Revenge of the Southern Lemons

Last week, Gov. Gray Davis toured the frozen citrus groves of the San Joaquin Valley, personally cutting into a lemon as it hung on the tree. The lemon’s interior showed itself to be desiccated and worthless.

A disaster, the governor said, and he was right. The recent freeze has destroyed most of the orange crop and virtually all the lemon crop north of the Tehachapis.

But neither the governor nor other high officials discussed one of the lingering ironies surrounding this most recent citrus setback. Namely, the San Joaquin Valley is not, and never has been located in the classic citrus belt of California. It’s an upstart in the business and, because of its location, a risky proposition. Planting a lemon grove in the San Joaquin is a bit like building a house on the beach in Malibu: You’re asking for it.

In fact, the results of the freeze underscored this truth. Here in the South, where the industry was born more than a century ago, the groves largely missed the freeze. Orange and lemon trees here are fat with healthy fruit, and the situation looks very sweet.

Right now you might be asking yourself, “What orange and lemon trees?” Because, as we all know, the citrus industry of Southern California has been plowed under from Monrovia to Riverside. It’s kaput, gone, a figment of geriatric memory. Teams of bulldozers were sent into the groves, steel cables strung between them, to tear out the trees by their roots so the land could sprout red tile roofs.

True, true, but there’s an exception. That’s the Santa Clara Valley, the last great place for citrus in Southern California. Stretching inland from the Ventura coast toward Fillmore, the Santa Clara Valley today looks pretty much like the Inland Empire did 40 years ago when it was filled with vast tracts of navel oranges. The town of Santa Paula, in fact, has the same sleepy feel of the pre-World War II days in the towns east of Los Angeles.

You can walk down Main Street, past the hardware store, past the local diner, and much of the traffic will consist of citrus trucks hauling ripe lemons to the packinghouse. At the east end of town sits the headquarters of Limoneira Co., the largest lemon producer in the nation. And, outside town, the groves stretch in every direction.

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In all, the lemon groves fill 26,000 acres. Orange groves fill still more. Drive through the back roads here, and you will confront scene after scene that seems to be taken from a citrus packing label, complete with the mountain peak rising in the background. It’s almost spooky.

And lucrative, at least this year. You might call it the revenge of the South. Prices have risen as a result of the freeze, and any grower who has healthy lemons or oranges will be rewarded handsomely. And everyone has them. One county agricultural official told me that lemon prices reached $30 per carton last week, an increase of 20% or so from last year.

So obvious is the contrast between the southern growers and their San Joaquin neighbors that some citrus ranchers here have begun to dodge reporters for fear of seeming to gloat. Two days of imploring officials at Limoneira to talk, for example, produced not a word of comment.

Richard Pidduck did talk, however. Pidduck is 51 and arrived in the Santa Clara Valley in the 1980s after leaving a farm machinery business. He now operates his 78-acre lemon and avocado ranch north of town.

“One man’s bad luck is another man’s good fortune. That’s the way it works in farming,” Pidduck said. “We were far enough south to miss the impact of the cold. As far as the San Joaquin goes, this is the second major freeze to hit them in eight years. With that kind of pattern, it does not bode well.”

During the worst of the cold snap, Pidduck initially feared that his lemons might also be damaged. He stayed up late several nights, walking his groves, making sure the warming devices on his ranch--wind machines, waters sprayers and smudge pots--worked correctly. Then, early the next morning, he returned to inspect the damage.

“I was looking at the new leaf growth, which is very tender and susceptible to freezing,” he said. “Also the new flower buds. When these parts of the tree freeze, they just shrivel up and it becomes obvious that you’ve been hit. But there was very little damage. I came away 95% unscathed.”

So the growers here dodged the bullet. Goody. They’ll make money and stay in business. It won’t kill us to buy a few expensive lemons this year.

Actually, Pidduck’s fears, though not realized, were well-founded. The lemon tree is notoriously vulnerable to cold, far more than the orange. The persnickety lemon, in fact, exemplifies the heady risks of growing citrus.

Historically, the lemon evolved in those areas of the world that fell between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south of the equator. If you’re good at geography, you know that Southern California misses that zone by about 100 miles. So, in a sense, even the Santa Clara Valley pushes the lemon’s tolerance levels.

Earl McPhail, Ventura County’s agricultural commissioner, says the lemon’s sensitivity to cold can be demonstrated by a night when the temperature goes down to, say, 28 degrees. “An orange will take 28 degrees for twice as long as a lemon,” he says. “With lemons, a cold night always presents the potential for major damage.”

A dicey business, citrus. So dicey, in fact, that Southern California growers originally refused to believe that citrus could be grown on a commercial scale here. That was back in the mid-19th century.

They could see the remnants of small-scale groves that flourished around the missions but believed the risk of frost and pest damage so great that they shied away, trying other crops instead.

Eventually one daring pioneer, William Wolfskill, planted a citrus orchard next to downtown Los Angeles in 1841. It proved a wild success, and soon a small group of growers was supplying fresh oranges to the miners of the ’49 gold rush, sometimes at prices as high as $1 per orange.

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By the turn of the century, citrus groves carpeted the landscape of Southern California and served as the foundation of its economy. The growers learned that the Mediterranean climate here, with its constant flow of moist Pacific air, usually kept freeze damage to a minimum. At the height of the citrus culture, in 1939, at least six railroad trains per day pulling 50 cars each left Los Angeles loaded with citrus. The risk-takers had become millionaires.

Of course, as the writer Charles Fletcher Lummis once observed, citrus is not only a fruit but a romance. Much of the myth of Southern California, and its attraction to immigrants, grew out of the images of citrus groves basking in the winter sun. Oranges in particular became the symbol of escape from winter and the supposed paradise that awaited the newly arrived.

In the 1940s, journalist Carey McWilliams put it this way:

“To own a large wheat farm in Washington unquestionably gives a sense of possession and proud dominion; to own a well-stocked corn and hog farm in the Middle West undeniably confers a sense of solid well-being and plenty; but to own an orange grove in Southern California is to live on the real Gold Coast of American agriculture. It is not by chance that millionaire row in Pasadena should be called Orange Grove Avenue.”

It was, of course, the death of the citrus culture in Southern California, via the bulldozers and cul-de-sacs, that eventually forced growers to move north into the San Joaquin Valley and assume the even higher risks of that region’s freeze damage. Land prices in Monrovia or Pomona simply no longer allowed groves to exist there.

So now the Santa Clara Valley stands as the last vestige. True enough, the subdivisions are marching its way. True enough, the past is not reassuring about the future. But in February the major picking season will begin and, if all goes well, big money will be made here. Almost like the old days.

“You take the good years and you take the bad years,” said Pidduck. “You hope that it all adds up to a situation where you can stay in business over the long term.”

Personally, I’m rooting for him. I’ll take an expensive lemon over a new red tile roof any time, any place.