Bountiful Salinas Valley Has Bumper Crop of Woes : Farms: Problems include overproduction, seawater intrusion. Some pin hopes on quest for tastier lettuce.
People in these parts still think of Floyd Griffin as a bit of an outsider, a Johnny-come-lately to the Kingdom of the Crispheads.
He’s only lived in the Salad Bowl of America since 1968--the kind of place where you sure can grow vegetables but you sure can’t buy land. His “recent” arrival in itself is a minor black mark in this tight little fraternity of four-generation farm families.
And then there’s the way he feels about iceberg, the king of crops in the land of lettuce: He eats it. He likes it. But he’s spending good money to change it.
“We’re working toward taste, truly we are,” promises the secretary-treasurer of Mission Packing, a multi-state farm firm that is using genetic engineering to breed next-generation iceberg with the help of a major seed company from Holland. “We’re only a couple of years away.”
Too bad they can’t speed things up, for these are grim days in the Salinas Valley, site of the richest farmland in America. A yearlong iceberg glut has driven prices to historical lows. Frustrated farmers are willing to try most anything to improve their ailing market.
In fact, when iceberg lettuce turned 100 this year, the only party was in Pennsylvania, where seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. threw an August birthday bash complete with Creme de la Creme Iceberg Soup With Mint, and Light Iceberg Latkes With Chives.
Lettuce growers here spent the summer grappling with overproduction that caused losses of up to $1,500 an acre in a region that plants about 72,000 acres of iceberg each year.
Now they’re digging in for the nastiest water war in California today, a battle that pits farmers against each other instead of their urban counterparts.
The Salinas Valley water war is among the most crucial in California, says Edward C. Anton, chief of the division of water rights at the state Water Resources Control Board. And its current remedy is among the rarest: The state has just begun the lengthy process of stepping in and taking over.
“The Salinas Valley has a unique combination of climate and soil that allows it to produce a lot of very valuable produce,” says Anton, who testified about the controversy last month at legislative hearings in the tiny Salinas Valley town of Spreckles. “That’s among the reasons why it (water) is such a concern.”
The water war threatens a 90-mile swath of farmland that is both bountiful and beautiful. Salinas native John Steinbeck took an entire chapter in “East of Eden” to describe the valley that gave him plots and poetry.
“I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother,” he wrote in the 1952 novel. “They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding--unfriendly and dangerous.”
George Ball, Burpee chairman and chief executive, is neither Nobel laureate nor California native, but he, too, finds it easy to muster up a shred of the poet when he speaks of the land that made his company’s product a household name. While he might not speak of “brown grass love” when contemplating the verdant swath from San Ardo in the south to Castroville in the north, he will rhapsodize about “those beautiful, sharp, sunlit days” that make the Salinas Valley the iceberg capital of the world.
But iceberg is far from the only crop, as is easily seen at Art Manzoni’s farms just outside of Greenfield, the self-proclaimed broccoli capital of the world. Manzoni has been growing crops in the southern Salinas Valley for 47 years, from his high school days as the Carrot King of King City High to this, iceberg’s centenary.
Today, his fields are a constant patchwork of growth and cultivation. Climate, he says, is the Salinas Valley’s secret weapon, the thing that lets him, his son and his brother plant spinach in chill November, iceberg seven months out of 12 and hardy broccoli all year ‘round.
“When I was a junior in high school, my dad gave me 15 acres of land here for Future Farmers of America,” he said as he maneuvered his mud-splashed pickup through the fields. “I gambled and grew carrots on the open market. I made $30,000. In 1947, that was a lot of money. It’s still the talk of the town.”
Today, however, is a different story. The $2,000-an-acre carrots of Manzoni’s youth pale beside the $11,000-an-acre strawberries grown in Monterey County and the $11,000 an acre that lettuce can bring in here in a good year--a year unlike this last one.
Monterey County--basically the Salinas Valley, for there is little agriculture in the county outside the valley--grossed $1.85 billion in agricultural receipts in 1993, the most it has raked in since early Spanish farmers began cultivating corn, wheat and sheep here in the late 1700s.
Although three counties in the nation--Fresno, Tulare and Kern--brought in more agricultural dollars last year than Monterey, the numbers are deceiving. Sure, Fresno County pulled in $3.01 billion, about 60% more than Monterey. But it accomplished that feat on 1.23 million acres--nearly five times the acreage of its agricultural neighbor to the west.
The Salinas Valley grows more than 50% of the nation’s share of five pricey vegetables: head lettuce, artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower and leaf lettuce. In short, says Gerry Willey, deputy Monterey County agricultural commissioner, Salinas Valley farmland is the most fruitful in the nation.
But instead of making money on their lactuca sativa this year, most farmers here and in the nation’s seven other lettuce-growing states are losing it--up to $1,500 an acre for most of the past 13 months, Willey says.
“You’ve got to have a certain character to grow lettuce,” marvels Willey, who likens the lettuce field to the craps table and the stock exchange. Lettuce farmers “can make a lot of money. It’s almost like Reno. You can go in there and lose your shirt continually. Or you’re just lucky.”
Or, as with many lettuce farmers this past year, you’re actually part of the problem, unable as yet to manage the changes caused by the biggest agricultural innovation to hit the Salinas Valley since the ‘50s, the so-called “value added product.”
You’ve seen them take up increasing shelf space in the produce section of your favorite market, those bright new bags of chopped and washed lettuce leaves--some with dressing and croutons tossed in--for which harried urban shoppers are willing to pay extra.
Dole Fresh Vegetables thinks such products are here to stay and has built a multimillion-dollar packaging plant in the Salinas Valley. Tanimura & Antle, the biggest independent lettuce grower in the country, has a full line of products, from fresh spinach to Caesar salad. And the latest Monterey County agricultural report notes that such products grew by more than 50% between 1992 and 1993.
But are they any good and will they last? Most growers acknowledge that they smell sort of swampy when you open up a bag, that they last maybe three days as opposed to three weeks. Bob Nunes, Jr., whose family firm is just now building a processing plant on the East Coast to chop and pack their Tubby brand lettuce, says he and his wife, well, used to eat them.
“It was a phase,” Nunes says. “We don’t do it anymore.”
And then there’s that little math problem that has dogged lettuce growers throughout the country for the past year. Instead of acknowledging that consumers eat a finite amount of lettuce and bagging some of their existing crop, they planted extra. Compounding the problem was perfect weather and an abundant harvest. What consumers haven’t eaten, farmers have. It’s called oversupply, and it hurts.
Add to that scenario the state of California stepping in to solve what farmers insist is “just a local water problem” and you get a large group of very independent, very annoyed men and women in work boots stomping up and down the valley.
At issue is seawater intrusion--ocean water contaminating the underground water supply. It was first noticed in 1944 in the north county city of Castroville, the artichoke capital of the country.
Farmers and water districts in the Salinas Valley get their water by pumping it from the underground aquifer. Under normal circumstances, that water is replenished, generally by rain. By the 1960s, two dams had been built in the south county to help replenish the aquifer.
But since those dams were built, two things have happened to strain the underground water supply. The population of the area’s cities, from Salinas to Soledad, has grown. The greatest impact, however, has been the nearly 60,000 acres of new irrigated farmland--most in the southern part of the county.
As a result, more water has been pulled out of the aquifer than has been replenished. The imbalance in pressure has caused seawater to be sucked into the aquifer in coastal Salinas Valley. Last year, seawater contamination was discovered within a mile of the city of Salinas.
In its simplest form, the water fight can be looked at as artichokes against the world. Farmers in Castroville--home of the Giant Artichoke Restaurant with its artichoke quiche and artichoke soup--have been most affected by the seawater intrusion. They are the ones who most want a series of costly remedies that farmers and residents throughout the county would be forced to pay for.
Says Pat Hopper, marketing director for the California Artichoke and Vegetable Growers Corp., “If this acreage goes out, where will we go? Your quality of life will go down. We need the climate here to grow artichokes.”
In the south county, where farmers are 50 miles from the direct effects of the seawater, the feeling is that north county growers are reaping what they sowed, that the problem is not the south county’s to suffer or solve.
“It turns out that 97% to 98% of the seawater intrusion is directly related to the pumping in the exact vicinity (where) the saltwater intrusion is occurring,” insists Ralph Riva, chairman of the Salinas Valley Water Coalition. “I can’t do much for them. They have to accept the responsibility and make the hard calls.”
Because they have endured but not solved the intrusion problem, Monterey County farmers are about to receive letters from the state water board telling them to get their records ready. The state is embarking on the lengthy investigation that could precede an official weighing of interests and parceling out of the ground water supply. All bets are off on whether the state will actually go through with such a severe process--one that has been initiated but never before completed.
In the interim, a small army of Salinas Valley lettuce breeders is working fast and furiously to improve the crop that drives the region’s agricultural engine. People like Floyd Griffin’s son, David, a genetic engineer, and Edward J. Ryder, the last of the great government lettuce breeders, are hard at work on a hardier--and tastier--head.
“Certainly I would hope that (seawater intrusion) would not be so much of a deterrent that we would willingly give away the agricultural industry,” says Ryder, a staunch iceberg defender. “But the possibility of doing some breeding work to enable lettuce to grow even in a higher salt environment is a real one.”
The Billion-Dollar Club
Based on the dollar value of the crops it produces, Monterey County is the No. 4 agricultural county in California, more than a billion dollars behind Fresno County, the nation’s agricultural powerhouse. However, Monterey County has about 250,000 acres in production--most in the Salinas Valley--while Fresno has nearly five times that amount. That makes the Salinas Valley the richest farmland in the nation. This chart shows that state’s top-grossing agricultural counties and the acreage in production.
Greenfield: Broccoli Capital
Castroville: Artichoke Capital
Salinas: Lettuce Capital
Estimated County Gross Receipts Total Acreage Fresno $3.0 billion 1.2 million Tulare $2.4 billion 1.5 million Kern $1.9 billion 809,725 Monterey $1.9 billion 250,000 Merced $1.2 billion 1.1 million Stanislaus $1.1 billion 801,000 San Joaquin $1.1 billion 823,729* Imperial $1.0 billion 450,000 Riverside $1.0 billion 321,421
Source: California Farmer magazine and county agricultural reports, 1993
