A Growth Industry : State’s Agribusiness Rides Out Recession, Insects and Bad Weather
Considering the six-year drought, a brutal 1990 freeze, an invasion of whiteflies and various political insults, California’s $18-billion farm economy has held remarkably stable during the state’s long-running recession.
Agriculture set annual records for cash paid to farmers for their crops until 1991, when the total dipped 5% to $17.9 billion as the effects of the drought and the freeze accumulated.
Yet receipts resumed their climb last year in the face of the state’s water cutbacks as gross receipts edged up 1.1% to an estimated $18.1 billion, and the growth continues in post-drought 1993.
Farm jobs show the same pattern. After falling 6% in 1991 to 342,000, agricultural employment in the state jumped by 11% last year, and is up so far this year an average 6.5%, according to the state Employment Development Department.
“Agriculture has been a stable contributor to California’s economy,” says Henry Voss, a peach, plum and prune grower, who is director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “It doesn’t swing up and down like it does in the grain states.”
There are big problems for some farmers and some regions, notably in the water-short western San Joaquin Valley. And farmers always argue that even in good years, they see little or none of the profits generated by the state’s vast agribusiness system after their products leave the farm.
In the aggregate though, the drought and other problems have been offset by the state’s agricultural diversity, record yields in key crops, and the growing appetite for California’s high-value fruits, vegetables and other crops, especially overseas.
Except in products such as wine, the state’s recession has itself had little effect on the California farm industry, economists say. Even the unemployed must eat, they note, and most of the state’s farm products are shipped elsewhere, anyway.
Meanwhile, state farmers went through the same shakeout in land values as the rest of U.S. agriculture in the mid-1980s, and the survivors emerged with low debt, according to economist Fred Cannon at Bank of America, the state’s top farm lender.
“Despite the adversities, agriculture has been stronger and less volatile than the rest of the economy,” Cannon said.
Indeed, for export-dependent crops such as cotton, weak economies in other nations are often worse than a recession at home. As California and U.S. agriculture continue to grow more food than the country needs, export growth is increasingly critical to a robust U.S. farm sector.
But as the economy has slowed in Japan, for example--the top foreign market for California cotton, where it is made into $200 golf shirts--the state’s Tokyo-bound shipments have tumbled by nearly 30% to 500,000 bales a year.
Nevertheless, “we routinely sell everything they grow,” says Bruce K. Groefsema, senior vice president at Calcot Ltd., a Bakersfield-based cooperative that markets 42% of California and Arizona cotton, which is purchased by 250 mills in 30 countries.
Economic cycles aside, the state’s farmers are worried about government-imposed limits on pesticide use and new competition in foreign markets from Mexico, Chile, Greece, Australia and Israel, among others.
But these and other headaches pale in comparison to the implications of farming’s growing political isolation. With the state’s rapid urban growth, farmers now make up less than 1% of all Californians, even smaller than their national profile of just 2% of the population.
This led to last year’s enactment of the landmark Miller-Bradley law, a rewriting of federal water policy in favor of urban areas that dimmed California agriculture’s prospects for continued automatic access to its lifeblood: cheap water for irrigation.
Farmers predict that this will drive up the cost and undercut the efficiency of farming, leading to higher food prices and exacting a greater toll on the overall economy than urbanites realize.
Growers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are said to be especially vulnerable to water cutbacks due to the salt content of their ground water and the region’s reliance for irrigation on the federal Central Valley Project.
Already, tens of thousands of acres, especially in cotton, have been pulled from production, striking economic blows to farm workers and communities on either side of Interstate 5 west of Fresno.
“The real question is how long some of that land can remain in production,” says Jerome B. Siebert, agricultural economist at UC Berkeley.
The web of California agriculture, with its network of processing factories, is wide.
The University of California calculates that the state’s “food and fiber system” generates $63 billion a year, or 9% of the gross state product, and accounts for one in 10 jobs, most of them off the farm. Its $18.1 billion in gross farm receipts makes California half again bigger than Texas, the nation’s No. 2 farm state.
But its role in the economy is diluted among more than 250 crops, each an industry with its own economic, botanical and political profile. Thus, while the overall statistics show only a brief interruption of agriculture’s growth trend during the state’s recession, there is woe amid the gains.
“Every year we have crops that lose money, and every year we have crops that make money,” Voss says.
Dairy farmers, representing the state’s biggest farm product, have battled low prices here and nationally for two years. But livestock farmers, who are No. 2 in the state, have generally prospered from robust prices.
(The disastrous summer flooding of corn, soybean and grain crops in the Midwest is now driving up the cost of feed for California livestock and poultry. However, the California Farm Bureau sees little overall farm impact here, because the state produces only small amounts of the crops being flooded.)
Growers of cotton, another of the state’s biggest crops, posted record yields per acre last year, thanks to ideal weather in the San Joaquin Valley. But they had to drill deeper and pay more for water, which squeezed profits, while the drought’s toll has taken about one-third of the state’s cotton acreage--about 500,000 acres--out of production altogether.
In the Imperial Valley east of San Diego, lettuce growers and others continue to fight the ravages of the whitefly. But February floods in Arizona wiped out lettuce crops there, triggering a price run-up that handed California growers a windfall.
California’s tomato growers say they are in a “depression” caused by three straight years of overproduction that has sent prices tumbling to 20-year lows. The glut has worsened this year.
Strawberry growers along the Central Coast have been shielded from the drought by their use of drip irrigation and ample ground water.
But they are now faced with the prohibition of methyl bromide, a universally used soil fumigant for which many of today’s strawberry varieties were bred.
Growers of navel oranges, recovered from the freeze that destroyed a third of the 1990-91 citrus crop, are producing their biggest crop ever. But as with most farm products, the higher the production, the lower the price; returns to orange growers are off.
This season, the cool, rainy spring created its own pluses and minuses that underscore California’s farm diversity.
The late rains interrupted pollination or caused mold on numerous crops, but some farmers--such as vintners and strawberry growers--might not mind a moderately smaller crop because it bumps up prices.
“We’ve lost 130,000 to 140,000 trays,” says Ed Kelly, a strawberry grower near Watsonville. “But there are those who will argue that it’s the best thing that could have happened.”
California-Grown
As the nation’s No. 1 producer of agricultural products the California farm industry has weathered the recession better than many key industries in the state. Its output is among the most diverse in the world and includes a broad variety of fruits and vegetables.
* Top 11 food crops by acres planted in 1992: Shadings indicate growing areas 1. GRAPES: 643,100 acres 2. RICE: 394,000 acres 3. ALMONDS: 390,000 acres 4. TOMATOES: 277,000 acres 5. ORANGES: 181,100 acres 6. WALNUTS: 181,000 acres 7. LETTUCE: 144,000 acres 8. BROCCOLI: 104,000 acres 9. CARROTS: 60,000 acres 10. LEMONS: 46,400 acres 11. STRAWBERRIES: 23,400 acres
Reaping What We Sow
California’s diverse, $18.1-billion farm industry managed to weather the recession well, and many crops did better last year than in 1991. California’s Top 20 farm products, ranked by 1992 revenue, in millions of dollars:
Product 1991 1992 % chg. Milk, cream $2,439.4 $2,608.3 +6.9% Grapes 1,562.6 1,663.9 +6.5 Cattle, calves 1,681.7 1,422.6 -15.4 Nursery products 1,156.3 1,196.4 +3.5 Cotton 882.1 931.1 +5.6 Tomatoes 875.1 724.9 -17.2 Flowers, foliage 759.3 868.0 +14.3 Almonds 564.2 670.1 +18.8 Lettuce, head 600.9 627.1 +4.4 Hay 693.1 601.0 -13.3 Strawberries 465.5 512.5 +10.1 Oranges 370.2 463.9 +25.3 Chickens 336.7 352.0 +4.5 Eggs 362.3 277.9 -9.8 Walnuts 274.5 268.0 -2.4 Broccoli 215.6 251.0 +16.4 Rice 188.5 218.9 +16.1 Carrots 201.1 208.5 +3.7 Cantaloupe N/A 208.3 N/A Celery 143.8 164.3 +14.3
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture; California Agricultural Statistics Service; Researched by C.A. WEDLAN / Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
Staff writer Martha Groves in San Francisco contributed to this report.
