Medfly Quarantine Puts Growers’ Livelihoods on the Line : Pest: Orange and grapefruit ranchers in Riverside County hope restrictions are lifted before harvest time, which is about three months away.

Slicing though an orange grove on Don Kraemer’s Riverside County ranch is an imaginary line that he has been told marks the boundary of the Mediterranean fruit fly quarantine zone the region’s farmers have long feared.

On one side of the line, Kraemer can harvest his crop of Valencia oranges and ship them anyplace in the world without a second thought.

Eight feet away, on the quarantined side, are crops he might have to grind into juice or sell for less than he would have liked.

“I can’t even pick an orange now and take it home,” said Kraemer, 54, whose home lies five minutes away, outside the quarantine area. “I’ve been working on a ranch since I was 12. I don’t even know what to do. I’ve never had to do this before.”

A day after a quarantine was slapped over 81 square miles around Woodcrest because of the discovery of a Medfly, farmers in this bountiful fruit-growing region are just beginning to adjust to the frustrating prospect of seeing their orchards become the latest battlegrounds in the war against the Medfly.

Urban dwellers in Los Angeles and Orange counties have lived with the pest for the last nine months, enduring repeated malathion sprayings, cars covered with sticky dots of pesticide and fears about malathion’s safety.

In Woodcrest, where bountiful orchards lie side-by-side with stark tract homes, farmers worry that they will not only have to face those problems but also the threat that the quarantine could disrupt this year’s harvest and cost them plenty.

“You always think this could only happen to someone else,” said Kraemer, who has farmed in the area for more than 20 years. “It’s a pretty sad moment.”

The quarantine, the first ever declared over a Southern California fruit-growing region, covers some of the most productive orange and grapefruit orchards in the Southland. Under the quarantine regulations, no fruit grown in a small core area of about one square mile will be allowed to leave the area unless it has been placed in cold storage or fumigated. In the rest of the zone, growers will be able to ship out their fruit by using cold storage, fumigation or the added option of repeatedly spraying their fields with malathion.

“We can stay in business,” Kraemer said. “At least through this year.”

The growers’ main worry is that Japan, the area’s largest and most lucrative market, will refuse to buy any fruit grown in the quarantine zone no matter what measures are taken to rid the crop of pests.

Larry Topham, who farms 1,000 acres of oranges and grapefruit in the area, said Japanese buyers pay top dollar for the very best fruit available--the tastiest, cleanest and most colorful.

But they also have been the strictest in reacting to pest infestations. According to Topham and other local growers, Japan was the only country last summer to place a quarantine on local grapefruit because of a beetle outbreak. The state hadn’t even declared a quarantine in that case.

“We took a beating,” he said. “They really play hardball.”

Topham said if Japan refuses to buy fruit from the area, growers will be able to market their fruit in the United States and other countries, although the price will be lower.

Yet even selling to domestic markets has its problems. Getting fruit out of the quarantine area by treating it with cold storage or fumigation is expensive. And the process can damage the fruit’s quality, further lowering the price.

Spraying orchards with malathion also is a hard choice. Topham, like most growers in the area, has virtually stopped spraying pesticides on his crops.

About 20 years ago, growers discovered that instead of using pesticides they could import beneficial insects into their orchards to prey on harmful pests. Over the years, the growers have developed a delicate ecology that has left their groves with fewer pests than at any time in the past.

Topham said some of his fruit orchards haven’t been sprayed with any pesticide in 15 years.

“You spray some malathion, and all that we’ve established could last about 20 minutes,” he said. “Here we are establishing a program that has reduced the amount of chemicals in the environment and now we have to go back to the program we had 20 years ago.”

The one saving grace to the quarantine is that harvest for Valencia oranges and grapefruit is still about three months away. If the state’s eradication program of spraying goes smoothly, the quarantine could be lifted in time for the harvest.

“That’s why everyone isn’t panicked yet,” said Jeff Gless, whose family operates the ranch where the Medfly was found. “If we can wait it out, nothing will hurt.”

On the other hand, if even a single fly is found in the summer, the quarantine could easily extend past August or September--the latest dates to harvest oranges and grapefruit.

“That would be the worst thing that could happen,” Gless said.