Farmers Caught in the Big Squeeze : Agriculture: Rising land values and development are forcing--sometimes enticing--many North County growers and dairy owners to pull up stakes and move.

Mike Horwath believes a farmer must be optimistic by nature, yet his words are tinged with fatalism when he considers the future of his serene, 155-acre rhubarb farm in Valley Center, north of Escondido.

“You can only put up with complaints, trash dumping, trespassing and urbanization for so long before you give up,” Horwath said, as his black dog galumphed around the yard. “Let’s face it, you can’t stop it.”

He’s been through it all before and knows that the arrival of new homes, kids on motorcycles, littering and the newcomers’ disregard for the delicacy of agriculture can spell the eventual doom of a farm.

Horwath, who at age 40 is among the county’s younger farmers, belongs to a stubborn and resourceful breed who so far have survived the region’s lightning development. It hasn’t been easy.

From crop farmers like Horwath to flower growers along the North County coast to inland dairymen, rising land values and development are forcing--sometimes enticing--many to pull up stakes and move.

Sometimes they push farther east into San Diego County, a more remote area but where the climate and soil aren’t always as rich. Others plan to leave for good, for places like San Joaquin Valley, where land is cheaper and water more plentiful.

“Urbanization causes a lot of problems, so people just keep moving,” said Wendy Benz, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau. “But how far east can you go? There’s not a lot of water.”

For now, though, Horwath figures he’s gone far enough.

He came to San Diego in 1972 and, with his father and uncle, farmed tomatoes, squash, cabbage, lima beans and other crops on 1,400 acres in what was then the sprawling lands of Otay Mesa.

But Horwath could plainly see the rapid development of nearby San Ysidro and knew that time was short before Otay Mesa would be teeming with subdivisions, shopping centers and traffic.

“One of my first jobs was to find a new place to farm because we saw the handwriting on the wall in Otay Mesa,” he said.

Sure enough, before long there came the predictable collision of lifestyles as homes sprouted up around Horwath’s acreage. And, in the meanwhile, Horwath’s water bill for irrigation soared during the summer, not unusual as farmers without wells in semi-arid San Diego County rely on water imported hundreds of miles from Northern California and the Colorado River.

Between development and high water costs, “farming was being squeezed out of Otay Mesa,” Horwath recalled.

Next, he leased property and farmed in the San Pasqual Valley southeast of Escondido until a dispute with the landowner, the city of San Diego, prompted him to buy 155 acres in Valley Center in March, 1989.

On his land, sometimes a bird is the only sound in the lulls between the ruffling of the breeze. His dog wanders around, gladly accepting attention and not even minding when he is required to display his black tongue for a visitor.

A house serves as the business office for TMY Farms, and out front are irrigated rows of green-topped, reddish-stalked rhubarb, the crop Horwath is banking on to provide him and his family with a future.

The weather is good here for rhubarb and, unlike before, Horwath is supplied by his own well water.

The farmer agrees politely when told that rhubarb doesn’t exactly enjoy a passionate following. However, he’s wise far beyond that narrow observation.

Like the new wave of farmers, he has learned to switch to specialty crops because the big traditional crops in San Diego are declining as prime land is lost to development.

“San Diego was very well known for its tomato crops,” said Horwath. That was in the days before the farms “were mostly split up and developed.”

Annual crop reports from the county’s Department of Agriculture help tell the story. Ten years ago, 5,190 acres of tomatoes were harvested, a figure that dropped to 2,743 acres by 1988.

Production of strawberries, another key crop in San Diego County, has faltered as the amount of harvested acreage increased by a modest 188 acres from 1980 to 1988. That was after strawberries went up 365 acres from 1970 to 1980.

Even 20 years ago, then-county Agricultural Commissioner James Moon had a vision of the future.

In his annual report, Moon noted that, although agricultural acreage in 1970 was half what it was in 1950, the availability of water for irrigation would make high-yield, high-value crops on smaller farms more prevalent.

So, although tomatoes and strawberries may not be as bountiful as they once were, other crops such as avocados and flowers are flourishing on smaller farms. According to the Farm Bureau, today there are about 6,000 farms in the county, 70% with 9 acres or fewer.

Avocados were harvested from 10,380 acres in 1970 and 36,410 acres in 1988. During that time, acreage for nursery products and flowers went up from about 475 to 6,083 acres.

With less land available and needing a high-yield, marketable crop, Horwath followed the trend in this county toward specialty crops.

“We’re only one of two people in California to have the rhubarb roots,” he said. The other is in Santa Maria.

The strain of rhubarb roots Horwath grows were developed in the 1920s, and he acquired the roots in 1984.

Rhubarb is continually harvested from October to June, and when his plants mature in a few more years, he expects to pluck up to 12,000 pounds an acre.

He sells his rhubarb locally to Big Bear and to a large produce market in Oakland. Other accounts are situated in Salt Lake City and Kansas, and Horwath hopes to begin his own rhubarb shipping business this fall.

Migrating inland may be only a matter of time for Mellano & Company, growers of iris, daisies, baby’s breath and other flowers on 150 acres in San Luis Rey, between Oceanside and Fallbrook.

“We came here 20 some years ago from L.A. because our nursery became surrounded by houses,” said Mike Mellano, whose family is once again trying to keep its operation stable in the face of development. “We didn’t think it would grow this fast here.”

Land is available in eastern North County, but flowers are best suited to the gentle coastal climate that serves as a natural greenhouse.

“As you go farther inland, it’s colder in the winter and warmer in the summer,” said Mellano. That requires costly air conditioning and heating equipment to regulate greenhouse temperatures for flowers, he said.

And the inland soil is less nutritious for certain flower varieties, he said.

Bob Echter, co-owner of Foxpoint Farms in Encinitas, whose fields of bright flowers resemble a Monet painting, believes the exodus of flower farmers from North County has been slow.

“We’ve seen a number close down and a number move inland, but it’s not a great number,” he said. Still, “we’ll continue to see this slow movement.”

Echter and his partner lease 35 acres, and he feels cautiously optimistic that they have plenty of years left there. Even so, “at times, I would like to put in a high-cost greenhouse, but I’m concerned about the longevity of being here,” he said.

Although development is causing many farmers to move, not everybody in agriculture is dour about change.

For Arie De Jong, the slow but relentless approach of development near his family’s 150-acre dairy in San Marcos has brought an opportunity he can’t resist. After all, farmers are businessmen.

His land has become worth so much that he intends to sell and relocate his operation to the San Joaquin Valley. “What is happening, the property is just getting too valuable to be grazing cows on,” he said.

As he speaks, condo projects stick up like pinkish clumps of vegetables across the street from the De Jong family’s Hollandia Dairy, the county’s largest. Cars buzz along Mission Road past Jong’s 1,000 milk cows.

This juxtaposition of a dairy farm and suburban growth constitutes a strange vision contrasted with with the way things used to be.

The De Jong family has produced milk for more than a century. In 1949, they came to America from Holland, started a dairy in Poway, and scraped together the then-lordly sum of $5,000 to buy a place in Escondido.

They relocated to San Marcos in 1955, a community so sparse it “was nothing but dirt roads,” he recalls. The family prospered. Hollandia now has 200 employees and processes 200,000 gallons of milk a week.

Besides their own milk cows, “we buy all the milk produced in San Diego County and process and distribute it,” said De Jong, a man obviously proud of his family’s attainment in a new land.

Hollandia provides milk to 400 schools, military bases and hospitals in San Diego County. Other family members have dairies in the San Joaquin Valley, Oregon, Arizona and, soon, in New Mexico.

All the while, the world around the family has been changing in San Marcos until, finally, the moment for a critical decision arrived.

The city formed a special assessment district, which included the dairy, to raise money to widen Mission Road from two to six lanes, place utilities underground and make other improvements. The move put the dairy in a hot location for future projects.

With the dairy land worth so much for development, De Jong reasoned that, “from an economic standpoint, it is more feasible to bring the cows to the feed than bring the feed to the cows.”

So, after 40 years in North County, the family plans to take its operation to Hanford, Visalia or Tulare, where water is more plentiful and land is cheaper.

“The problem is, it’s become so urbanized (in San Marcos), you have liability if a cow gets loose. It’s just not practical to run this large an operation in so urban an area,” De Jong said.

Within five or 10 years, De Jong believes his dairy land will be covered with houses, condos, commerce and industry. The family hopes to help win development permits, then sell to a builder.

Although De Jong has accepted the inevitable, farmer Horwath is busily looking forward to his first major rhubarb crop in October.

But, even as he labors, he is wary of the familiar signs that growth is coming to Valley Center.

This area, about 10 miles north of Escondido and south of Rainbow, now has a moratorium on new sewer connections that has limited growth. But one faction of property owners is supporting a drive to get sewer service for a 5.5-square-mile area that’s zoned for up to 10,000 people.

Already, there are hints of Valley Center’s destiny. On Old Castle Road, which leads to Valley Center from Interstate 15, is a country club and golf course. The valley is dotted with homes on large lots. A sign advertises a gate-guarded community of luxury homes that is on the way.

A few miles up the road is Horwath’s farm, which has single-family homes at the rear property line. “There’s more being built every day,” said Horwath.

Things haven’t yet gotten as unpleasant as they did in Otay Mesa, where there was trash dumping, trespassing and tenseness with newcomers. Yet the signs are unmistakable. “We’ve had problems with kids on motorcycles running over the irrigation pipes,” Horwath said.

He seems a prudently upbeat man who says with all the variables, from fickle weather to the economy, “you have to be an optimist to be a farmer.”