End of an Era : The Strawberry Harvest This Spring Has Some Bittersweet Overtones; the Closing of Kinoshita Family’s Farm in Ssan Juan Capistrano Leaves the City Without Any Large Agricultural Tracts

Conflicting emotions of joy and sorrow rippled across Shig Kinoshita’s face as he watched customers line up to buy the latest picking of strawberries.

For Kinoshita and his brother, Bob, the spring crop is bittersweet: it is their final harvest from the soil of the San Juan Capistrano farm their family has worked for nearly 40 years.

On Friday, the brothers will retire and the last family farm in San Juan Capistrano will vanish.

“It’s time to move on, to do other things,” Shig Kinoshita, 58, said in an emotion-cracked voice as he stood on the land and gazed at the tracts of homes that over the years have sprouted around the 56-acre farm.

In a way, the end came two years ago, when the Kinoshitas, tired of battling low prices for their crops and ever-higher labor costs, sold the farm to the city. They stayed on under contract to manage the property.

Now, it’s time for the family to leave as the city prepares to convert the land, with its patchwork of brown and green fields, into athletic playing fields and a community center. Twenty acres will be farmed by a private contractor hired by the city.

The whole Kinoshita clan feels the loss.

“I always knew that the farm would be gone someday,” said Bob’s 31-year-old son, Norman Kinoshita. “But it’s like a death. You’re never quite ready for it.”

“The farm shaped my life and the way I am now. It taught us the value of hard work and made us all mature a lot faster,” he said.

It isn’t the first time the Kinoshita family has felt the need to move on.

As one of the many Japanese who farmed in the Anaheim area during the 1950s, Shig Kinoshita’s father, Sanji, had grown uncomfortable with the increasing number of homes noisily going up around his once tranquil farm.

In 1955, spurred by the construction of sprawling Disneyland, Sanji moved his family to San Juan Capistrano, then a farming community of 800 people, where family members believed they would be safe from disruptive progress.

Shig and his two older brothers, Tad and Bob, joined their father in the difficult process of setting up a farm again. The first year was the hardest because the farm was planted with orange trees, all of which had to be removed before other crops could be planted.

“We used a tractor to get the trees out of the ground, “ Shig Kinoshita said, “but we had to do the roots by hand. It took us several years to clear them all out.”

Thirty-eight years and a virtual lifetime of memories later, he is clearing out again--removing generations of accumulated possessions from the circa 1878 farmhouse his family lived in when its members arrived in San Juan Capistrano.

Standing in the living room of the frame farmhouse where his parents lived until the 1970s, every object in the room seemed to stir memories for Kinoshita.

“We had a big dining room table right there,” he said, pointing at the dusty floor. Kinoshita recalled the many holidays spent with family members around the table, and his eyes became misty.

“My parents are what brought the family together for the holidays. I can still remember my kids running all around the house,” he said, looking around the living room.

When the phone beside him suddenly rang, he unhesitatingly answered: “Kinoshita Farms,” forgetting for an instant that the farm isn’t his any more.

Old habits die hard, Kinoshita explained, admitting that he still finds himself waking up in the middle of the night when the weather is bad, wondering if his crops are all right.

His devotion to a bygone lifestyle is a trait shared with other longtime residents here, many of them former farmers who view the Kinoshita family’s departure as the end of a gentler time.

“In the old days when there were only farms, you knew everybody, every cat and dog by their first name,” recalled Frank Buchheim, a former farmer whose family has lived in San Juan Capistrano since the late 1800s.

Buchheim, who served as the first mayor of San Juan Capistrano after the city’s incorporation in 1961, said he misses the closeness and sense of community that existed among farmers.

“Farming requires a lot of faith and trust in your fellow man,” Buchheim said. “You learn that you need each other--a good neighbor is like another piece of machinery to call on.”

Even if the special brotherhood of farming no longer exists, city officials here are working to ensure that the community’s farming heritage isn’t forgotten.

Using $9.5 million from a 1990 bond measure to maintain the city’s open spaces, the city will keep part of the Kinoshita farm in agricultural use as a monument to the family-owned farms and ranches that once flourished as the emotional and economic heart of the community before new housing tracts came to dominate the landscape.

Mayor Gil Jones hopes that preserving the farm will provide city residents, especially children, with an opportunity to learn about the community’s history.

City officials need look no further than Shig and Bob’s children for evidence that the farming lifestyle still has valuable lessons for other children.

Although none of the Kinoshita brothers’ seven children lived on the farm while they were growing up, all of them worked on the farm as teen-agers.

“Working on the farm really instilled a sense of responsibility in me,” said Shig Kinoshita’s 31-year-old daughter, Jo Ann. “At the time I didn’t notice because I was happy to be earning money, but working on the farm was a good way to teach you how life really is.”

A Farm With History Although the Kinoshita family sold its San Juan Capistrano farm to the city in 1991, members will not relinquish managment of it until Friday. The closing of the enterprise ends an era of family-owned and operated farms in the community. Opened: 1955 Acres: 56 Crops: Peppers, corn, strawberries, lettuce, cauliflower, cucumbers. History: The oldest frame house in the city, built in 1878, sits on the property. Present: A private contractor will take over farming operations Friday. Future: City will keep part of the land for agriculture as a monument to the family-owned farms of the area. Most of the land will be used for athletic fields ad community center. Soure: Kinoshita Farms