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Watching the Slow Fade of Farm Empire With Deep Historical Roots : Changes: An Irvine Co. executive and farmer remembers the days before big-cash crops were the rule, and developers were king.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Pete Changala is a thoroughly modern farmer with a CB radio and a cellular phone in the dusty white Bronco in which he bounces over the ruts between orange trees on a warm afternoon.

Unlike most Irvine Co. executives, who tend to be a buttoned-down lot, he is wearing a plaid, short-sleeved shirt, knockabout pants and plain shoes. Out here away from the office the trees are festooned with oranges so heavy they’re starting to bend the branches: By the beginning of April, they’ll be ready to harvest.

Over the tops of the trees you can see the pastel tile rooftops of a subdivision. The vague whoosh of traffic on nearby Irvine Boulevard filters through the trees.

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Changala, 30, grew up on this ranch, the son of Basque farmers. He now is the director of the Irvine Co.’s agricultural division, overseeing the cultivation of more than 8,000 acres of fertile land--the remnants of parts of the great ranchos of the 18th Century.

There is still plenty of history on the Irvine Ranch. Changala shows a visitor the wrought-iron gate and curving drive lined with tall palm trees that once led to the Irvine family mansion.

It leads to nothing now. The house burned in the 1960s, and an avocado grove now stands there. The only other signs that land barons once lived here in splendor are a cracked concrete tennis court, a disused pool and a few barbecue pits.

Changala’s parents, who farmed here for 30 years, left in the late 1970s, about the same time the ranch’s crop mix began to change.

Farmers had begun showing up, bringing with them new crops like strawberries and bell peppers, high-priced fruits and vegetables that could make a farmer a fortune in a good year and leave him in ruin in a bad one.

Changala’s father, who was growing tomatoes for canneries, decided to move to the San Joaquin Valley. A big reason was that with the traffic and the houses sprouting like weeds around the farm, it was getting to be too much like a city.

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Eventually the Irvine Ranch moved over almost entirely to the big-cash crops. At the same time, the ranch cut its reliance on thirsty crops like watermelon, corn and chili peppers, which take a lot of water and don’t bring in as much cash.

That wasn’t the only change. In 1983, the last remaining family member with a big block of stock in the company--Joan Irvine Smith--agreed to sell to Newport Beach developer Donald L. Bren. Owning the land, which he is intent on developing fully, has made him a billionaire.

Changala, who went to Cal Poly Pomona to play baseball and wound up earning a degree in agricultural business, came back to the Irvine Ranch six years ago. As manager of the farming operations, he lives with his wife and four children in a house around the corner from the company’s small, one-story farm office.

While the development of ranchland continued, for a while using the new irrigation methods, the company actually managed to balance the loss of farmland by expanding onto the surrounding hillsides. It planted orchards on hills that are now shaggy with trees.

It’s a costly operation, however. The three-quarter-inch hoses that run the water up there are small, and the raw water from the Colorado River has to be filtered of shells and fish. Coyote pups sometimes chew up the plastic hoses on the hillsides.

But the Irvine Co. is likely to be in the farming business for some time. The company regards farming as an “interim” use of the land, until development is timely. And it is sensitive about its role: It worries that some people will decry the loss of farmland and that others will complain that agriculture takes too much water to make sense much longer in an urban area.

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Changala presides over this long, slow demise of the ranch he grew up on, and at times it seems to leave him a little sad.

“I know building houses is a lot more profitable,” he said. “But it’s what I knew growing up here. And there’s something about farming that’s enduring.”

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