Agriculture’s Challenge: Getting Most Out of Less Land : THELMA MOSES

In many ways, Thelma Moses typifies urban Orange County: she’s young, college-educated, smartly dressed and career-oriented.

But there is one fundamental difference. Urban Orange County is dedicated to growth and land development. Moses, who grew up in Orange County and has never lived on a farm, is dedicated to agriculture.

Since graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1983 with a degree in agricultural education, Moses, now 27, has been manager of the Orange County Farm Bureau.

Her office, tucked away in a corner office in a small commercial building near downtown Santa Ana, is devoid of farm mementos--no paintings of big red barns on the wall, no scythes or plowshares leaning in the corners.

But her desk is full of paper work relating to farming and farming causes.

As farm bureau chief, the Fullerton native--whose grandparents grew walnuts in Orange County, citrus in Riverside and, finally, avocados in San Diego County--is the chief voice of agriculture here.

She is political lobbyist, public affairs officer and publicist for Orange County’s farmers, ranchers, orchardists and nurserymen. The bureau, Moses says, has about 400 members, representing about 70% of the farmers in the county. In all, about 600 growers and ranchers work some 62,000 of Orange County’s 500,000 acres of land.

The Farm Bureau, founded in 1919, has been grappling with change for more than two decades in Orange County.

And the local farm community has given a good account of itself, maintaining agriculture as one of the major industries in the county--nearly $260 million in gross sales last year--even as its ranks continually shrink.

In this recent interview with Times staff writer John O’Dell, Moses discusses the problems, the triumphs, the past and the future of agriculture in Orange County.

Q: What does a farm bureau do in a rapidly urbanizing county like this?

A: We do a lot of public relations. We try to educate people that there still is a great deal of agriculture left in the county despite the fact that it is not highly visible anymore.

Farmers typically are thought of as the guy on the tractor. In Orange County, certainly there are those who do the tractor thing, but we’ve changed the face of agriculture here. We are more land-intensive and more labor-intensive than elsewhere. We get a lot more out of the ground than we used to.

Q: What is the bureau involved in right now?

A: The labor situation.

Q: Are you are referring to the recent changes in federal immigration law? How will that affect farmers?

A: I think that there will be probably a crunch for labor once the strawberry season really gets under way. Right now there’s not too much of one because there aren’t huge crews out in the fields every day. But I think come March, April, May, there will be a push to get workers, and I think it’s going to be a difficult thing.

Q: Can’t farmers find help in the absence of undocumented workers?

A: In about 1982, the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided it was going to clean house in Orange County. INS agents swept all the fields, took all the illegals out and said, “Hey! There are plenty of people in Orange County who need work, and you growers have to stop hiring people that are taking away jobs from our folks. Hire these Americans who need work.” And the growers said “OK, we’ll do that.” I guess the INS helped get people to go out and work in the fields, but after one day, most of them said, “Listen, I’m not going to do that--I’m going to go back to the streets and I’m not going to do that.”

Q: Why?

A: It’s very hard work, and that’s not to say that you’re taking advantage of Mexican nationals. They are willing to work and they’re not ashamed to work, and work hard. But we have gotten to where we’re very soft, and we don’t want to work for our money, thank you. So you can’t expect--it’s sad--but you can’t expect regular old American people to work for their money if they really have to work for it.

Q: You were talking about the situation in 1982. Is that still true today?

A: Oh, yeah. You couldn’t pay me enough to go out and pick strawberries.

Q: But then you don’t need to. Are there still ongoing efforts to recruit from the legal work force?

A: Sure. There is no grower in this county who would prefer to hire an illegal over a legal worker. None. Not one. All of them would like to have a completely legal work force. They’re not going to have to worry, and the workers aren’t going to have to worry, about someone coming through and taking off the workers in the middle of a peak harvest season. And that’s not to say that everyone in Orange County hires illegals. But when you have to have the work, you have to have it. It’s not like a factory where you could shut down if you had to. If you don’t go out and pick strawberries when they are ready, then they’ll rot in the field. There are some provisions for perishable agriculture in the new law, but I don’t know how effective they’re going to be, so it will be interesting to wait and to see what happens.

Q: Doesn’t the law basically reinstitute something along the lines of the old bracero program?

A: Right. It’s called the H2A program. A grower can apply for a certain number of foreign workers if he can show that he advertised for help and can’t get citizens and legal aliens to do it. But you have to give 30-days’ notice, and that’s difficult. If it suddenly gets hot, you may need them tomorrow and not next week. Or if it turns cold, you won’t need them in 30 days, but they’ll show up and here they all are and you have to provide housing and you’ve got to pay them and they can’t work.

Q: What are farmers and the Farm Bureau doing to alleviate the situation?

A: Well, we’re working very closely with an organization that’s called ALFA, which means Alien Legalization for Agriculture. It was put together by the State Farm Bureau and Western Growers and Farmers League and the Grape and Treefruit League and some of the major agricultural entities in the state. We have an ALFA office in our office here. We’re working very closely with them to try to get workers legalized. Our growers are working with their people, bringing them in. They have a trailer that they take out to job sites when there are a lot of workers, and they help them with their paper work and getting all their medical things done so that there will be a legal work force out there and available.

Q: Come July we have a new minimum wage in California of $4.25 an hour. How much of a problem will that become?

A: I think that’s going to impact the price of food. Plain and simple, that’s what’s going to happen.

Q: Will it have a greater impact on the consumer than the farmer?

A: It will impact the farmer first, because it will be difficult to pass that cost along all at once. But eventually, they will be able to. Agricultural workers are paid basically on a piece rate and they already can make a lot of money. Historically, people have thought that workers are not paid very well--that they get like $1.25 a day or something, but that’s not at all true. Growers have to pay the minimum wage, but a good worker can make $5 or $6 or $7 an hour because of piecework rates.

Q: Just what does the county’s agricultural community consist of?

A: The No. 1 agricultural industry in the county is the nursery business. It is worth about $125 million. Strawberries in the county obviously are the second gross value crop and the No. 1 edible crop in the county. We get about 30 tons to the acre of strawberries here, which is a substantial increase over virtually anywhere else. The national average is about 22 tons.

And oranges are still very viable here. They were the third largest cash crop in 1986 with a value of $64 million, but production keeps going down.

Celery was No. 4, at $5.5 million, and avocados were the fifth-largest crop, worth $5.3 million. We grow some row crops, like celery and asparagus, but we’ve really gone into things that are high money and very, very labor- and land-intensive.

Q: How about livestock? Orange County used to have a very large dairy industry, for instance. And it used to have a very large poultry industry. Do we have much of that anymore?

A: No, we don’t. And the way that I explain that to people who ask me why is to ask how often they have stood next to a wet cow or a wet chicken--and whether they liked the smell. As people have moved into the county, livestock has been forced out. There’s not one dairy in Orange County.

Q: There still are some beef cattle operations in Orange County, but just a few years ago, the Irvine Co. announced it was getting out of that business. How much cattle ranching still goes on here and for how much longer?

A: Well, virtually all the cattle now are raised on land the rancher leases, predominantly from the Irvine Co. and some from Rancho Santa Margarita. But those animals are on land that is slated for future development. They are here now because the landowner said, “Well, we don’t have anything better to do with it, so let’s put some cows out there and get a little rental income from it.” But they’re going to be gone one of these days, replaced by houses.

Q: What is the typical Orange County farmstead? Are we talking about 100 acres or 5 acres?

A: Both of those, and everything in between. There’s nothing typical about it. We have the Irvine Co. that has thousands of acres that are farmed. And we have people who have five or 10 acres and are doing very well with that.

Q: We hear a lot about how difficult it is for farmers in the Midwest, farmers with sizable acreage, to make a go of it nowadays. So how can someone maintain a viable agribusiness on five or 10 acres of land?

A: It works in Orange County because the growers have very good cash crops and a very good market.

Q: Is the typical farm in the county economically sound, with the people who farm it making a living? Or do we have farmers in Orange County who are still trying to pay off their debts from three and four years ago?

A: We still have growers that have cash flow problems. We still have growers that have outstanding debts. We weren’t hit as hard here as the Midwest; we didn’t have the severity of economic crisis. But there was an economic crunch, and I would say there probably still is one. Last year, for example, the berry farmers particularly were hurt very badly by frost, and this year, with the rains and cold, it isn’t looking real good either. But farmers by nature are gamblers. They have to be because there are so many factors that they have no control over.

Q: The weather isn’t the only reason that we’ve had financial crises in the agricultural world. What are the other reasons?

A: That could be a real involved answer. But the short version, I think, is that a lot of it is economics, trading balances, protectionism, the up-and-coming nature of some of the South American countries in their ability to produce agricultural commodities at much less cost than we can.

Q: Where does most of the produce that’s grown in Orange County end up? Is it consumed here?

A: No. A lot of the strawberries are consumed here. But the first berries of the season, when we get berries as early as Christmastime like we did last year, those berries are shipped off to Eastern markets because that’s where the grower and the brokers get the money for them. They were getting $24 a tray from East Coast markets last winter.

And the Valencia oranges grown here are very desirable in Pacific Rim areas, so a lot of them go to Singapore, Hong Kong and those kinds of areas. I’d guess that probably 80% or so of the citrus that’s grown here is exported. The people there prefer thin-skinned, juicy oranges like the Valencia. They love them over there, and that’s what they prefer and they pay a premium for them.

Q: How does the economic food chain work?

A: About 33 cents of your dollar eventually gets to the grower, I believe. The rest of it goes to everybody else: to the trucker, the packer, the broker and the retailer.

Q: If I came in tomorrow and told you I’d really like to become a farmer in Orange County, what would I have to be able to do and to know in order to make it?

A: The days of the farmer being some guy that gets out there on the tractor and is oblivious to what’s going on outside his own little world are gone. These guys now are very astute businessmen--they have to be because they study bottom lines just like anyone else and they make cuts accordingly. And it’s real important that they have a handle on all the aspects of the business that they’re involved in. Farming is a business, it’s not just a neat sideline and it’s not just a nice family operation. I think that the only way growers--certainly the only way that growers in this county--can survive is if they have very, very keen business minds.

Most of the farms here are computerized. They keep track of what they grow and what it costs to grow it and how much it sells for and what the weather patterns have been and what people are buying in the markets. And they use that information to plan for the future.

Q: How fickle is consumer demand? Do tastes change? Is everybody going to be in the broccoli business someday? Or will we see acres of kohlrabi fields?

A: I think there’s probably a lot of consumer impact on what is grown, and when. But you also have to remember that marketing plays a big part in helping the consumer decide what to demand. A perfect case in point is the raisin industry, which had been in the dumps until it pulled out the Claymation raisins that are dancing across your TV. Now everybody is running out and buying raisins and the raisin industry is smiling all the way to the bank. Now, probably if they were trying to make kohlrabi real attractive, that would be a difficult thing. But I think consumer demand can be influenced.

People in the Midwest, for instance, don’t know what avocados are. So the Calavo (California avocado growers cooperative) growers hired a new manager three years ago, and he has turned that situation around. A lot of people there would get a hard avocado and they’d look at it and they’d try to bite into it like a pear--well, you do that and you are never going to eat another avocado. You’re going to get over that avocado thing real quick. So Calavo took on a campaign to educate people in the Midwest, and now avocados are selling there.

Q: Are growers in Orange County getting into other kinds of high-yield crops? Newer, more faddish things, if you will? Raddiccio, oriental vegetables, things like that?

A: I think you will probably see more and more of that in agriculture in general. That’s not to say Orange County will or will not get on that bandwagon, but I would think that’s a possibility. But right now I don’t see too much of that. As far as I know, we don’t do baby vegetables and we don’t play too much to the nouvelle cuisine and things. Although probably someone will read this and say, “I do that, and I’m right here, what’s wrong with you?”

Q: Are young people coming into the business in Orange County?

A: We don’t have a real large number of younger people--kids graduating from high school and aiming to take over from their fathers--we don’t have too many of those. Most of the farmers in the county, I’d say, would probably be the 35, 40 and up.

Q: People who grew up in it?

A: For the most part, yes.

Q: If their progeny don’t follow in their footsteps, then what happens to farming in Orange County?

A: I think the growing will move somewhere else. And because of that, we all may lose. Other areas don’t have the same kind of conditions that we have here as far as weather and the productivity of the land, so it will take the same or more cost and effort to produce fewer crops.

Q: If that is the case, then why would agriculture move out of the county?

A: Typically, any place the climate is good for growing, it is good for people. And when the people move in, the agriculture has no choice but to move out. I think Orange County is a prime example of that. And what happened here 20 years ago is now happening in Ventura County and in San Diego County. Growers there are now fighting the same fires and battles that we fought here years ago, and I think that’s inevitable. It sounds defeatist, but agriculture in Orange County has pretty much leveled off now. We’re going to see it stay probably about the same for a few years. But eventually the downward trend is going to pick up again.

Q: So when does the Orange County farm become a museum exhibit?

A: I think there will probably always be some agriculture in the county--at least for the foreseeable future. You can’t possibly, in a 10-year period, for example, get rid of all the agriculture and build up office space and condominiums. It won’t happen; you just can’t build that quickly, for one thing. That’s good, I guess. But I think eventually agriculture in the county is just really going to be very, very diminished and it’s not going to be the force that it is now.

Q: Is that good, bad or just progress?

A: I think it’s just progress. I think we would be playing the ostrich if we tried to ignore that it was coming.