Bloom Boom Hits County as Nurseries Grow Apace

Officials at Coast Nursery in Gardena recently looked up from their flower beds and realized that the one-time nursery capital was no longer a garden spot.

Suddenly, Coast was surrounded by industrial complexes. With no affordable property near its 5 1/2-acre site, it began acquiring property in Ventura County.

Its entire operation within the next five to six years will move to 32 acres outside of Saticoy. Already, Coast has put in the bedding plants there that have been its staple for more than three decades--petunias, marigolds, pansies, begonias, zinnias.

Coast is by no means alone in its move.

In light of increasing costs of land and water in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Santa Barbara counties, much of the state’s nursery business is being transplanted to Ventura County, where agricultural land is not cheap by statewide standards but is still relatively inexpensive for the Southland.

“A lot of us have been pushed out by increasing land values,” said Burney Burton, Coast general manager. “We have nowhere to expand.”

Nursery stock--plants grown to be replanted in farms or backyards--has become the county’s fastest-growing commodity, averaging an increase of 15% each year at a time when the rest of the county’s agricultural commodities are fighting just to stay even, according to Earl McPhail, county agriculture commissioner.

Although there is little chance that poinsettia and hydroponic cucumbers will ever overtake the vast citrus groves that still produce the county’s largest commodity--lemons--local experts say Ventura, of all the counties, is poised to become the state’s largest producer of nursery stock within 10 years.

Thus, if California remains top-seeded as the country’s top nursery-stock producer, Ventura County would be the hot petunia of the nursery world.

“Eventually, we’ll be the leading county in the whole country in nursery stock, both in terms of the number of plants produced and dollar value,” said McPhail.

Monrovia Moving

He points to the pending relocation of Monrovia Nursery of Azusa, the nation’s second-largest nursery. Monrovia plans to uproot its headquarters during the next five to seven years and move to Somis, where the company has already acquired 350 acres and is seeking up to 150 acres more, says company president Robert Moore.

“It’s getting to be city down here,” he complained from Monrovia’s San Gabriel Valley office.

Jack Wick, executive director of the California Assn. of Nurserymen in Sacramento, stops short of McPhail’s prediction, pointing out that Ventura “has a ways to go” before becoming No. 1. But he agrees that Monrovia’s move will definely stack the deck in Ventura’s favor.

“They’re a huge factor,” he says. “They represent a $30-to-$40-million increase. That will jump Ventura’s figures fast.”

Los Angeles County has long been the capital of the country’s nursery-stock production and still accounts for $121 million of the state’s $786 million traffic in sod, ornamental trees and bedding plants.

Last year, nursery production in Ventura County increased by nearly 40%, to $54 million, making the county the fifth-largest producer of nursery stock in the state. Just the year before, Ventura had ranked eighth statewide, Wick said.

From Somis to Oxnard, Ventura is sprouting an entire spectrum of wholesale nursery stock, including sod, ornamental trees and bedding plants that later appear in supermarkets, hardware stores and retail nurseries across the country.

A Saticoy nurseryman even is experimenting with jojoba, a desert bush with purported curative properties, and a pair of farmers in La Conchita are growing potted bananas for suburban backyards.

Ventura’s primary attraction is that land costs $17,500 to $20,000 an acre--less than half the cost of property in Santa Barbara County’s Carpinteria, another popular nursery area.

Low water costs are another important draw. Relatively bountiful aquifers keep irrigation to an average cost of $78 an acre in Ventura County--among the lowest in the five leading nursery-stock counties, according to a study last year by the state Department of Water Resources. By contrast, agricultural water averages $300 an acre in San Diego County, the same study shows.

Then there are the natural attributes of a county where flowers bloom year-round. “It’s the gorgeous sunshine, the lack of smog and the nice soft rain,” said McPhail. Growers themselves cite the temperate coastal climate, where the lows average 40 to 45 degrees and the highs 70 to 75 degrees, and where humidity ranges from 45% to 50%.

Ideal Climate

Young plants and sensitive bioengineering techniques that clone thousands of seedlings from a single sliver of plant tissue cannot tolerate swings in temperature and may require up to 90% humidity. Maintaining moderate growing conditions even within the confines of a greenhouse can prove prohibitively costly in harsher environments.

Also in Ventura’s favor is its proximity to the established Southland markets and the county’s standard of living, nurserymen say.

“It’s much more difficult to get a Ph.D to move to Bakersfield or Ontario than Ventura,” said Ken Mattice, president of Armstrong Roses. The nation’s largest purveyor of rose plants, the company moved “the brains” of its operation--its headquarters and tissue-culture laboratory--from Ontario to a 25-acre plot in Somis in 1985. It still maintains 2,000 acres for more mature plants in Bakersfield.

For farmers faced with escalating land costs, the nursery business makes sense because of its high return per acre, McPhail points out. Whereas an acre of citrus nets $2,000, for instance, an acre of ornamental trees nets $3,000.

And nurserying can be more compatible than other agricultural operations with residential uses because it does not involve noisy farm equipment that kicks up dust.

The Migration Starts

Beginning in the 1960s, the nurserymen who had once been so prevalent in Los Angeles County began creeping south.

Orange County’s Fullerton and Irvine briefly served as centers of nurserying. Then Carpinteria in Santa Barbara County and towns in northern San Diego County beckoned with moderate coastal climates. Although nurserymen still describe those two areas as “hotbeds” of their trade, the Moorpark area and somewhere on the Oxnard Plain are the favorites of nurserymen seeking to relocate or expand.

“This is the only place left to go in the area,” says Steve Beimel, an owner of Mitsuwa Nursery in Moorpark, who has watched other nurserymen reach the same conclusion over the past 16 years.

When Mitsuwa, which grows 70 different varieties of bedding plants, relocated from Canoga Park in 1971, there were only three nurseries between Moorpark and Somis, Beimel says. Now he says he can count 15.

“Santa Barbara County is getting too expensive, and above Santa Barbara starts getting too cold,” said Beimel. “There’s a lot of land in San Bernardino and Riverside, but it’s too hot and smoggy. Orange County weather is fine, but there’s not much land left, and San Diego is pretty full up and getting expensive,” he said.

Otto & Sons Nursery, a 25-acre ornamental-tree nursery in Fillmore, typifies the influx that started slowly in the late 70s and gathered momentum within the past several years.

In 1977, Otto Klittich sold two acres of nursery stock in Chatsworth to developers who later subdivided the property. With the profits, he acquired 30 acres of lemon groves in Fillmore.

“Someday,” said their son, Scott, 28, “we’ll take over all the citrus.”

Water restrictions in Carpinteria prompted California Plant Co., a nursery headquartered there and specializing in chrysanthemums, to expand in Oxnard, where the nursery now owns 10 acres and is seeking to acquire another 10 acres. Even though a state water survey shows that Santa Barbara County has the cheapest agricultural water in five counties, water availability there is restricted to the level of previous uses.

“Any land you want to purchase is planted either in avocados or lemons, and you’re restricted to that amount, which is less than what you need” for nursery stock, said company president Jerry Van Wingerden.

And, with land costs less than in the other five counties, Ventura has another advantage. Growers say it is the one of the last places where a nursery grower can still start from scratch.

A Modest Start

Take Tom Dullam of Ventura. He started growing hydroponic cucumbers and cut flowers in a rented garage-sized nursery, buying used greenhouses as they became available and relocating them to larger and larger patches of leased land, where daisies provide the mainstay of his business.

“You can start in your backyard,” he said, “and within 10 to 12 years, you’ll have something that will pay you a living.”

Not all industry observers, however, believe Ventura’s future is quite as rosy as McPhail predicts. Dick Morey, publisher of Nursery Business Magazine, points out that the country’s second-largest producer, Florida, could close the $120.5-million gap that separates it from California and become the industry’s leader.

On the other hand, Harold Young, the editor of Pacific Coast Nurseryman Magazine, says that Los Angeles County may remain the state’s largest producer. Most of the nurseries there lease inexpensive land from utility companies, which reserve the right to force occupants to evacuate at a day’s notice for power-line repairs--effectively ruling out residential or other agricultural uses.

But, however Ventura County finishes in the nursery race, the local industry will have been changed forever.

The current boom has attracted such technologically sophisticated players as Twyford Plant Laboratories, the world’s second-largest bio-engineering firm.

At its Santa Paula subsidiary, scientists in lab coats tinker with plant tissue to speed the natural evolutionary process and build more disease-resistant varieties of familiar vegetables and flowers.

And Coast Nursery plans to build a multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art greenhouse that will use an energy-efficient infrared heating system that warms only the plants and their containers, not the air surrounding them.

Speaking of Ventura County’s green revolution, McPhail said: “It’s bound to make the nursery business more sophisticated.” Local nurserymen “may not be doing these innovations themselves, but they may be having somebody like Twyford doing it for them,” he says. “If they don’t, they’ll find themselves left behind.”