recall a time gone by, when:

- Jack rabbits scampered through bean fields where Los Angeles International Airport, a monument to progress, now stands.

- Fragrant groves of orange and lemon trees covered land occupied today by the sumptuous homes and shops of San Marino.

- Herds of dairy cattle were so abundant in what now is the City of Paramount that boosters claimed that enough bales of hay were consumed there daily to build a replica of the Washington Monument and enough milk produced to float the Navy’s largest battleship.

From the time the Census Bureau first began tracking the value of farm production in the nation in 1910 until the early 1950s, according to county Agricultural Commissioner Paul Engler, “Los Angeles was the No. 1 county in farm dollars in the nation.”

Then all that changed. To many longtime residents, the transformation seemed to occur almost overnight. It was as if, Engler said, “every day I walked out of the door of my home, I saw a new home going up.”

“The most rapid change, I think, occurred in the late 1950s with the rush of urbanization,” said George Rendell of the Farm Adviser Office of the University of California’s Cooperative Extension Service.

But, even before the late ‘50s, as prices for land crept upward, the county’s crop production already was in decline. From the peak year, 1942, when 318,392 acres were farmed, the number had skidded to 258,710 by 1950.

Today, slightly less than 32,000 acres are farmed in Los Angeles County, according to Engler’s office, and the number diminishes each year.

Grown on those acres are everything from strawberries to lettuce, from peaches to alfalfa, from vegetables to avocados, because in Southern California just about anything growable that is stuck in the ground will thrive, given sufficient water.

But since the early 1960s the leading cash crop has been nursery products, which range from common trees, shrubs and ground cover to the most exotic of plants, including both the indoor and outdoor variety. No place grows them better than Los Angeles County.

Nursery products have survived the down trend in Los Angeles County agriculture for an elementary reason: They are a pricey crop that can be grown, mainly in containers, in a limited space.

“Twenty acres can be very viable economically. With most other crops, 20 acres is nothing,” said Jack Wick, executive director of the Sacramento-based California Assn. of Nurserymen.

For example, in 1986, a somewhat slack year, a single Los Angeles County acre holding nursery products generated an annual average income of about $60,000. During previous years in the 1980s, when demand for trees, plants and shrubs was keener than last year, the figure was higher.

As another indicator, consider this: While only 2,419 acres of county land were devoted to the growth of nursery products in 1986, the crop accounted for 60% of the money--more than $150 million--that agriculture generated in the county, according to county Agricultural Commission figures.

Most of that occurred on land that developers have not seen fit to gobble up for a variety of reasons--the most important was its unsuitability for anything else. More than half of the acreage devoted to nursery products today runs under power lines belonging either to the Southern California Edison Co. or the Department of Water & Power, land on which permanent structures are forbidden.

Power lines and wholesale nurseries--in the heyday of agriculture here, the combination was an improbable concept. But today it is the most dynamic component of Los Angeles County agriculture, and it is likely to be for years to come.

“We could never be in the nursery business and have this much land,” said Stuart Sperber, president of the Sylmar-based Valley Crest Tree Co., the biggest grower operating on acreage leased under power lines in the county.

The growing of nursery products, principally in containers under power lines, goes back at least to the early ‘60s. That’s when Valley Crest and another big Los Angeles County operator--Norman Nursery of San Gabriel, which today farms 100 power-line acres--struck deals with Edison.

About the same time, nursery items overtook citrus produce as the dominant money crop here as the boom in development made most of the county’s good earth far too expensive for conventional farming.

Valley Crest, the largest grower of trees in containers in the nation, began in North Hollywood in 1949 on less than an acre of land. It leased its first power-line land--five acres--from Edison in 1961, near the site of its current Sylmar headquarters.

Today, Valley Crest leases 200 acres under Edison lines and 50 under DWP lines at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in the northeast section of the San Fernando Valley.

“If there were no Edison nor DWP land available,” Valley Crest President Sperber said, “there scarcely would be nurseries in L.A. County.”

Edison enjoys a great edge today over the Department of Water & Power as a lessor to nurserymen. It got in the business far earlier, and today nearly all of its suitable acreage has been staked out by growers.

“Ninety-six percent is under license” and the remainder is too small to be farmed economically, said Don Baumann, the utility’s supervisor of property management.

70 Requests Pending

On the other hand, the DWP’s leasing is still in its infancy. Probably only about 15% of its power-line land that is suitable for nurseries has been leased, said Lee Moussafir, the DWP’s chief real estate officer. “But we have about 70 requests pending.”

DWP didn’t enter the business until about five years ago, about the time Edison was running out of power-line land.

Even though leasing their rights-of-way is a profitable enterprise, both big utilities also appreciate the public relations value of their relationships with nurseries. When the land beneath the power lines is idle, it is inclined to be a neighborhood eyesore and even a nuisance.

“You can’t cut weeds every day. The land would be city dumps otherwise. Or motorcycles would be running up and down them,” Edison’s Baumann said. “Either way, the neighbors would be up in arms.”

Width of strips leased by DWP range from 100 to 750 feet, with the average being about 300. Edison’s strips range from 50 to 300 feet. Annual leases, Baumann said, cost nurserymen between $700 and $1,000 an acre. When his firm first went under power lines a quarter of a century ago, said Charles Normand of San Gabriel’s Normand Nursery, leases were $25 an acre.

The land is available at a relatively low cost because, under terms of the license, the utility must have access to the power lines for repairs even if it means trampling the nurseryman’s valuable products. But Baumann said he can remember its happening only once in his 20 years with Edison.

Most of what the public generally thinks of as farming exists today in Los Angeles County only in the Antelope Valley, where the swings in the weather are inappropriate for nursery products and their need for a consistent, temperate climate.

Agricultural Commissioner Engler estimates that at least 80% of the land under cultivation in Los Angeles County is in the high desert country. But dollar-wise it does not measure up to the Basin because high-value nursery products skew the percentages.

The agricultural commissioner’s report for 1986 shows that the next biggest revenue-producing “crops” in the county after nursery products are table eggs (about $11 million), horses ($10.5 million), dry onions (nearly $10 million), chickens (slightly more than $6 million), edible sprouts (slightly more than $6 million), strawberries (just under $6 million), alfalfa (slightly more than $5 million), milk (slightly more than $4 million), freestone peaches (almost $3 million) and table greens (about $2.5 million).

Most of the eggs, the No. 2 crop, are produced by hens on a ranch in West Covina and another in the Antelope Valley’s Littlerock area, according to Randy Hamashita, inspector with the commissioner’s office.

Most horse breeding in the county is for private owners or stables. These breeders thrive in “horsey” areas such as the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the Santa Monica Mountains, but increasingly they gravitate toward the Antelope Valley, said an official in the county veterinarian’s office.

Dry onions and poultry are the exclusive product of the Antelope Valley, according to John Calman, an inspector who compiled the latest countywide farm figures for the agricultural commissioner’s office.

Alfalfa, strawberries and sprouts--which can be grown in limited confines--exist exclusively in the Basin.

Strawberries are found in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, and to a lesser extent in the Long Beach area where some of the production is done beneath power lines, Calman said.

“About a dozen to 15” sprout growers exist in the greater Los Angeles area, some of them in Chinatown, Calman said.

Only four milk-producing dairies remain in the county, according to the dairymen. The biggest is 10 miles east of Lancaster where 2,000 cows roam 700 acres. The next largest is a mere 25-acre spread in La Mirada that has 1,000 head. Lesser dairies exist in Santa Fe Springs (200 cows) and in Long Beach (100 cows).

Table greens--lettuce, kale, cabbage and collards, among other vegetables--are the product chiefly of small truck farms, which are mainly in the southern area of the county, according to Calman. But the days of these small farmers are numbered, said one of them, 67-year-old Frank Takahashi.

Takahashi still farms 50 acres just off the San Diego Freeway in Carson, most of which he rents. “But I cut back two years ago because the water got too expensive and the rent cost too much,” Takahashi said.

He owns six of the 50 acres but is negotiating with a developer. He said the land he now rents also will soon fall to development, just as the acreage he formerly farmed did.

“I figure I’ve got a couple of more years to go,” Takahashi said, and he predicted: “In another five years, there will be no more vegetable farming around. All the young people want to work in offices today and land is just too valuable.”

Along with peaches and apricots, pears also are an Antelope Valley monopoly because these crops grow best in a four-season climate.

However, these growers can’t make a living by farming alone. Most Antelope Valley orchard owners are only part-timers. Steve Orloff, a University of California extension service representative based in Lancaster, estimates that 90% of the fruit growers in the Antelope Valley fall into this category.

But even in the Antelope Valley, the push of urbanization threatens the remaining land that is suitable for farming.

John Alesso, 59 and president of the Los Angeles County Farm Bureau, farms one of the largest acreages there with his brother. The Alessos grow, among other crops, alfalfa, onions, garlic and wheat, 15 miles northwest of Lancaster.

But already what John Alesso calls urban “ripples” are being felt close by. “If the ripple gets out here, we’ll be awfully tempted to sell,” he said.

He estimated that Antelope Valley farmland has dwindled to 20% of what was cultivated 40 years ago.

“It has dropped most dramatically in the last five years,” Alesso said. “Some farmers just quit, others moved elsewhere, some went bankrupt, some sold to developers and others began developing the land themselves.

“As I see it, in the next 10 years most farmers will quit or die. There will be few young ones to take over. Farming’s too much work and not enough return.”

Despite Los Angeles County’s ranking as the nation’s richest producer of nursery products, its dominance in that area will end within a few short years and either Orange or San Diego counties, which now run neck-and-neck behind it, will assume preeminence.

The scenario is inevitable because of a move scheduled by the historic Monrovia Nursery Co. of Azusa. The 500-acre nursery--which dates back to the mid-’20s and sits on the site of what once was part a huge lemon grove--is the largest in the county by far. It also is the last major nursery in the county that occupies private land instead of operating under power lines.

Monrovia’s production accounts for about one-fifth of the county’s nursery riches. But the demand for residential property in the San Gabriel Valley has doomed it on its present site; the property has simply become too valuable.

A rival but friendly nurseryman “guesses” that Monrovia’s 500 acres are “worth $500 million to developers,” adding: “When Monrovia goes it will mark the end of the era; virtually everything will be under power lines.”

Monrovia has purchased property in the Moorpark area of Ventura County and expects to accomplish its move within the next six years.

However, Los Angeles, in time, could once again regain its status as the richest in nursery products.

The gaps left by Monrovia’s departure could be filled if nurserymen eventually occupy all potentially useful land beneath DWP’s high-voltage transmission lines.

DWP’s Moussafir said land under 200 miles of the utility’s 1,500 miles of lines in the county lends itself to nursery use. Only 30 miles of that amount is occupied, leaving another 170 miles ready and available to the green thumbs of nursery owners and their employees.