THE AGRICULTURAL HERITAGE : SADDLEBACK VALLEY : Biggest Cash Crop in S. County: Housing

When its founders decided it was time to give this onetime citrus mecca the name Orange County, they obviously weren’t looking south.

South County has had few citrus groves, and its hilly terrain and scarce water supply are far more hospitable to cows than crops. Since the 19th Century, the land has been mainly used for grazing cattle, and of course for development.

Today a few hardy South County agricultural entrepreneurs are making their mark in the 1990s by adapting to the environment and to the business climate.

“The fact remains that South County is basically a semi-arid coastal desert,” said Mike Evans, part owner in the Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano. “It all boils down to what is the best use for the land, and here the agriculture base has given away to suburban development. It’s a sign of the times.”

In South County, that generally means building houses, offices and stores, which require landscaping. A handful of nurseries off Ortega Highway supply a wide variety of plants to area landscape contractors.

Land in South County has gotten too expensive to raise crops, say local historians and land owners. The Ortega Highway nurseries exist in part because the property owner, the Santa Margarita Co., gets a tax break from the state for setting aside land for an agricultural preserve.

“I don’t think there are enough oranges being grown today in (South County) to make a good screwdriver,” said Jim Sleeper, an Orange County historian. “What little land for farming that exists today is in the (Rancho Mission Viejo) agriculture preserve. Today, a large farm couldn’t make enough money to pay their taxes and make a profit.”

Over the years, there have been a few attempts to raise crops in South County. Around the turn of the century, Rancho Santa Margarita was once the site of the county’s largest wheat field.

But what large farms existed began disappearing in the 1960s, to be replaced by a much larger cash crop: the housing industry.

A few hundred acres of orange groves were once cultivated in Rancho Mission Viejo.

There were scattered attempts to grow peppers, walnuts and corn, but when it became more lucrative to build houses than raise crops in South County, most of the farmers left, Sleeper said.

Evans himself has become an agriculture specialist. The Tree of Life Nursery grows only native California plants that thrive in desert-like conditions.

The nursery sells coastal live oak and sycamore trees, manzanita shrubs and California lilacs to contractors who xeriscape--use plants that require little watering for landscaping.

“We have plenty of beautiful plants that have learned to survive with little water,” he said. “Since we grow such a unique crop of plants, we’ve been able to do well.”

“But there aren’t a lot of other growers here,” Evans said. “I guess it’s a sign of the times.”