The Blossoming of a Dynasty : The Chino Family Grows Produce of Unsurpassed Quality, but Their Sun-Splashed Fields May Be Torn Asunder Because of a Will

Sometimes, if he pauses long enough from his labors, Tom Chino can still glimpse the figures of his late mother and father right there beside him, hard at work in the family’s growing fields.

As always, his mother wears her protective kerchief and wide-brimmed hat. His father, suntanned and ramrod straight, walks among the lines of vegetables like a silent general inspecting troops.

The images are brief but reassuring, a signal that family patriarch Junzo Chino and his wife, Hatsuyo, still lend a comforting presence to the vegetable farm about 6 miles east of here that they founded nearly 50 years ago.

Mama, as she was known to her close friends and nine children, died last September after a long illness. Papa Chino had died almost a year earlier at 96.

Their legacy is more than the vegetable-growing phenomenon that some say has cornered the competitive market on freshness and variety.

Theirs is a story of a tight-knit family with an almost religious love and respect for the land and all that can be coaxed from it. Living in simple farmhouse quarters and working their 52 acres together, they have resisted cashing in on their valuable farmland to quietly concentrate on growing the best possible produce.

The Chino secret combines the oldest farming traditions with the cutting edge of agricultural technology. The family knows and tends the land intimately, using knowledge about how to work small plots that the island-dwelling Japanese people developed over centuries.

They hand-work the soil, with a sixth sense about weather conditions that have prevailed over their valley for the past half century, trying different family fertilizing secrets--including combinations of manure and dried cow’s blood.

On the modern side, they research, find and experiment with the newest seed hybrids, throwing out the failures in search of perfection.

As a result, their vast array of watermelons, corn, tomatoes, strawberries and string beans, lettuce, cabbage and carrots--each a still-life of artistic perfection--have become staples for California cuisine.

And their sun-splashed spread, which does about half a million dollars of business annually, has become a model of the quality that the small farmer can achieve, experts say.

For more than a decade, the Chinos have supplied two of California’s most famous restaurants--Spago of Los Angeles and Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. Since 1969, they have attracted long lines of loyal customers to their roadside stand.

Now a new generation of Chino farmers prepares to carry on the unique agricultural niche that Junzo and Hatsuyo Chino left behind.

“There was a time when I thought my father and mother would farm this land forever,” says Tom Chino, a soft-spoken, laconic 43-year-old who abandoned a career as a Salk Institute cancer researcher to return to the family farm.

“But now they’re gone. We no longer can rely on them for their wealth of empirical knowledge and wisdom, not just about farming but about life as well. They were strong personalities and, while it wasn’t always spoken, we always knew what they wanted. Now it’s up to us to maintain those standards that my parents set.”

Indeed, these are months of transition for the four Chinos who remain at the farm, as the children try out the new democracy of running a family-owned business without their parents.

And they must cope with the atmosphere of sour grapes that has pervaded the family in the short time since Hatsuyo Chino’s death. Two Chino brothers, Orange County physicians, have begun legal proceedings to assert their co-ownership of the farm.

The brothers, Jun and Shigeru Chino, say they have been disenfranchised because their parents’ will designates farm ownership to three brothers and a sister who live and work there--Tom, Frank, Fred and Kay Chino.

Although they are indignant that their brothers would question their parents’ will, the San Diego siblings say they only want the matter settled without acrimony. They say they don’t want to let Mama and Papa down.

Friends say the coming months will be crucial.

“It’s important that they remain strong as a family--to follow the example their parents taught them,” says Spago owner and family friend Wolfgang Puck. “If everyone gets along, there won’t be much change, but if there are problems, they might have to sell off bits of the farm, which would really be a shame.”

The farm’s strength, says Puck, who often spends part of his summer vacation hanging out there, is that each remaining Chino has established a farming specialty.

“They all do their jobs well because they worked so long with their parents,” Puck says. “Who else has the good fortune of working so many decades with their mentors? The Chinos aren’t children anymore. They’re up to the task.”

This generation of Chino farmers are all college graduates who nonetheless remain faithful to the simple, independent vision their parents articulated through decades of backbreaking labor.

Each year, that vision yields a prized harvest that includes 50 varieties of melon ripening on staggered vines, 60 varieties of lettuce unfolding red, green and yellow leaves and 102 kinds of ripe, juicy tomatoes.

The Chinos don’t just grow carrots. They produce round carrots, white ones, yellow ones and miniatures. Their strawberries are tantalizingly red triangles--except for the rare white Alpine variety that grows wild in Europe.

Consulting with seed sellers, agricultural specialists and gardening experts worldwide, they continue their quest for the most perfect and exotic fruits and vegetables, fussing over texture and taste like fine restaurant chefs.

“We taste things,” says Frank Chino. “And if we don’t like them, we make changes. If we have to, we start over.”

Clad in the usual farm uniform of faded blue jeans and a red-checked work shirt, Tom Chino says the family wants its stamp on every vegetable it grows:

“We want it to come out of our own dirt. We want to pick it at its prime, under our own conditions to see what it really tastes like. That kind of experimentation has been our driving force.”

The produce sold at the family’s weathered, 1940s-era roadside stand on Calzada del Bosque is picked at dawn for that day’s customers, harvested at the peak of ripeness--never shipped off unripe in refrigerated trucks.

Food experts say the quality of the Chinos’ produce is a byproduct of the family’s unique spirit.

“There’s something romantic about this family,” says Ruth Reichl, food editor of The Times. “They’re certainly no ordinary farmers. They’re artists of the earth, a group of incredibly educated people sitting on land that is worth a million times more than they could ever make on it through farming.

“But this is what they choose to do without compromise. It’s a lesson to anyone who is passionate about their own work.”

Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, discovered the Chino farm 15 years ago. She recalls the day that a friend in San Diego sent her a special shipment of Chino’s green beans--along with the prediction that they would change her life.

“At the time, I was using some green beans from Mexico that I thought were quite wonderful,” she says. “But when I tasted the Chino beans, well, they just turned my head around. I realized that what I had been using were really quite nothing.”

Today, Waters regularly visits the farm that she says has revolutionized vegetable growing:

“What the Chinos do, it’s not like growing a couple of tomatoes--it’s seeing what a tomato is all about, to grow every shape, color and size you can imagine. It’s opening a whole world of possibilities with the tomato.

“Anyone who goes there with an open mind and taste buds will never again go back to the supermarket for their produce.”

The Chino story in California began with perhaps Junzo Chino’s most stubborn act in a career full of resolution: He walked here.

He had been sent to America by his father just before World War I to search for an older brother who had left years earlier and never returned to Japan. But Junzo Chino was denied entrance to the United States. He eventually landed in Peru, where he began an arduous two-year trek to Imperial County.

Years later, Junzo met his wife-to-be at a Los Angeles market he ran. Hatsuyo taught him the farming traditions that would become the cornerstone of the Chino dynasty.

Eventually, Junzo found his brother, and they farmed together. But during World War II, the Chino family was interned for several years in a government work camp with other Japanese-Americans. It is a time the elder Chinos rarely mentioned, their children say.

In 1946, despite pressure from locals who resented the presence of the Japanese-American family, the Chinos founded their farm about 20 miles north of San Diego in the fertile river bottom that today separates Fairbanks Ranch from Rancho Santa Fe.

They established contacts with L.A. produce buyers and worked the land.

“In those years,” Tom Chino recalls, “my parents were enamored with the idea that real farmers grew crops for the commercial market. The one thing they didn’t want to be considered was a hobby farmer.”

Over the years, attitudes changed. In 1969, the family opened its roadside stand and sold directly to local residents. Meanwhile, with the help of researchers, they reinvested their profits looking for new vegetable strains.

Top California chefs discovered the farm in the late 1970s, and menus at Spago and Chez Panisse soon listed the Chino farm as a vegetable source. In 1980, the family cut its wholesale and commercial ties and began to concentrate exclusively on variety and quality.

“It all came together like pieces of a puzzle,” Frank Chino says. “Suddenly, restaurants were looking for the highest-quality ingredients. And we knew how to provide them.”

The Chinos became a California phenomenon. Ensuing years brought stories and plugs in all kinds of culinary magazines, as well as in Vogue, Playboy and National Geographic. A writer from the New Yorker recently spent a year off and on with the family for a soon-to-be-published story about them.

But despite the family’s fame, it’s easy to drive past the Chino farm; there’s no hint other than an obscure sign--the Vegetable Shop.

Despite offers from other restaurants, some as far away as Chicago, the Chinos refuse to ship or deliver their produce anywhere but to Spago and Chez Panisse. More customers, they say, would just mean more distraction from experimenting with the land. Even local restaurant chefs have to stand in line with other customers.

Indeed, as family friends say, the Chinos don’t go to the world, the world comes to them. Tom Chino explains:

“Basically, we detest marketing. We want our vegetables to stand on their own. If we had to sell them, we wouldn’t grow them.”

As shy as their parents, the farming siblings rise each morning before dawn to help their staff harvest the morning’s crop, saying little even to one another as they scurry about in 1940s and ‘50s-era farm vehicles--low-built go-carts, ramshackle buggies and roofless Volkswagen beetles.

Using walkie-talkies, they speak Japanese to each other and the handful of trainees here from their parents’ native land through an agriculture program. The rough-hewn wooden stand opens promptly at 10 a.m. By then, there is usually a line outside--everyone from the wealthy in Jaguars and Rolls-Royces to curious European visitors to the Mexican laborers who arrive from adjoining farms--not to work, but to buy.

Customers browse a rainbow selection of about 60 types of vegetables. Prices are not marked; they are higher than at supermarkets but competitive. Broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, bok choy and arugula sell for $1 a bunch, strawberries for $2 a pint.

The business operates informally; there’s no cash register or receipts. Customers who dwell on the prices are often greeted with silence. What isn’t sold is fed to the neighbor’s sheep.

“We’ve been rather circumspect about our customers,” says Tom Chino. “We don’t pamper them as much as other places might. The stand has always been a sideline; our real purpose is growing the vegetables.

“As far as the prices go, our attitude has been, ‘Go to hell if you don’t like it.’ We sell good quality. If you want to complain about the price, don’t come here.”

Few people complain.

The precarious economy and high costs of farming haven’t escaped the Chinos. Privately, especially with the cloud of family legal proceedings hanging over their heads, they worry how long they can afford to work the land.

Stopping a moment from the monotony of sorting vegetables, Tom Chino considers whether he could ever leave the farm behind:

“I would leave only if I had assurances that the farm would run well and my brothers and sister would not be under any tremendous burden. We are a family, and family unity is important.”

He smiles. “But, in truth, I think I’d feel a bit hollow if I didn’t know I could come back to this place if I wanted to, just to feel the spiritualness of it.”