Squeezed Down to One
Stepping into the Yorba Orange Growers Assn. packinghouse in Anaheim is like being transported to the 1940s, when Orange County could boast of being citrus royalty.
The machinery moving oranges down conveyor belts to waiting human hands looks like some mad pinball machine.
Except for “rots,” not much is thrown away here. A 1946 Ford pickup--once used to run errands--languishes in a nearby warehouse as it has for nearly half a century; outside, the replacement 1955 Chevy that busted last year sits in the dust.
People have spent their working lives in the dusty packinghouse; many of their relatives also spent their lives working here. The hallways are decked with black-and-white snapshots of sisters, aunts, mothers and grandmothers.
“We don’t like change,” said worker Jo Anne Gomez, 50. “We’re happy here in our own little world.”
In June, change will kick down the door at Yorba Orange Growers. That’s when the packinghouse closes to make way for an industrial park, leaving the county with one remaining orange packer.
Even as the final rinds are swept away at Yorba, there is no shutdown in sight for the surviving Villa Park Orchards Assn. in Orange, whose managers ensured a healthier future by bringing computer technology and global marketing into the ages-old fruit-packing industry. Here, the conveyor belts sweep the oranges past equipment that photographs the fruit and sends it down narrow paths based on an instant computer analysis of its quality.
Machines grasp a dozen oranges at once with plunger-like fingers and cram them into boxes that will go as far as Hong Kong and Malaysia.
The two packinghouses had similar beginnings but followed markedly different paths that say as much about the individual companies as they do about the gradual decline of the citrus industry in Orange County.
Both began in the first half of the 20th century. Both comprise rancher cooperatives and have forged strong generational links within their employee ranks.
Gomez, a 25-year Yorba employee, replaced her sister as office manager at the plant. Her aunt worked here. Her mother packed oranges until she died at 82. A picture in the main office shows Gomez’s mother and aunt, still young, inside the plant beside other workers. A painting of two oranges done by a brother-in-law hangs on another wall.
Such long-timers as 20-year-veteran Jaime Gutierrez readily admit they haven’t inquired about the going wages “in the world outside,” even though relatives tell them they could make more elsewhere.
“I’ve always been comfortable here,” Gutierrez said.
The people who run Yorba have long fostered the happy equilibrium at the plant, founded in 1935. Although packinghouses elsewhere have become automated, the packing, sorting and grading have always been done by hand here. Modern equipment was rarely purchased.
The plant, at 1500 N. Lakeview Ave., puts out about 700,000 cartons of oranges a year, unspectacular compared with Villa Park, but enough to make a meager profit, officials say.
“We’ve been a small house that relies more on reputation than on volume,” said Larry Kraemer, 66, Yorba president and scion of one of the county’s founding families. “It was never about how much we could put out.”
In April of 1999, the company payroll was done by computer for the first time ever. The manager, Larry Topham, said he had a hard time selling the office managers on the computers.
“In this day and age, yeah, it was a little odd that there were no computers in the place. But I knew what I was walking into when I came two years ago. I had heard,” Topham said, chuckling. “There was a real resistance to change.”
Sticking to small volume exacted a price.
“In this day and age of efficiency and unit costs, you have to have high volume,” Topham said. If it wasn’t so, the farmers who make up the cooperative might not be selling to a developer.
To keep overhead costs low for the co-op growers, employees sold candy boxes at the door to buy office equipment.
For all its modernity, the 88-year-old Villa Park Orchards Assn. also is a place of devoted longtime employees.
Connie Guillen, 67, followed her sister to Villa Park in 1949. Like many a packer, she learned the tricks of the trade from family.
Brad Leichtfuss, 37, the co-op’s vice president, started working at Villa Park as a 14-year-old, cleaning and doing manual labor just like everyone else.
But directing this packinghouse of grandmothers and grandchildren, husbands and wives toiling through the generations was a more aggressive corporation that sheltered its future from uncertainties of the county’s foundering citrus industry.
In 1964, the association cracked 1 million cartons for the first time. Throughout the 1980s, production rose to between 2.5 to 3 million cartons, said manager Patti Ortegon. In the 1990s, the association routinely broke the 4 million mark, she said.
The reason? In the last 15 years especially, Leichtfuss said, Villa Park executives have been taking marketing trips to places like Southeast Asia, have bought out other packinghouses, brokered deals with growers across the state and bought state-of-the-art equipment.
“We’ve followed the crops instead of relying on local growers,” Ortegon said. “We’ve also expanded our acreage to have the money to buy updated equipment. Modernization has been very important.”
Where Yorba has had about 50 employees, Villa Park has about 250.
Even for Villa Park, these are not good citrus times--maybe the worst in a long time, Leichtfuss said.
For reasons hard to pinpoint, the fruit that put the county on the map is small and sour this year, people in the citrus industry say. They’re “juice” worthy, but not much for eating.
Orange County is virtually out of the orange-growing business. In 1940, the county had more than 66,000 acres of orange groves; it now has fewer than 200, according to the county Agriculture Commission.
Recently, even Leichtfuss couldn’t help joking about the possibility of Orange County having no packinghouses.
“I hope we can squeeze at least 20 more years out of this business--that’s how long it would take for some of us to retire,” Leichtfuss told Emma Avalos, a manager at Villa Park.
It’s not that agriculture is disappearing from Orange County, said Deputy Agriculture Commissioner John Ellis. It’s just that its nature is changing.
The industrial parks, amusement park expansions, community colleges and other developments that have crowded out cropland and orchards need landscaping. And for the last 30 years, ornamental horticulture has been the County’s greatest agricultural moneymaker. Overall, at least, agriculture is booming--a $300-million industry in the county.
That’s little consolation for people like Gomez, who grew up romping around the Yorba Orange Growers plant, when groves of oranges were everywhere. The nearby strawberry fields that Yorba leased out until recently now lie parched and weed-ridden.
“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” Gomez said. “I haven’t been in the real world in a long time.”
