A Lemon of a Harvest : Agriculture: Floods and competition from other counties make it a rough year for growers. Strawberry and orange crops have been particularly hard hit.

The summer harvest is winding down after what has been one of the roughest years in recent memory, Ventura County growers said Monday.

The orange crop was disappointing, the strawberries were late and even growers of lemons, the king of crops in a county famous for its year-round harvest, have had only an average year.

“I’ve had growers tell me it’s as bad as they’ve seen in 20 years,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “I don’t know how we’re going to pass the total income that was reported in 1991.”

Ventura was the 10th-largest agricultural county in the state last year with a $909-million harvest, the largest ever.

County Agricultural Commissioner W. Earl McPhail said this year could be a disappointing one because of problems with the weather and the declining value of the county’s largest cash crops.

“Everybody’s hurting a bit this year,” McPhail said. “Everything is kind of down.”

The weather problem was not the drought nor anything like the catastrophic freeze of 1990, but the rains.

Earlier this year, floods devastated farms near Calleguas Creek, leaving fields almost ready for harvest under several feet of water.

Ventura County was once one of the few areas in the state where the weather encouraged a diversity of year-round crops.

Growers still produce more than 100 different commodities, from staples such as lemons and oranges to more exotic fruits, like cherimoyas. But competition in the vegetable and fruit markets from other counties has made the timing of local harvests even more critical than in the past, McPhail said.

Now, “the seed companies have developed varieties that can be grown in other areas,” McPhail said.

Perhaps no group of farmers has been hit harder than strawberry growers. For the first time, a local grower is attempting to beat the spring competition by planting his strawberry crop now so that it can be picked next winter.

Mike Conroy, owner of Conroy Farms in Oxnard, recalled a three-day period in March when his farm had four inches of rain. The fields remained wet and hundreds of pounds of strawberries rotted.

Ventura County usually has one of the earliest strawberry harvests of the year. The heavy spring rains that killed early strawberry crops delayed subsequent plantings and made them more vulnerable to rot.

By the time strawberry growers replanted and picked the crop, they found the market saturated with harvests from Northern California farms, Conroy said. Prices also took a tumble, falling from about $7 for a 12-pound carton a year ago to $2.50 to $4.

Some farmers couldn’t even find buyers for their crop when it was finally harvested, he added.

“It was a tough, tough year,” Conroy said. “I’ve been in it for 22 years, and this was the worst I’ve seen.”

Joe Boskovich, vice president of marketing for Boskovich Farms in Oxnard, said vegetables have fared no better.

Boskovich farms about 2,000 acres around the county, most of it planted during the winter in lettuce, broccoli and celery.

Although the demand for lettuce has remained high, prices have fallen by more than $2 a carton because of oversupply, Boskovich said. This year, a carton of lettuce was fetching about $4.25. Boskovich said the farm needs to make $6.50 a carton just to break even.

“Last season, nothing was profitable,” he said. This week, workers are harvesting onions, radishes and carrots and preparing the fields for a new winter harvest.

“We’re just planting for the fall and hoping for better times,” he said.

The pain was shared by orange growers. Around the county, growers produced an exceptionally large orange crop, but the fruit was small and did not meet the standard of marketable fresh fruit. The only option is to sell the fruit for juice.

Grower Jim Finch, who owns 32 acres of orange and lemon groves, said that although his lemon crop was about average, his groves have produced an unattractive crop of Valencia oranges. The problem, he said, was puffy and creased skin, and “they’re small oranges the size of a baseball or smaller,” he said. “They taste the same, but no one will buy them to find out.”

As a result, the price of Valencias has fallen to 50 cents for a 60-pound box, down from last year’s price of $15 to $16, Finch said.

On the other hand, the price of lemons has remained relatively stable at about $13 for a 40-pound box.

“Luckily, I have a day job,” said Finch, a manager for a lemon packinghouse. The lemon growers “are all doing reasonably well. They’re all saying, ‘I’m thankful I’m not an orange grower.’ ”