In the Land of Lemons : Agriculture: The largest grower of the county’s biggest crop turns 100. Farms of all sizes are optimistic about the future.

In the fertile fields of Ventura County, a long heritage of harvests has come and gone. Grain, lima beans, walnuts and oranges took turns in a giant crop rotation that shaped the fortunes of its farmers. But for the past half-century, lemon has been king.

The thorny tree elsewhere offers up but one winter crop. But the perfect world of a mild, dry coastal belt grants an unending harvest, and in the lemonade season, prices climb with the temperature.

About half of U.S. lemons regularly come from Ventura County trees, said a farm advisory spokesman from the University of California Cooperative Extension in Ventura. According to the Ventura County Agricultural Commission’s annual crop report, the value of lemons in 1991 in the county reached $206 million, far surpassing the local runner-up, strawberries, and almost double the third-place Valencia orange.

In the grand rotation of things, the bright yellow fruit may one day give way to tracts of concrete and steel here. But in this 100-anniversary year of the county’s largest lemon grower, large and small farmers and many more farm workers are still betting on a future that will keep them toiling in the fields.

A Lemon Empire

A hundred years ago, at an age when most men retired to rockers on their Victorian porches, Santa Paula founder Nathan W. Blanchard launched an enterprise that would throw a long yellowish shadow over the future of Ventura County.

Hard into the depression of 1893, the successful grower of the Santa Clara Valley’s first 10-acre lemon orchard borrowed capital to expand. Together with oilman Lyman A. Hardison, he incorporated a business with an exotic Portuguese name: Limoneira--meaning “place of the lemon.”

On a 400-acre spread west of Santa Paula the two men planted three-quarters of the land to lemons, leaving the colder sections for walnuts and the navel orange. Just three years later they sent 96,000 pounds of lemons to market.

From this fruitful beginning, they built a modest empire. As more land became available, Limoneira bought it, and planted more trees, on its way to becoming the largest lemon acreage in the world.

Small farmers’ attempts to copy Limoneira’s success at first went sour. There was much to learn. Lemons freeze. Unlike walnuts, they must be watered; but too much water sends them into decline. When stored to ripen in warehouses, they tend to rot. And when old trees are pulled out, new ones refuse to take root in their places.

By the 1920s, there were hundreds of lemon orchards in the county, and Limoneira was indeed the world’s largest grower of the fruit, according to Santa Paula historian Judith Triem. It had its own packinghouses, and a resident population of about 1,400 including workers’ families, who lived in electrically wired bungalows and traded at a company store. This was more than a third of the population of Santa Paula, a town which would come to bill itself as “The Citrus Capital of the World.”

Other lemon-friendly areas in California gave way to development, but here the trees flourished. As walnuts went north, and oranges spread throughout the warmer inland valleys, lemons followed in their furrows, on their way to becoming the top cash crop in the county. The sour fruit pulled ahead of the Valencias in the ‘40s, and never looked back.

And 100 years later, Limoneira remains the largest lemon grower in the county. Its 1,300 acres in 1991 produced 458,000 field boxes of lemons. And according to company President Jack Dickenson, Limoneira continues to serve as a model for smaller lemon growers in the region.

“We also watch them to see what they’re doing,” he said.

The Farmer

The county’s lemon pioneers had children and grandchildren who were inclined to remain in the field. A century after the crop was introduced here, third- and fourth-generation farmers continue to grow citrus.

“They’ve got it in their blood,” UC Cooperative Extension farm adviser Nick Sakovich said. “You have government regulations coming in, they don’t get a whole lot of money for the crop, the news media seems to paint them as bad guys--they are perceived as poisoning our food supply,” Sakovich said, “but they still want to farm.”

In fact, there are between 800 and 900 determined lemon growers in Ventura County, according to figures provided by Sunkist Growers Inc.

One of them is Randy Axell, who lives on a 100-plus-year-old farm east of Ventura with his wife Joanna, their son and daughter. He farms 50 acres of lemons along with 30 acres of avocados and specialty crops.

Axell’s great-grandparents came from Illinois and bought land here in 1878. He has lived in the shadow of citrus trees all his life, and planned his future early.

“In high school, I was one of those weird guys who knew what I wanted to do,” he said. At 15 he was raising all the feed for his herd of 25 steers on land that belonged to his grandfather. He went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and studied agribusiness, graduated and went into orchard management. He took over the family farm a few years later when his father’s health declined.

Like all farmers, his life is filled with variables: frost, the price of diesel fuel to combat it, the cycles of insects, the east wind.

There was such a wind the previous day, and he has just checked the trees for damage. It’s there. Leaves ravaged on the windward side, fruit scarred by blowing against the trees’ sharp spurs.

He picks a lemon oozing liquid from a wound, and frowns at it. Once scarred, lemons can’t be stored. They are reduced by packinghouses to the lowly rank of “products”--used in items such as lemon oil and shampoo.

“We don’t get zilch for that,” said Axell cheerlessly. “Some years you get a bill.”

Life among the groves is more complex than when Axell left college 20 years ago. For one thing, more time is spent indoors, filling out government forms.

Reports must be filed with the state every time a chemical is used on the ranch.

Axell said he uses natural predators to control red scale and mealybug attacks. But when red spiders strike, he uses an oil spray and must notify the state’s agricultural commission. Within the next four years, he said, that may not be enough; because of new air pollution laws, the oil spray may be banned altogether.

Meanwhile, a threat to small citrus farmers’ profits has emerged with a new federal decision to end controls on orange and lemon distribution. Axell hopes the new federal administration will put the controls back, preventing deluges of lemons during harvest season, which will drop prices beneath his margin of profit.

“Most of us are basically small growers,” Axell said. “This will mean the big boys will control (lemon farming) at the end by raising the prices when everybody else is out of business.”

In the face of mounting regulations and an ever-expanding urban landscape, new roles, not traditional to farmers, continue to emerge in Axell’s life.

Along with his neighbors, he is a member of a lawsuit challenging the city of Ventura’s claim to water-pumping rights from the Santa Paula basin.

He is also active in a group called the Exotic Fruit Fly Coalition. When their day in the fields is done, citrus farmers meet to discuss strategies for survival should a Medfly turn up in a Ventura County trap.

“It’s the biggest fear I have right now, out of all the other things that go on,” he said. “One fly could quarantine our crop.”

Undaunted by the hardships inherent in farming, Axell’s son, Brandon, will graduate from high school this spring and go on to study agribusiness at Cal Poly.

“So far,” said his father, “the problems have not exceeded the good stuff.”

Serious Labor

Lemon picking is not for everybody.

“It’s a tough, tough job,” said Ralph De Leon, president of Servicios Agricolas Mexicanos Inc., a long-established labor-contracting service in Santa Paula. “If people from the city come and try to do it, they are going to quit right away.”

Paid by the piece, the fastest pickers can make up to $10 an hour, and the work lasts about 10 months a year. But of his crew of 200, only 10 men are so skilled. The average earns closer to $7.

Ernesto Medrano says he hits $10 some days. His hands almost blur as he works a tree, cutting the ripest fruit and passing it to a clumsy bag on his hip. He would rather pick fruit than talk about it.

He is 25 years old. He came here from a town south of Mexico City three years ago and applied for residency under the Immigration Department amnesty program’s family unification provision. His brother and sister live in Santa Paula and were granted amnesty in 1986. He rents a house near them with three cousins, and sometimes with two extra men who share the $650 rent.

It is a good place to live, he said, because if work is not available, “they wait for us to pay the rent.”

The work is not hard, he said, only the thorns are peligroso --dangerous. When asked if he is interested in higher pay or a union, he shrugged. He had no opinion. He earns 10 times as much as in Mexico, where he cut sugar cane and picked guavas.

How long will he pick lemons?

“Until they fire me,” he said.

De Leon predicts Medrano will last two or three more years, then he will go to a job such as fast food, where the pay is lower but the demands are less--it takes over a ton of lemons to make a $10-an-hour day.

Or, the young man may move to Yuma or Bakersfield, where rent is cheap. It will be good for the worker, De Leon said, bad for him.

“We are running out of people,” he said. “We can’t go to (the Employment Development Department) and say, ‘We need 150 lemon pickers,’ because they are not out there.”

Ninety-five percent of his workers come from Mexico, De Leon said. Six years ago, almost all of them took part in the amnesty program and now they are burning out. And there are no others to take their places because De Leon must turn away anyone who applies for work without a green card.

De Leon, who began his career picking beans, said he is frustrated by the situation and worried that his operation may soon be in jeopardy.

It won’t be, according to Jack Lloyd, a farm labor consultant of Oxnard.

“Nobody really wants to do anything serious about reducing the hidden army of illegal workers,” he said. “For 50 bucks you can get a false green card and a driver’s license.”

Lemons produced 2,500 jobs in Ventura County in 1988, according to a University of California report, which Lloyd co-authored. The numbers have been fairly stable for 20 years. Only in the area of sorting, where machines took over, has the labor force been reduced, and that was by 20%.

Alternatives to a large field force are tricky and expensive. They involve automatic machinery and research and development in new genetically engineered hybrids that ripen uniformly. For now, farmers cannot make the investment. And as long as they have a labor force and a farm they don’t have to.

The Future

Even in the county’s perfect climate, lemons have lost ground. The high mark of lemon harvesting was in 1974, when there were 30,000 acres of them. By 1991, they had dropped 20%, according to agricultural commission figures.

“Some people would like to tell you it all went to development,” said Chris Taylor, president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, “but some declined due to poor market conditions.”

However, development is a factor. Due to anticipated development, Taylor said, many farmers planted strawberries and row crops after old trees came out, instead of replanting citrus trees.

Taylor was referring to the fields surrounding Oxnard when he said: “If you have 50 acres of land that’s going into development in the next few years, it’s kind of dumb to be putting all your money into a long-term investment like lemons.”

In the heart of the Oxnard Plain, Bob Pfeiler’s lemons are still producing, but he’s looking ahead to the time when bulldozers will fell them.

“All good things come to an end,” said the 84-year-old man whose great-grandparents bought the first private acreage sold on the plain. His lemon orchard is an island surrounded by concrete. It looks out on a forest of used-car lots across Oxnard Boulevard.

Pfeiler’s son has long since gone to Oregon to farm less expensive land. The older man still takes care of his own trees, but his family’s farming operations in the region, he feels, will end with him.

“I can’t predict how long--at least two, maybe three generations--before all the lemons are gone.”

In Santa Paula, Alan Teague, president of the 500-acre Teague-McKevett Ranch east of town, also sees lemons as less viable in the future.

“Agriculture as we know it will not last forever,” he said recently. “We have had this (ranch) since 1908; I would love to see things stay as they are. I don’t believe they will.”

His company has asked Santa Paula to extend the city limits to include his ranch in the next review of the General Plan. It is a necessary step toward development of any land within a designated greenbelt--a protected farm area.

“Competition changes (things),” Teague said. “We have to look at those changes and make adjustments.”

Greenbelts have traditionally been vulnerable entities, according to Deputy Agriculture Commissioner Jim Fullmer. He keeps a map of their boundaries and mourns any loss of acreage when he moves his pins.

Greenbelts are an “agreement between two cities that they won’t develop certain land,” he said. But “the two city councils can get together and just change the boundaries.”

Currently he worries about the advancing urban frontier and its ultimate effect on the county’s agriculture. He is not optimistic about the future of lemon farming.

“Lemon trees can’t vote,” he said. “That’s the problem.”