Through an Orange (Industry), Darkly : Television: KCET chronicles the life and eventual death of the citrus business in Orange and Los Angeles counties.

KCET’s documentary “The Big Orange” begins with a close-up of an orange, suspended like a strange planet against a forbidding horizon. Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” which charged the early scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” serves as background music. Then there’s a shift to a sunny grove where gray-haired Ed Pankey, looking wistful, holds an orange gently.

The first moments are amusing and ironic, but the shot of Pankey sets the tone for Channel 28’s look at the fate of the Southern California--and especially the Orange County--citrus industry through the 20th Century. Through Pankey and his family, who grew oranges in Tustin for three generations, we learn of the growers’ history--their ups, downs and all arounds.

“The Big Orange,” narrated by Eddie Albert and the third part in KCET’s “Los Angeles History Project” series chronicling life in the region, airs Thursday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 6 p.m. (Officials at Orange County PBS station KOCE Channel 50 in Huntington Beach said they have no plans to air the series or this episode.)

The program tells us--via Pankey’s recollections, his family’s home movies and archival footage of the times--that raising oranges was a mean business; one, in fact, that required several years of nurturing before any profits might blossom.

“One of the things that surprised us about this story was that, despite the boosterism in getting people to come out to sunny California and get wealthy with an orange grove, there was great difficulty in making it all work,” series producer Arthur Barron said in an interview.

“There usually wasn’t a penny (made) for five years. (It was) a demanding and hard way to make a life.”

The hardships that Ed’s father, John Henry Pankey, experienced after he leased 30 acres from the Irvine Co. in the early 1930s were typical. They ran the gamut from waiting for the trees to reach fruit-bearing maturity (at least four years) to water shortages to labor problems.

To keep some money coming in, the Pankeys and other Southern California growers usually planted quick-maturing crops such as beans and harvested them while waiting for the great orange bonanza. But once the oranges came in, there were profits to be made.

“The Big Orange” notes that from 1930 to 1948, the boom years, citrus agriculture in the Southland accounted for about 40% of California’s economy. The industry had $200 million in profits in 1938; Los Angeles County had the distinction of being the top orange producer in the nation, with Orange County second.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in reaching this prosperity, Ed Pankey recalled, was getting water to the groves.

“Oranges are a particularly thirsty crop,” he said, pointing out that the fruit requires about 36 to 40 inches of rainfall a year and Southern California usually gets around 12 inches.

“Water is life and death for agriculture . . . and Southern California is considered a desert area,” he said.

But the solution came with the Los Angeles aqueduct, which abundantly filled the need. “The Big Orange” shows home movies of the Pankeys’ naked children and their friends paddling happily about in a narrow stream near the groves to illustrate that things were looking up.

The next headache actually came in finding customers. It wasn’t so bad locally, but to make the good money the growers had to export oranges in big numbers.

The program goes back before the Pankeys arrived in Orange County to show that Easterners in the early 1900s saw oranges as an exotic fruit, much like a mango. Oranges were expensive and could only be bought for special occasions, like Christmas.

To overcome this perception, the growers formed co-ops to advertise and market the fruit as a populist delight. The first of these, the California Fruit Growers Exchange (formed in 1893), eventually became Sunkist. The exchange came up with the immortal slogan “California for Wealth, Oranges for Health.”

Once the market was found, there were other worries. Fickle, unpredictable weather changes could ruin a crop, as it did with the Pankeys on a few occasions. “A whole year’s activity could be completely wiped out in mere hours,” Pankey said.

Labor unrest was also an issue, particularly during the mid-1930s when Mexican workers who made up the bulk of the labor force protested terrible working conditions in Orange and Los Angeles counties. They were repressed, often brutally, by police and the National Guard.

Two workers who remembered those days said the migrant pickers’ lives were cruel, especially for children. One noted that the youngsters would carry 60-pound bags of oranges all day to earn about $36 a month. It wasn’t much better for their parents, who labored long hours for small wages and without medical care or other benefits.

“The Big Orange” also tries to bring some perspective to why the citrus industry boom eventually went bust. Southern California changed from an agricultural area to an industry-based economy during World War II, after which people flocked in. With the newcomers came a need for housing tracts, freeways and more industry, all of which demanded lots of land. There was only one place to get it: from the growers.

At the show’s end, narrator Albert notes that during the orange heyday, “the scent was overpowering . . . but now the citrus groves are gone. Now steel and glass form the harvest.”

Barron, in having Pankey describe to him what the region was and what it is now, said he felt “a sense of poignancy” in doing a piece on how everything has changed.

“You feel loss for the way of life that was lost, a way of life that was bountiful and nurturing. Now it’s been replaced by industry and mini-malls . . . it’s a loss of community.”

“The Big Orange” airs Thursday at 8 and Saturday at 6 p.m. on KCET Channel 28.