Lemon Aid

The future of Ventura County agriculture may lie on Steve Smith’s Santa Paula Canyon ranch, scattered among the avocado trees and lemon groves.

Concerned that imports of inexpensive Argentine lemons and Mexican avocados are threatening two of the county’s most lucrative cash crops, local agriculture officials are eagerly searching for alternatives.

One possibility is the litchi--also variously spelled lychee and lichee--that was planted in August on Smith’s Mud Creek Ranch and about 20 other locations in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties for the first time.

Sporting green drooping leaves and standing 4 feet high, the 20 tiny trees don’t look like much now.

It’s hoped that come the turn of the millennium, they will begin to produce fruit: a golf ball-sized reddish outer rind akin to the husk of a chestnut that contains a white, delicate interior flesh with a subtle flavor.

“It’s a good replacement crop for avocados, possibly citrus if you’re in a warmer climate,” Smith said. “The state is very interested in growing ethnic crops.”

With good reason.

Litchi are popular among California’s rapidly growing Asian population, and nearby Los Angeles offers a ready-made market.

Litchis are perishable, so they cannot be readily shipped long distances, reducing competition from other regions.

And the sensitive tree can be cultivated in few other places, further diminishing the likelihood that farmers could grow the fruit elsewhere at a lower cost that would undercut local producers.

Indeed, the unfamiliar fruit with a funny name embodies the sort of niche crop growers are seeking to maintain profitability, and consequently the viability of agriculture in Ventura County.

“We’re an agricultural area that is under a lot of pressure to show a profit, more than most areas,” said Ben Faber, a farm advisor with the Ventura office of the University of California Cooperative Extension, which is spearheading the litchi trial. “Unless we get crops in here that pay for what we’re doing, we’re not going to be farming much longer.”

That is no overblown sky-is-falling statement.

Ventura County has the second-highest per-acre yield of any county in the state, behind marijuana-producing Mendocino County, Faber said.

The reason: With the cost of land and labor among the highest in the state, farmers must grow crops with a high cash value to make a profit. For growers unwilling to risk an illicit crop, that means lemons, strawberries and avocados.

Crops with narrow profit margins or that can be grown cheaply in other areas fall by the wayside. County history is replete with crops that rose to prominence, only to be superseded by other commodities.

Oxnard, for instance, was founded 100 years ago around a sugar beet factory.

Lima bean farming was big in the pre-World War I years, until Orange County growers recognized that the beans thrived in their coastal soil, too. The two counties vied for production dominance for several years.

A large portion of Las Posas and Santa Clara valleys was covered with walnut trees until the 1950s, when San Joaquin Valley farmers caught on to the crop and the nuts went north. Only about 300 acres of walnuts remain, Faber said.

Apricots were once numerous around Moorpark, Santa Paula and Fillmore. Now Faber is one of only two local farmers who grow the fruit commercially.

Citrus fruits--oranges and lemons--gradually became dominant crops in the county. But oranges are showing signs that they, too, may leave the agricultural arena.

A combination of depressed markets and competition from the San Joaquin Valley--where thousands of acres of newer trees produce larger, better-looking fruit--means that many Ventura County farmers have been ripping out their orange groves over the last 15 to 20 years.

Orange Groves Squeezed Out

Randy Axell, a third-generation Ventura County farmer, has removed 35 acres of oranges in recent years, leaving just five acres--largely as landscaping around his house east of Ventura.

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to grow quality oranges in the Santa Clara Valley,” he said. “There’s a lot of people in the orange-growing business . . . wondering what the next crop will be.”

Planting more lemons isn’t necessarily the answer, since that product is facing a competitive threat from an Argentine province that has a climate similar to Ventura County. If the importation of Argentine lemons is allowed--something expected to happen next year--the county’s top-ranked crop, which had a value of $217 million last year, could be in peril.

The influx of cheaper, top-quality lemons could depress prices, especially during the crucial summer season when county growers enjoy a near monopoly on the market and, consequently, larger profit margins.

“If in fact Argentina were to have a significant impact on the world trade situation, I don’t know if the industry could react soon enough and would react soon enough to keep the industry from being devastated economically,” said Rex Laird, president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, a local trade organization with 1,700 members.

Avocados, the county’s sixth most valuable crop in 1997, could also be hit hard by last year’s lifting of an 83-year ban on imports of Mexican avocados.

While the cyclical nature of agriculture is nothing new, relatively recent challenges to industry mainstays have researchers and growers eyeing unusual alternatives.

The new era of global competition increases the urgency to discover the next fruit that will be eagerly gobbled up by consumers.

“There’s a heightened awareness,” Faber acknowledged. “This was sort of a game in the past. Now growers are saying, ‘What do we do next?’ ”

Of course, farmers have long sought lucrative niche crops.

Strawberries were once considered experimental, noted Camarillo farmer Craig Underwood. Last year they were the second-biggest cash crop in the county’s $942-million agricultural industry.

And in 1997, bok choy production leaped to 2,379 acres from 1,733 the year before, doubling in value to $14 million in just one year.

Berries, Coffee Being Tested

Faber and local growers are testing more than half a dozen other potential crops, including a cousin of litchis called longans, blueberries, raspberries and even coffee.

In the spring Smith will plant several coffee seedlings now sitting on a table outside his front door. No one is predicting that Ventura County will supplant Colombia or Brazil as a major coffee-growing region, but Faber foresees the day someone could walk into a local coffee shop and order a cup of “Santa Paula fog.”

Indeed, Smith’s ranch is ground zero for so many experimental crops--some UC trials, some his own--that Faber has dubbed Smith’s ranch the “biblical garden.” Smith isn’t planting any more lemon trees, favoring instead such crops as “dinosaur eggs,” a plum-apricot hybrid.

He is a firm believer in agricultural diversification, not only to have a variety of products to sell at farmers’ markets, but for his own family’s use.

Smith has high hopes for blackberry bushes planted two years ago, which produce abundant fruit in May, several months ahead of growers in the Pacific Northwest. Impressed with results, Smith has ordered 900 more plants.

Blueberries follow a similar cycle. His biggest challenge so far: figuring out how to keep deer away from his 2-year-old plants, since the animals appear to enjoy them as much as people do.

There are also small Satsuma mandarin trees that bear sweet, easy-to-peel, virtually seedless fruit.

Largely unknown in the mass market here, the oranges bring premium prices in such countries as Canada and England, where they are sold as holiday treats, each individually wrapped in bright green and red tissue paper.

Smith believes that the more than half a dozen varieties of the fruit can be grown year-round in Ventura County, something that can’t be done elsewhere, ensuring retailers and consumers a reliable, continuous supply.

“Mandarins are the most widely used citrus product in the world, although not necessarily here in the U.S.,” he said. “Once [Americans] get a taste of them, they’re really going to take off.”

Of course, selling a small quantity of fruit at farmers’ markets is one thing. Finding potential replacements for a huge crop, such as lemons, is quite another.

Underwood, who is also participating in the litchi trial and has tried numerous unusual crops, said he has learned that from “brutal experience.”

For instance, a foray into a type of yellow seedless watermelon was a financial disaster, he said.

In 1987, he was one of the first to begin marketing a baby salad mix in grocery stores. A decade later, the pre-washed bags of several lettuce varieties have caught on with consumers who like the convenience.

But as larger companies began distributing their own products and prices dropped, Underwood found it more difficult to compete. Last year he bowed to the inevitable and got out of the business altogether.

“That turned out not to be a niche crop because it can be grown a lot of different places,” he said. “To really expand those crops and make them hugely successful takes a lot of marketing.”

And that is a big leap for an individual grower, especially when mergers in the retail grocery store business are likely to prompt a bigger-is-better mentality among suppliers as well.

Still, local farmers and agriculture officials are plowing ahead.

If agriculture is to survive in the county, they have no choice.

Smith is already harboring thoughts that the first person to have a nursery full of litchi plants locally could make a lot of money if the crop proves successful. But researchers won’t be ready to recommend a particular variety for five to eight years.

So farmers like Smith and Underwood keep tending their test crops. And they watch nervously as an industry rapidly changes around them on a massive scale.

“Everybody is searching, because the traditional crops are getting harder and harder to make money at,” Underwood said. “If we could find a single crop that had huge volume and climatic advantages, it could be a big thing for Ventura County.”