Cultures Clashing Down on the Farm : Agriculture: City refugees object to dust, noise, smells and pesticides. Growers are fighting back with laws that warn the newcomers about country ways.

Just as harvests follow planting, there is something predictable about the reaction of city folks when they move out to farm country in search of cheaper housing--they complain.

Tractors creep along at 5 m.p.h. and clog roads at the height of the commute. Low-flying crop-dusters buzz at dawn and spray who-knows-what near back yards. And there are the flies, dust and odors of farm life.

But as expanding suburbs swallow up more tomato fields and peach orchards in the Central Valley, farmers are flexing their political muscle to pass laws that warn refugees from the city to accept country life or leave.

Here in Stanislaus County, the Board of Supervisors is set to decide this month whether to require real estate agents to inform potential home buyers that farming is still king. The proposed law, and another pending in Yolo County, would go a step further than the so-called “right to farm” laws that have spread across most of rural California.

“Farmers are feeling squeezed,” said Jan Ennenga, executive director of the Stanislaus Farm Bureau. Ennenga is a leading sponsor of that fast-growing county’s proposed ordinance, which seeks to shield farmers from neighbors who don’t seem to realize, as he said, that “farming is dirty.”

Already, right-to-farm laws that shield growers from some lawsuits and give them immunity from complaints have been adopted by the state Legislature and 25 farm counties. A reaction to fast population growth in rural California, the ordinances began to spring up in the 1980s as a defense against litigious arrivals from high-priced housing markets in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California.

“They want what they perceive as a rural atmosphere--what they see on TV,” Stanislaus Agricultural Commissioner Keith Mahan said of the new residents in towns such as Patterson, Newman and Los Banos. “The reality--noise, dust, odors, flies--doesn’t jibe with what they perceive rural life as being.”

The new wrinkle--requiring real estate agents to notify home buyers in writing about the realities--is gaining in popularity as the suburban population of rural California soars and disputes between farmers and their new neighbors grow more numerous.

The arrivals are invading some of the most fertile ground found anywhere. The eight counties that make up the rich San Joaquin Valley had a combined harvest last year worth $11.2 billion, 61% of the state’s total farm output.

Those same counties saw their population grow by 34% in the 1980s and are now home to more than 2.7 million people, the U.S. Census found. Some other numbers help explain why. Developers pay farmers $30,000 or more an acre for prime home-building land on the western edges of the San Joaquin Valley closest to the Bay Area. A farmer in Stanislaus County, by contrast, will gross on average $3,293 off an acre of peaches, $2,654 from an acre of tomatoes, and much less from alfalfa, grapes or beans, Ennenga said.

Bill Atfield, 59, moved in May to what a few seasons ago was farmland on the western outskirts of Patterson. He commutes 90 minutes each way to the Bay Area. The smell of fertilizer can get “kind of strong,” he said, and he gets mildly concerned when crop-dusters swoop down on fields.

“But that’s country living,” he said with a shrug, standing outside his piece of America in a subdivision called Countryside. Farmers were there first, he says. Any downsides are worth it. The irritations are far worse back in the Bay Area, he said, where he can’t drive two blocks without hitting a stoplight.

Not all of the new residents are quite as accepting. Farmers tell of being asked to change harvest and spraying schedules to keep dust and chemicals from drifting into yards and onto commuters’ cars. Some farmers have left their land fallow to avoid complaints.

George Klopping, who tends 1,200 acres on the outskirts of Patterson, figures he has made as many concessions as he can. He has stopped spraying his walnut groves in the morning to avoid waking up late-rising residents and damaging the paint on their cars.

“We spray at night and let ‘em bitch,” said Klopping, who has been urging Patterson city officials to adopt a right-to-farm ordinance.

In Patterson, where the population has doubled to 9,000 during the last seven years, officials say they are ready to pass the ordinance to shield farmers from residents’ complaints.

“Most of us have grown up with crop-dusters at dawn,” Mayor Wade Bingham said. But not so his new constituents. As Bingham sees it, it’s a “matter of education.” City dwellers must realize that in exchange for the sounds of sirens and streetcars, they get the roar of harvesters and biplanes.

Ordinances guaranteeing the right to farm are a part of a larger effort to keep agricultural land in production and limit urban sprawl in the San Joaquin Valley. The Merced County Board of Supervisors is considering a proposal by that county’s farm bureau to prohibit farmland from being subdivided into parcels of less than 60 acres. As it is, cropland in the county can be split into 20-acre blocks. Merced County’s population grew by 32% between 1980 and 1990.

In Stanislaus, the state’s seventh-richest farm county with a harvest worth $1.03 billion, officials are considering a sweeping policy to preserve farming, while a coalition of growers and preservationists is pushing an initiative for the 1992 ballot to bar development on irrigated agricultural land for 20 years.

“What I’m trying to do is preserve the quality of life,” said Larry Hooker, a Stanislaus County rancher and advocate of the initiative. His 2,500 acres in the Sierra foothills is far enough from expanding cities that he hasn’t felt much pressure to subdivide. But he points to the county seat of Modesto, a once-bucolic town that suffers from street gangs and crime as its population pushes 200,000. The county population swelled by 39%, to 370,500, in the 1980s.

“(Modesto) has grown out by miles and miles and miles, and it’s the best land there is anywhere,” Hooker said. “We have so many Bay Area commuters that the roads are just impossible.”

Betty and Stewart Bradley, both 63, have seen the changes close up. When they began farming, the nearest house in Modesto was six miles away. Now, tracts are just a short walk away. In recent years, as houses were built, the Bradleys began pulling up their peach trees acre by acre. They said it was simply too much trouble to tend the orchard with so many people around. When the Bradleys sprayed to combat rot and insects, neighbors “raised hell.”

“They expected you to stop the tractor while they drove by. It was just impossible,” Betty Bradley said.

The couple figure that housing will continue to encroach. Soon, they hope, their 60 acres will be part of Modesto. Then they hope to sell and retire on the proceeds. “We are just waiting for the change,” she said.

Given that there are 7.5 million acres of prime irrigated agricultural land in California, farms in the nation’s most populous state are not in danger of vanishing overnight.

The exact number of prime farming acres lost to housing is not known. The state monitoring program estimates that in the counties it surveys, 45,000 prime acres were lost between 1984 and 1988. Erik Vink of American Farmland Trust, a conservationist group that focuses on preserving farmland, puts the number far higher--as much as 100,000 acres of crop and grazing land a year.

“As we are developing and paving over our Central Valley, there’s nothing left,” Vink said. “The next valley is Nevada, and you can’t grow things in Nevada.”

In Yolo County, which had a harvest worth $242 million last year, the Board of Supervisors is considering an idea by Vink’s organization to buy land as a buffer between farms and such expanding cities as Woodland and Davis.

Yolo is not among the fastest growing farm counties--its population grew 24% between 1980 and 1990. But the county is located between Sacramento and the far eastern reaches of the Bay Area, and sliced by Interstates 80 and 5. Inside of 20 years, another 90,000 people will move to the county, officials estimate.

“We will need to have lot of different policies that preserve (agricultural) land. This is one of them,” said Supervisor Helen Thompson, an advocate of the new real estate disclosure ordinance and other measures to keep farms in production.

At the south end of Woodland, the seat of government in Yolo County, a young woman took a break from washing her car and told how she and her neighbors joke about the smells that come from across the street, from over near Terry Branigan’s turkey farm.

As Branigan tells it, however, not all of his neighbors find humor in the 20-acre turkey farm. “I’m an easy target,” he said, standing beside a pen of 10,000 turkeys. To limit the dust and quiet his neighbors, he plants grass and wets down the dirt in the pens. But when he tries to reason with his angry neighbors, he typically ends up on the defensive.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he tells them. “It stinks here, too.”