Dreams Evaporate and Turn to Dust . . . : Agriculture: After six years of drought, soaring water rates are forcing many farmers to shut off their spigots. Tens of thousands of avocado trees are being chain-sawed down to stumps and some discouraged farmers are selling out altogether.

Steve White trudged sadly through the avocado grove he planted nearly 15 years ago in Ramona and heard a rasping crow that hovered overhead, an irritating speck in the blinding afternoon sky.

“They only circle over a dead animal,” White said, setting his jaw. “Maybe they sense death here.”

There is death here, whole fields of it.

Thousands of trees sagging with wilted, leathery leaves and limp branches, slowly, helplessly expiring like terminal patients after life support has been switched off.

It has come to this in San Diego County, last year’s leading agricultural county in the Southland, but a rich land with a fatal economic flaw: it rests at the distant end of the state’s water pipeline, and farmers are paying dearly.

Now, after six years of drought, soaring water rates are forcing many farmers to shut off their spigots. Tens of thousands of avocado trees are being chain-sawed down to stumps. Some discouraged farmers are selling out altogether; others are offering pieces of their land for housing development, hoping to survive until better days.

And higher water bills aren’t just hitting the local growers who produce half of California’s avocado crop. Water costs that in some cases have doubled over a few years are pushing some citrus and row crop farmers to the edge of extinction.

“We’re in a grave crisis here. We’re in serious trouble with water,” said David Owen, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

Growers with enough money and daring are drilling wells, desperately gambling on finding cheaper water. Even profitable sectors of agriculture are reeling under the cost of water and straining for ways to use less of the precious commodity. Marginal farms and growers with heavy debts are failing.

Consider Raul Sanchez, who for 17 years leased a 200-acre farm in Carlsbad, employing up to 300 field hands to harvest tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and green beans. But no more.

His $150,000 water bill for 1989 rose to $180,000 last year, compounding other financial problems and finally breaking him. His workers have vanished, only a few finding other scarce farm jobs. The landlord has ordered Sanchez to leave. Battered farm equipment awaits a new destination. The earth, usually so alive this time of year, is barren, and wind stirs up the dust.

“Nobody wants to finance us, the city don’t want to supply us with any more water,” said Sanchez, a genial man with white beard stubble. He has an unpaid $50,000 water bill and wants to start anew, somehow, somewhere, if he can only get credit. He is 58 years old.

And he is not alone.

Farmers tend to be a conservative lot, distrusting government, cursing environmentalists and chronically complaining about how competition--especially from abroad--is crushing them. For many, the increasing cost of water is becoming the last straw.

“People are getting tired, they’re getting beat down,” said Mike Horwath, past president of the county Farm Bureau. “It’s a never-ending battle to protect your right to feed the nation.”

Whopper Bills

Water has always been expensive down here, but the latest whopper bills have stunned even the most seasoned farmers.

Except for a water district in San Mateo County, farmers in San Diego County pay more for their water than anywhere else in the state, according to agriculture and water officials.

Many farmers in the fertile and vast San Joaquin Valley pay roughly $15 or $16 per acre-foot for water that’s subsidized under a federal program to support certain farm commodities--though some farmers pay as little as $5 per acre-foot.

There’s no such subsidy in San Diego County, except for milk, so the average farmer in Valley Center in northeastern San Diego County, for example, had paid $475 per acre-foot--a sum that jumped to $540 last month.

Local agricultural water costs range from $460 per acre-foot in Rainbow to nearly $700 in Encinitas, figures that have generally risen rapidly over the past few years.

“There are signals that, by year 2000, water will cost $1,000 per acre-foot,” said Escondido avocado farmer Warren Henry, who has already cut down 15,000 of his trees--20% of his total--to slash his water bill.

“It sends shivers through us.”

An acre-foot is 325,872 gallons, enough to cover an acre of land with a foot of water. It takes 1 million gallons of water a year to maintain a single mature acre yielding 6,500 pounds of avocados, according to Henry.

The county’s great distance from its water source is a curse in what’s otherwise a farmer’s paradise of gentle climate, bountiful land and a cornucopia of crops.

San Diego is 500 miles from the massive State Water Project pumps at Tracy in the southeast San Francisco Bay Area, and it is about 240 miles from the Arizona pumps that transport Colorado River Water.

The power it takes to pump water so far swells water bills, and the drought made the situation worse.

First, the state is charging more for the water it sells to the mammoth Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. In turn, the MWD sells the more expensive water to the San Diego County Water Authority, which then apportions it to 18 municipal and agricultural water districts throughout the county. The districts, which have individual costs and capital improvement budgets, charge varying rates to end users.

A second factor is the enormously expensive programs--hastened partly by the persistent drought--to build water storage facilities and improve the Southland’s intricate water delivery system.

The MWD alone has a 10-year, $5-billion capital improvement program, and the San Diego County Water Authority is scrambling for a location to construct an estimated $500-million reservoir in North County.

Simply, not enough water is banked in the Southland for an emergency like a catastrophic earthquake or continuing drought.

“When there’s an abundance of water, we need to store it down here,” said Bert Becker, assistant director of finance for the MWD.

Yet, in a strange irony that’s not lost upon local farmers, efforts to protect water users in the future are ruining many growers right now.

Mark Baker’s parents moved to Escondido in 1941, and as he watched his father cultivate citrus and avocados, he dreamed of the times to come when he too could make the land bloom.

He bought property in Ramona 20 years ago, and, in partnership with his two brothers, Baker nurtured 8,300 avocado trees on 112 acres. But, over the last six years, his water bills more than tripled, from $600 a year per acre to $1,950 most recently.

Finally, in January, the brothers decided to shut off the sprinklers and let nearly all the trees go. “We’ve been riding the emotional roller coaster, knowing we should do this over the last two or three years,” Baker said.

About 7,500 trees are slowly dying, or, as Baker cushioned it, “living off the grace of whatever rain we get.”

Once, he used to visit the groves several times a month, enjoying the rows of tall trees, but now the specter is too harsh to behold.

“I don’t want to go up there to see it, OK?”

For farmer White, who remarked upon the omen of the crow, seeing the work of his adult life in near ruin has been wrenching.

“I was sawing down a tree I planted 20 years ago,” he said. “I thought this would be a productive grove, and there I was with my chain saw. It really does leave you with an empty feeling.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones sounding danger over the local avocado crop, which in 1991 was valued at nearly $132 million.

Agriculture officials, too, are alarmed, although nobody knows yet exactly how many trees are being felled and how many acres of farmland are going on the market as prime locations for large-lot residential development. Little is selling in the stubborn recession.

“I think we’re on the verge of a major destruction of the avocado industry. It just doesn’t pay any more,” said Gary Bender, farm adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension.

Other important crops, like citrus and row crops such as beans, cabbage, corn, tomatoes and cucumbers, are growing more financially stressed, according to experts.

Even the county’s profitable flower crop, cultivated in greenhouses and in fields of coastal North County, is feeling the pinch, although flower growers generally have a better margin to absorb the cost of water.

Dave Pruitt, owner of Sea Coast Greenhouses in Encinitas, pays $700 per acre-foot of water--his latest bill covering two months was $4,700.

“I have literally lost track of how much they’ve (water rates) gone up,” he said.

He pays the bill, knowing he can’t pass along the cost to buyers if he hopes to stay competitive with rival flower growers. He doesn’t believe his industry will broaden in San Diego County and, depending on future real estate values, may in fact shrink as dwellings replace greenhouses.

The ripple effect of farmers cutting down trees, not planting crops and selling off land is touching other parts of the county’s agricultural economy--from farm workers to bankers.

For seven years, Damien Rojas, a 52-year-old farm worker with “USA” emblazoned on his black cap, has traveled north from his home in Oaxaca, Mexico, to work on Raul Sanchez’s farm.

He planted and harvested tomatoes for more than he could earn in Mexico, then took his earnings home to support his family. But not this year.

When Rojas showed up in March, as usual, he learned of Sanchez’s financial troubles.

“I came back thinking he was going to plant in April, that there was going to be work, but then Raul told me there was no money and he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

Rojas can find no other farm work in North County, and he’s even sought employment sweeping floors at a factory, but no luck. He is leaving for home with empty pockets and the rest of the year to struggle through.

“Instead of dying here with no work and no food, I’d rather just go home, back to Mexico,” he said.

Nobody knows how many other farm workers share a similar disappointment, but Jim Lundgren, director of the Job Center in Carlsbad, sees some of them every day.

Recently, Lundgren, expecting to start English classes for migrant workers, visited an area farm that normally had 200 workers. Instead, the farmer told him that high water costs had forced him out. A sign announced that the property was for lease.

Now, when workers come to the Job Center looking for help, they don’t bother to mention their aptitude as farm hands.

“They don’t ever quote their agriculture experience because they know there’s nothing in that field,” Lundgren said.

Lenders also detect economic distress in San Diego County, where, if anything, many farmers commonly used to seek financing to buy more land and increase their crop production.

The interest in seeking such loans “is flat and decreasing,” said James Schurr, president of Farm Credit Services of Southern California.

“Everybody realizes there’s a shortage of water, and they tell me the cost is going to go up,” he said. “They hope to have enough water to farm that which they already have.”

All this seems a strange predicament for a county that last year had more than 6,000 farms, nearly 173,000 acres of land in production, and topped $1 billion in crop value, according to the county Department of Agriculture, Weights & Measures.

“Over $1 billion, it’s never looked so viable in its life,” county Agricultural Commissioner Kathleen Thuner said enthusiastically.

Yet a significant part of local agriculture’s success in 1991 reflected other counties’ misfortune. Frost in the Central Valley boosted the price of crops in San Diego County. And an infestation in Imperial County dislodged it as the Southland’s No. 1 agricultural county, giving the honor to San Diego.

Farmers here have traditionally been frugal about their expensive water, and, since the 1970s, have eagerly embraced Israel’s drip irrigation practices.

“The agriculture industry in San Diego County is probably the most efficient users of agricultural water in the United States,” said Gordon Hess, director of water resources planning for the County Water Authority.

If anything, he added, “I would say most farmers are under-irrigating their crops.”

However, despite the county’s impressive crop productivity and almost religious water conservation, powerful economic forces are continually bending and twisting the shape of agriculture here.

Urbanization, always-considerable water rates and fierce competition have pushed farmers out of South County’s Otay Mesa area and Mission Valley, ushering the lion’s share of agriculture to the more open North County.

Historically, increasing costs have endangered less profitable crops--as more avocado farmers are now experiencing--and put the future of local agriculture more in the hands of high value crops such as flowers.

Emil Ghio has seen it all.

He farmed row crops in Chula Vista for 36 years until he quit in 1986, when high water costs and competition from the San Joaquin Valley and Mexico undercut him and forced him out.

Ghio was there, over those years while the number of farmers in the now defunct Chula Vista Growers Assn. dwindled from 150 to four. Some farmers relocated to Mexico, where labor and other costs are much cheaper.

And now, he’s beginning to see the same decline happening again, this time to his brethren farmers in North County.

“Life goes on, nothing lasts forever,” Ghio said, pausing to add bittersweetly, “I thought we’d go on forever.”

* An Escondido farmer is determined to survive the high cost of water by drilling his own wells. B10