Planting Houses on Farmlands of San Joaquin Valley

There is a sparse beauty to the western flank of the San Joaquin Valley. Sere hills loom up to the west, filled with canyons and ravines that served as hide-outs for 19th century bandits.

Orchards, cropland and sporadic patches of brushy desert roll out to the east, across the valley floor. Winds blow hard through here, bending the trees and grasses and kicking up dust storms.

However beautiful, the landscape can become more than a little monotonous. As you drive up or down California on Interstate 5, the freeway that runs in a straight line along the valley’s west side, the eye begins to search for any break in the unchanging scenery, for something new to look at.

And then up pops one of Shane P. Donlon’s road signs, hawking valley real estate.

Festooned with shamrocks, the white and blue signs are fixtures along I-5 in the stretch through Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. Some promote specific properties, others are more generic.

“Land, land, land,” touts one. “Croplands and orchards,” offers another. Donlon’s most fetching roadside attractions, though, are the signs he strings out Burma Shave-style, making pitches with rhymes and couplets, one phrase at a time.

-- 312 Acres, goes the first in a row of four signs planted in an orange grove near Los Banos, followed every 20 yards or so by these:

-- Buy these little

-- Vitamin C

-- Makers.

A bit farther north, there is this series:

-- A pleasant drive from the East Bay

-- When you get there you will want to stay

-- A little above the valley floor

-- Commercial or cattle or who knows what more

Who knows what more?

Now there is a question worth lingering over a bit.

“Who knows what more” is a riddle that is confronting, not just the west side, but all of the San Joaquin Valley.

The valley is changing, and changing fast. Its population is expected to triple in the next 40 years or so, climbing toward 15 million. Its cities and towns already are pushing out deep into the countryside. Once isolated, the valley now attracts home buyers willing to endure the hard commute over the passes to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

There are those in the valley who fret that California’s agricultural heartland is destined to become, as they inevitably phrase it, “another L.A.” Others promote visions of a valley that somehow manages to balance rural charm and urban amenities, new economy and old--”silicon chips and cow chips” is how they like to describe it.

Much of the discussion about valley growth in the last few years has focused on the Highway 99 corridor, a reference to the older freeway that cuts along the east side, stringing together Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento. More and more, however, there also has been talk about future development springing up along I-5, on the valley’s west side.

This would have seemed ludicrous not too long ago. When the freeway opened in 1972, filling stations were so few and far between that motorists routinely ran out of gas. For a long time this was a part of California reserved for stashing the unwanted--a place for giant tire piles, hazardous waste dumps, prisons.

“It was just desolate,” recalled Shane B. Donlon himself the other day. “There weren’t even many ranches.”

The real estate broker was in his little two-room office in Patterson, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, bluejean shorts and no shoes. “That’s just me,” Donlon said of his bare feet.

He confessed that he had been a bit hesitant about granting an interview. The last time had been 15 years ago or so. A reporter had come down from San Francisco and, Donlon said, “made me look like a real doofus.”

A doofus?

“A hayseed,” his lone office assistant interjected.

“You know, since we’re in the valley. . . .”

In fact, the 58-year-old Donlon is no hayseed. He was raised on a family farm in Oxnard and attended St. Mary’s College, where he majored in French--”if you can believe that,” he added. He received his real estate license in 1965, served a hitch in Vietnam and then came to Patterson to run a farm his father had started.

A soft-spoken man with a sly sense of humor, Donlon said that starting out he decided he needed a title--”everybody else had a title.” And so he settled on “agricultural entrepreneur,” a fancy handle he prints on his business cards to this day.

In the mid-1980s, a couple of down years in agriculture convinced Donlon it was time to get serious about the real estate business. He decided to specialize in ranch properties and bought advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and other publications. Nothing came of them. Then he put up his first roadside sign, “and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing.”

It is ringing still. “Sales over $150,000,000,” proclaims yet another Donlon sign, this one posted outside his single-story office building next to a burger stand.

“The signs,” Donlon said, “are everything.”

He plants them all over the region, and he can explain with great detail the art and science of road sign creation and placement. He said his signs elicit calls from “all over the world,” from speculators hoping to buy property at farmland prices in the path of future development, from Bay Area house hunters chased over the hill by an overheated real estate market.

Donlon’s primary thrust has not changed; he concentrates on selling farmland to farmers. Unfortunately, he said, with commodity prices down, “there are not too many farmers buying farmland these days.” And in the past few years, many of his sales have been to commuters wanting to build dream homes in farm country.

“We’ve got people coming from the Bay Area,” he said, “and buying whole ranches for home sites.”

On one office wall Donlon has hung a large map of Patterson. With a marker, he traced the large agricultural parcels that have been sold for development--a series of tracts that eventually will add 4,000 houses to the town of 12,000 and extend its borders three miles west to the freeway. Donlon predicted that most west side towns--sited in the late 1800s to service the Southern Pacific rail line--eventually will follow the same pattern and grow west until they meet the freeway.

“I’m a farmer first,” said Donlon, who still grows apricots. “And as a farmer, I hate to see the farmland go.” At the same time, he said, “It is inevitable that we are going to grow. It cannot be stopped. . . . People have to go someplace.”

Donlon’s one of the valley optimists. He believes the coming urban growth won’t obliterate agriculture, that limits on water will prevent development from sprawling across the entire countryside.

Of course, there are some rather obvious examples in California where cities have been built first, and the water grabbed later. And at this point, perhaps all that can be said with certainty about the valley is that it is hurtling down the freeway toward some rather large decisions, decisions that will shape its future.

Commercial or cattle or who knows what more. . . .