Getting Down to Earth in the City

A.G. Kawamura--philosopher-farmer, builder of edible landscapes--steers his Chevy Blazer off the highway into a green-shimmering bean field. By all appearances, with a walkie-talkie in his lap, a pager on his hip and a cell phone at his ear, he is a high-powered grower stopping in for a 30-second inspection.

But he immediately puts down the phone, seeking eye contact with pickers, whom he greets in well-accented, fluent Spanish. As Kawamura runs his fingers through beans being sorted and crated, and as he hops out of the truck every few minutes to check drip lines, new plantings and corn harvesting, it is doubtful that he will be defined only by his modern accouterments.

For Kawamura, a 40-year-old, third-generation farmer, his job of growing vegetables on 800 leased acres in Irvine is one of enchantment and even of spirituality, and he will be the first to say so.

He says it to agriculture experts, whom he addressed a few weeks ago at a United Nations forum on world hunger. He says it to schoolchildren touring Centennial Farm at the Orange County Fairgrounds, which his firm largely built. And he says it to the social activists he invites twice a week onto his fields to collect--”glean”--food for the hungry.

“Farmers are like doctors; we deal with living things,” says Kawamura in his even-tempered voice. “A good doctor is not out playing golf when you need him, or the patient may die. If we fail to remember that what we’re caring for is alive, it can be attacked by so many things--weather, bugs, diseases.”

This is not to say that Kawamura is not an astute businessman--although, yes, he does like to read poetry and New Age books, wears his hair in a ponytail and graduated from that counterculture nest, UC Berkeley, in the ‘70s.

With his brother and partner, Matt, managing sales and shipping from facilities in Fullerton, Kawamura oversees an operation with annual gross sales in the high seven figures. They are heirs to one of Orange County’s biggest produce operations, Western Marketing Co. of California, which was moved here from Los Angeles in 1953 by their father and grandfather.

Keeping a step ahead of developers’ bulldozers--he has had to move his trailer offices to new sites four times in 15 years--Kawamura continually fights to balance his production needs with the limitations of urban farming.

With produce growing sometimes just 20 feet from Irvine homeowners’ backyards, Kawamura’s workers cannot set off noise machines to scare off corn-munching starlings, for example. When watering systems create mud on the highways, a tractor with scraper is sent out to clean it up.

Homeowners do complain, although Kawamura says sometimes the objections are comical. A woman recently called because a truck selling fast food to workers was visible from her backyard. The truck, she said, looked “tacky.”

“We don’t expect to get pats on the back from people for doing our job, but we do wish they better understood the requirements” of farming, says Kawamura, who lives in Huntington Beach with his wife, Dianne. “After all, farmers feed 5.8 billion people in this world.”

With much of Southern California covered by concrete, residents have little day-to-day appreciation of agriculture, he says. “I sometimes ask people when was the last time they touched a plant--a living plant, not the fruit in the refrigerator. A lot of people don’t know.”

At Costa Mesa’s Centennial Farm, a three-acre educational exhibit, children are astonished to see a carrot being pulled from the ground. Kawamura was similarly amazed when, on a recent tour, a couple of boys accused workers of having inserted the carrot in the ground beforehand.

He says agriculture should be anything but an abstraction: About two-thirds of the food he grows annually--some 15,000 tons of celery, sweet white corn, green beans, radicchio, strawberries and various squash--ends up on local tables.

Kawamura’s dream is for all the county’s food needs to be supplied by county farms. Crops no longer practical to grow here--such as asparagus, peaches, apricots, sugar beets and walnuts--would be profitable again. An “edible landscape,” signifying a county that feeds itself, would sprout.

It is a message that Kawamura has been delivering for years. He recently finished a term as president of the Orange County Farm Bureau, a trade group, and is a director of the Western Growers Assn. and the state Celery Advisory Board.

Says Rick Lefeuvre, agricultural commissioner for Orange County: “He’s a key member of our farming community and is never shy about stepping to the forefront of an issue, explaining why things are done the way they are in farming issues.”

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A good chunk of Kawamura’s 60-hour workweek is devoted to the Centennial Farm Foundation and Orange County Harvest, whose volunteers reap tons of leftover food from fields.

Part of Kawamura’s altruism is home-grown: His mother, June, was instrumental in starting the Florence Crittendon Services in Fullerton for troubled teenagers. Another part he brought back from Berkeley. A Third World development course, he says, changed his life. It showed him a world at the other end of the scale from Newport Beach, where Kawamura grew up.

He was born in Los Angeles at a time when his grandfather, Arthur Shinji Kawamura, and father, Genji Gene Kawamura, were expanding their celery business.

Arthur Kawamura was one of the first Japanese to graduate from Santa Ana High School. In the 1940s, he, Genji and June were interned in the relocation camp at Gila, Ariz. Unlike many, however, they were not penniless when they were released; their assets had been held in trust by their banker, Jim Quinn, at United California Bank in Los Angeles.

In the ‘50s, they moved the operation to Orange County, cashing in on a burgeoning strawberry trade. The firm began to ship other farmers’ crops as well as their own--now the mainstay of their business.

After college, where he studied comparative literature, A.G. worked briefly near Bakersfield as a grape harvester, living in a small farmhouse with only his cat for company. Eventually, he decided to enter the family business.

“It was partly out of obligation, partly out of curiosity and partly out of the realization that if you want to make things happen and be part of positive change in the world, you can do a lot more with a business behind you than you can in the Peace Corps or on an individual, volunteer basis.”

He began by working eight years in the sales and shipping part of the business. “I learned the hard way, took a lot of lumps, made a lot of mistakes,” Kawamura says.

Because the climate permits year-round farming, Kawamura double-crops, planting beans after celery one year, corn after beans the next. This effectively turns his 800 acres--all leased from the Irvine Co.--into 1,600; meanwhile, the corn mulch returns organic material to the ground. “We have a marketing orientation,” he says. “Some farmers grow it and hope they can sell it. We want to grow it knowing it’s already sold.

“Cabbage is a good example. Everybody and their brother can grow cabbage in the wintertime. But if you have to depend on a flood in Texas or a major freeze in Florida to knock out those crops enough to make your crop profitable, you might as well go to Vegas and put your money on the table. We don’t grow cabbage anymore.”

His year-round growing operation, called Orange County Produce, also gives fairly steady work to his 200 pickers, most of whom are Mexican nationals with temporary work permits.

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While acknowledging environmental problems created by farming in decades past, Kawamura insists that modern conventional agriculture is on the right track. He has disdain for much of the criticism from environmentalists over the use of methyl bromide and other chemicals.

“I get sad that the environmental community likes to pick on the agricultural community. They have the best intentions, but . . . people with good intentions can cause problems, like the Alar apple scare. . . . Environmentalism [is] a business just like us. They have dues-paying members and have to keep issues in their members’ faces.”

As he said in his speech at the world food conference in Washington: “The notion of two kinds of agriculture, conventional and sustainable, is a divisive and disruptive waste of energy and resources. Agriculture by definition is sustainable. In general, it seems that farmers are not looked upon as valuable national resources but rather as expendable nuisances. . . . People do not make the connection between the restaurant, the chain store and the field next door.”

Kawamura believes that the more the public understands farming, the more it will be accepted. The 42,000 children who visited Centennial Farm last year represent a good start, he says. Meantime, his stepson, Derek Stovall, is starting to learn the business by selling his family’s produce at farmers markets in Orange County.

One of Kawamura’s most potent farming experiences came on a chilly fall morning in 1979. He was up early to inspect a bean crop in the Capistrano Valley. The previous night he had bragged to his vacationing father that their crop looked robust.

But the once-green field, he saw with a shock, was ghostly white. By 10 a.m., it had turned black--20 acres of worthless dead beans. Orange County had been visited by its yearly average of a single night of frost.

“The humbling part of working with nature is that you recognize pretty quickly that you can’t make a crop come off if Mother Nature has other ideas,” he says. “Plus, it makes you realize you’re part of the system. You’re not apart from it.”