Let’s Not Forget Farming Heritage

Drive down a familiar street and do a double take: The little booth that sold freshly picked strawberries is gone. Drive along another avenue and watch an office building rise on land where just last month lima beans grew.

Orange County has long since replaced thousands of acres of orange groves and bean fields with office buildings and shopping malls. But there still are a few reminders of the county’s agricultural past. Sometimes the neatly plowed furrows perform double duty, symbolizing the county’s ethnic past as well.

From the turn of the century until World War II, Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were prominent among Southern California’s farmers.

After the war, when Japanese were rounded up and confined behind barbed wire in internment camps, even if they were American citizens, the picture changed.

Many families lost the land they farmed before internment. After the war, they chose other occupations.

Those who did return to the fields fought the same battle that confronts farmers no matter what their ethnicity: long hours, back-breaking work, being at the mercy of the weather.

Some farmers, like Jimmy Otsuka, have managed to hang on to the land. Otsuka grows strawberries on a small plot at Fairview Street and Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana. When the real estate boom peaked in the 1980s, he received offers to buy the property that would have paid him 20 times what he made in a year. But he resisted.

In Orange County, from 1982 to 1992 the number of acres being farmed dropped from 165,262 to 60,740. Several hundred farmers found new occupations or retired, leaving fewer than 500.

Hiroshi Fujishige, another Japanese American, for decades resisted offers from Walt Disney Co. to buy his land near Disneyland. Only this year did he and his family agree to sell most of the property, not long before Fujishige’s death.

Agriculture has been an important part of Orange County’s history, as have Japanese immigrants and their American-born children and grandchildren. The farmland dwindles, but the memories should not. It’s part of the fabric of the county.