Ear Ye, Ear Ye : Corn Nuts Making a Mad Dash to Kinoshita Farms to Harvest a Sweet Sensation in San Juan Capistrano
Astronomers calculate that summer this year will officially begin at 8:57 p.m. next Monday, June 20.
But in San Juan Capistrano, Shigeru (Shig) Kinoshita makes the call as a matter of tradition. He has farmed the same 56 acres since 1955, and he defers to his corn. Last week when he saw the silk on the cornstalks turn brown and felt the ears filling out, he went to his answering machine to record the announcement:
“Hello, this is Kinoshita Farms. No one’s in the office right now, but please leave your name and number and we will return your call. Strawberries are still available, but starting June 8th, (here it comes) we will have our corn. Thank you for calling. Please wait for the beep.”
That Wednesday morning, people in cars, on bicycles and on foot flocked to the farm’s tiny, archetypical roadside stand, which has stood near the corner of Alipaz Street and Camino del Avion for 10 summers.
The sign on the stand said opening time would be 9 a.m., but the regular customers knew better. By 7, a line waited for the corn that was on its way from the field out back. At sunrise, Kinoshita’s pickers had begun harvesting about 100 crates of corn--6,000 ears for sale at 25 cents each.
It is white corn, the super-sweet variety, and fresh, which makes it sweeter. “It’s good. It’s really good,” said Shirley Nisbet of San Juan Capistrano, one of the earliest in line, as she has been for many summers. “It’s worth waiting for.”
It must have been, for only 90 minutes after sunrise, Nisbet was waiting with six others in line. “Is there anyone here not waiting for corn? I can help you,” called Miyeko Kinoshita, Shig Kinoshita’s wife. But no one stepped forward.
The first crates of corn arrived at the stand by 7:20, and by noon, all had been sold.
John Tarquinio, who had left Mission Viejo at 6:30 to be early in line, dumped two crates of ears into his car trunk. “I give some to a neighbor here, a neighbor there, and by the time I get home I only wind up with a couple dozen,” he explained.
‘I’d Go Farther’
Joan Walske had driven in from San Clemente, “and I’d go farther if I had to,” she said.
Jim Thomas of San Juan Capistrano said he has been buying corn from Kinoshita for 10 years, during which roadside stands have become nearly extinct in Orange County. He said having a real farm produce stand as close to home as a supermarket is an incredible bit of good luck, and he dreads the day when economic reality catches up with Kinoshita’s farm.
“This land’s worth millions, millions, and he’s still farming,” Thomas said.
Kinoshita, 53, admitted he loves farming and has worked at nothing else. His father, who owned farmland at the edge of Disneyland when it was being built, viewed the amusement park as an intrusion rather than an opportunity to sell out at a large profit. He traded his land for the farmland the family now owns in San Juan Capistrano.
But Kinoshita said he would like to develop the family’s farm and retire. He would have done so by now had it not been for City Hall, he said. Unlike other cities that rezoned their farms for housing and shopping centers, San Juan Capistrano zoned some farmland, including Kinoshita’s, as permanent farmland. Thus the farm is bounded by expensive houses and within sight of hillside mansions but forbidden to join in the development profits.
Finding a Buyer
Kinoshita’s land also contains the city’s first frame house--a two-story farmhouse built in 1876--and city officials are determined that it be preserved. While the city has granted zoning on 10 acres for “institutional” use, such as schools, churches and retirement homes, finding buyers for such developments “is very difficult,” Kinoshita said.
“To tell you the truth, I am getting tired of farming. It’s a tremendous economic burden. We’re not losing money, but we’re not making any. It’s very tough.”
The farm grows a number of crops, many of them trucked to the produce market in Los Angeles. But growing corn would be a losing endeavor “if you didn’t have your own outlet,” Kinoshita said. “We’re perfectly set up for it. You sell it fresh and at a moderate cost and people will come. And they do.”
The stand, open only on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, provides income at a good time of the year, filling in after the strawberry crop is exhausted, and the corn itself “builds up the soil,” he said.
“We’ll probably keep going for five more years. I don’t know, there’s a combination of things,” Kinoshita said. “It just comes out to economics.”
