Callens Is Still a Bean Counter : Fountain Valley Farmer, 82, Preserves Family’s Roots on 4-Acre ‘Home Ranch’

Farming is Joe Callens’ life. And to preserve his family’s roots as local lima bean growers, the one-time city leader collects farm equipment and machinery of days gone by.

His treasures include a 1908 thresher, which took 62 people to operate. It was converted in 1945 to a pickup thresher, which was pulled by a tractor and needed only a driver and a separator to run it.

He also has vintage tractors manufactured in the early 1900s. The walls of his home are adorned with photos of his family’s legacy.

“Ever since I can remember, I wouldn’t throw anything away,” said Callens, 82.

Chet Henry, vice president of the Fountain Valley Historical Society, said the collection is Callens’ joy.

“He’s very proud of all that stuff, and he enjoys to have people come and see it,” Henry said.

Wearing a blue work shirt, blue jeans and a worn cowboy hat, Callens still plants a lima bean crop each spring on his four-acre plot--all that’s left of what was once a 60-acre family farm on Ellis Avenue.

He has lived on the farm all his life, in the same farmhouse his father built 83 years ago. Callens lives at the “home ranch” with Valentine, his wife of 48 years. He is a father of five, and grandfather of three.

His father, Rene Callens, converted the Ellis Avenue farmland to bean ranching in 1916 after the Santa Ana River flooded the area and destroyed the sugar beet ranch the family bought for $500 an acre in 1910.

Callens’ family once farmed about 500 acres in Fountain Valley and on South Bristol Street near South Coast Plaza. Most of the land was eventually sold for housing developments or leased for commercial development.

Today, Callens still grows beans, because he likes to promote the crop, which Orange County once produced abundantly.

Callens said that in the 1940s, Orange County annually grew nearly 500,000 sacks of lima beans--about what lima bean farmers in all of California now grow each year. The crop has declined, Callens said, because there is much less farmland and because other varieties are less expensive and have become more popular.

This year, Callens grew 107 sacks of beans. “I grow it for a hobby, there’s no profit in it,” he said.

Callens, whose three sons farm 3,000 acres of family farms in Imperial Valley, near El Centro, shrugged as he talked about Orange County’s disappearing farmland.

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” said Callens, who served on the first City Council in 1957.

He said he has no plans to move from the city where he was born, raised and has always worked the soil.

“I think this is the best place in the world to live,” he said. “Even though you can’t farm here anymore.”