Growing Places : Tour Teaches County Leaders About Agriculture Industry

“This,” Paul Clark said as he ushered a dozen local business leaders into a small wing of the CloneTech Inc. plant in Somis, “is a forest.”

The inch-tall Paulownia seedlings growing inside plastic boxes are clearly not a typical forest. But in just a few months, each one is expected to grow taller than 15 feet, Clark said.

And to produce high quality, the fast-growing trees--which can help fertilize farm fields, prevent erosion and keep the ground cool--were sprouted from a tissue culture in a high-tech lab.

The lab, agriculture officials say, is as much a part of Ventura County’s agriculture industry as the strawberry fields and lemon orchards that line the roadways.

In a tour Friday designed to drive home that point, 100 local business, government and education leaders watched conveyor belts covered with produce, automated green onion slicers, lemon scrubbers, refrigerated warehouses, pesticide spraying machines, pest-eating beetles and ships headed for the high seas.

“This is the biggest business in Ventura County, but as the urban centers grow, fewer people know what it is about,” said Heather Wicka, a board member of the Pacific Agribusiness Alliance who organized the sold-out tour.

The more people understand about the industry, the more likely they are to support its needs, Wicka said. “One of the main goals is to create informed consent on agricultural issues,” she added.

Riding on two buses that meandered through the Oxnard Plain and the Santa Clara Valley among the county’s diverse crops, the local leaders visited lemon packers, pest control manufacturers, fertilizer producers, vegetable growers and shippers, horticultural sites, nurseries and the Port of Hueneme, locally known as “the port the farmers built.”

For many of the participants, perhaps the most telling thing about the state’s agricultural business today is that they finished the tour with very little dirt sticking to their shoes.

“The tour helped reinforce the notion about how it is all integrated,” said Handel Evans, the acting president of the planned Cal State University Channel Islands. “Seeing a lemon tree in a field is not the end of it anymore.”

Dana Weber Young of the Limoneira Co. agreed.

‘I stress the word ‘industry,’ ” she said as thousands of lemons were being unloaded, washed, dried, inspected, measured, sorted, brushed, cooled, gassed--with a ripening agent--waxed and packed inside the huge Santa Paula facility.

The tour, which also included visits to Boskovich Farms, AgRx, Associates Insectary, Pyramid Flowers and Brokaw Nursery, will ideally help ease the sometimes difficult relations between the farmers and local residents, said Carolyn Leavens, president of the Pacific Agribusiness Alliance.

“Sometimes [our business] is uncomfortable for our neighbors,” she said. “So if they want us to stay, they’ll have to put up with a little discomfort.”

Area residents are ill informed about most sprays the farmers use, Leavens said. “People are scared to death of everything we put on our crops. We need to have the public educated so they will have goodwill toward us.”

Agricultural leaders are worried that the acreage dedicated to farmland in the county is shrinking. If it falls below a certain level, they believe, the volume the crops produce will not be enough for the core of supporting industries--packing, shipping and processing--to survive.

“Once you are below a certain level you risk to lose the whole thing,” Leavens said. The alliance plans to begin organizing similar tours for the general public, she added.

Those participating in Friday’s tour were generally supportive of the industry, which generates about $900 million in annual sales and employs about 18,000 people.

“This county has a lot to offer,” said Carl Raggio, executive vice president of Ventura County National Bank. “When you just ride through on the highway, you don’t see all this.”

A tour like this one, Raggio said, could teach many in the banking industry--representatives of at least five banks participated in Friday’s tour--how to serve the agricultural business better.

“When you lend you typically look at the value of the assets, and that is usually the land,” he said. “But with yields per acre that exceed the typical value of the land, I have to look at the cash flow that comes out of the land.”

Stan Carmichael, whose company provides benefit packages for many agricultural businesses, said the tour was an opportunity for him to learn more about what some of his clients do.

Carmichael, who moved to Ventura from San Jose where orchards have been replaced by the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley, said he liked seeing the greenbelts provided by the farms around the county.

“I’m here to find out how agriculture can remain viable,” he said. “I’d hate to see Ventura County go the way San Jose went.”