A Peach of a Dream Is Dying in the Desert

It cost Kai Drengler $500,000 to coax his piece of the Mojave Desert into blooming with peach trees.

Now he is spending more money to destroy his 20,000 trees. Standing in his hillside orchard, Drengler silently watched a hired hand use a heavy chain and a tractor to yank a tree out by its roots. Scores of peach trees lay scattered on the parched ground.

Asked how he felt, the 71-year-old chiropractor motioned as if to wipe a tear off each cheek.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

Peaches were supposed to save the Antelope Valley’s dying agriculture industry, which had been shoved aside by new homes. Dozens of eager investors--most of them city folk--lined up in the mid-1980s to buy hundreds of thousands of trees, and what they thought was their ticket to prosperity.

But today, peach farmers aren’t talking about a renaissance, they are talking survival. They say wind, frost and bad advice from the peach’s No. 1 promoter have made it tough for the gentleman farmers to break even. Some are selling their orchards, while others tired of working long hours are neglecting their trees. Weeds grow in a few unkept groves where trees need to be pruned and thinned.

Still, most farmers are hanging on--banking their hopes on the “Last Chance” peach, a ruby-colored fruit that everyone agrees is scrumptious.

Meanwhile, the elderly man who single-handedly started the peach craze left the desert more than two years ago and is selling his orchard.

“Everything was wrong about it,” Gary Mork, a Los Angeles County agricultural inspector in the Antelope Valley, said of the peach boom. “The only thing that was right was they bought the land. They will make up whatever they lost on the land.”

“We were all ignorant coming into it,” acknowledged Jean Keenan, a real estate broker, who owns an orchard with her husband, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective. “We all believed it would be an overnight success. We are all adults, we knew that is not the way it happens.”

The novice farmers who bought peach saplings said they also foolishly bought into Jim Sprague’s tall tales. Sprague, a retired civil servant, had stumped his way across the valley extolling the virtues of the “Last Chance” peach with all the enthusiasm of new parents showing off baby pictures. He called it the Last Chance peach because it could be harvested late in the season and because Sprague considered it his last chance to make some real money.

“Who would ever have dreamed that an old frail man who weighed 90 pounds . . . wasn’t telling the truth?” asked Drengler, who now burns peach trees in the fireplace of his Danish-style farmhouse.

The Last Chance peach needed no thinning, no pruning, and hardly any water or space, Sprague insisted. On a promotional video--narrated by Mickey Rooney’s son--Sprague bragged that his peaches were so carefree, a farmer could spend part of his year relaxing in Hawaii.

Discovering the peach was serendipitous--it grew from a peach pit discarded in his back yard, Sprague told his audiences. The old man, who had learned the finer points of peach husbandry in high school, said that as he watched it grow he knew he was watering a fuzzy gold mine. He said he has a patent on the tree, but one critic who said he researched it found no record of it.

Farmers say the peach has not made any of them rich. They said they discovered the tree is like any other peach tree: it requires attention, water and space, and that has boosted the cost of maintaining their orchards.

Some farmers said they were forced to spend thousands of dollars to dig second wells when the trees soaked up far more water than Sprague had suggested. At least two farmers started removing every other tree because they were planted too close. Sprague had claimed that 680 trees could flourish in one acre, instead of the usual 109. Farmers also were surprised to find allegedly frost-free peaches dying in the cold air.

For the past two years, farmers have had to grumble to themselves about what they claim is the peaches’ inflated biography. In poor health, Sprague left the high desert.

From an apartment in Ontario, Calif., Sprague’s enthusiasm has not faded for the Last Chance peach, which he brags is “doing great.” Among the happy peach tree owners, Sprague said, is former President Ronald Reagan, who he said wrote a letter this spring to express delight with his two trees.

Sprague, who insisted that he never lied to farmers, didn’t seem concerned about criticism. He dismissed his detractors as people who only think they are experts.

“I’m not a bit afraid of my tree or my reputation,” said Sprague, who sticks by his original care instructions for the trees.

“If you leave it alone and leave it my way, you don’t spend any money on it,” he said. “You’ll ship just as many peaches.”

When Sprague first started peddling the trees, he encountered few cynics. Sales shot up seemingly overnight. In 1983, only 10 acres of Last Chance peaches existed, according to the state Bureau of Agriculture Statistics in Sacramento. But the acreage jumped 900% the next year, and by 1986 a total of 281 acres were planted in Last Chance peaches.

But the bust came just as quickly. In 1987, farmers planted only 10 new acres and in 1988 there were none at all. Before the bottom dropped out, Sprague estimates that 52 people invested in orchards in the Antelope Valley.

“They really had a super business or a potential for a super business, but they ran it into the ground,” said John Donovan, an auto-body shop owner turned peach farmer, who sports a deep tan and a Fu Manchu mustache. “They lied to people, they misrepresented what the trees would do. People just stopped buying trees.”

On paper, it appears that the peach farmers are making great gains. Last year, the Last Chance farmers sold 2 million pounds of peaches, according to the California Tree Fruit Agreement, a grower organization. In 1986, 282,677 pounds of the peach were sold.

But numbers don’t tell the story. The desert outside Lancaster, according to the experts, was the wrong place to grow peaches for a living. A sampling of farmers in the area showed that only one farmer made a profit, and for only one season.

Peaches have to be plentiful, good-looking and large for farmers to make money, said Steve Orloff, a state agronomist based in Lancaster. And growing peaches like that is not something the Last Chance farmers have been able to do frequently enough.

Some farmers have had trouble growing large pieces of fruit, which consumers prefer and which bring top dollar. And the valley’s fierce winds have bruised peaches, making them unmarketable in grocery stores. Getting the peach to produce the right blush also has been tricky for some.

Consumers prefer buying peaches that “are nice and red like a Christmas tree ornament,” Orloff said.

Today, the Green Tree Nursery in La Grange, Calif., is the only grower permitted by Sprague to sell his trees. About 15,000 saplings are sold each year to customers as far away as Pennsylvania and Florida.

Claude Martin, the sales coordinator for Green Tree, which specializes in selling fruit and nut trees to the agriculture industry, would like to see the Last Chance peach break into foreign markets. It’s a firm peach with a long shelf life, Martin said, and possesses the “best peachy flavor of any peach that is grown.”

As for Sprague’s claims, Martin warns that Last Chance peaches are not miracle fruit. The trees need to be nurtured like any other peach variety. But he declined to criticize the Last Chance disciple, saying, “I would like to see more people like Mr. Sprague, who is enthused about the fruit industry.”

Frank Jones, a bond trader from Ventura County, also finds it hard to criticize the peach’s cheerleader. Seeking a good investment, Jones accepted the advice of a banker and planted 3,000 trees in 1983. With the work overwhelming, he often couldn’t motivate himself to leave his house with an ocean view.

While peaches rotted on the ground, the value of his land soared, Jones said. He’s selling his property to a horse trainer who will circle the orchard with a track.

“The old guy was honest in a way,” Jones said. “He said, ‘Hey, this is my last chance to make a buck and I’m going to take advantage of it.’ That’s what he did.”

But Sprague isn’t ready to call it quits. When he moved to Ontario he smuggled in six Last Chance peach trees, which the landlady agreed to overlook. He is still nuts about peaches and he excitedly offered to share a secret. He has been developing a peach “bush” that he expects to patent and then sell.

“Who ever heard of a peach tree that is a bush?” Sprague asked. “This is a fantastic story! This is brand new.”

When some of the farmers back in the desert were told about Sprague’s latest project, most just shook their heads and laughed.

Said Harold Schnaidt, one of the original peach farmers, “I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole.”