Farming on the Fringes

At the age of 81, Santa Paula rancher Anita Tate is one of the last stewards of farmland in the Southland, holding it for a new generation.

The problem was that nobody seemed very interested in taking over.

Tate’s pioneer Ventura County family helped settle what is now the last large farming valley in coastal Southern California.

Until last year, however, she had found no heir interested in managing the lemon and avocado orchards on her Santa Clara Valley ranch.

Then granddaughter Lisa Tate, 21, stepped forward.

She’d come to her grandmother’s 200-acre Rancho Filoso as a child. She came again last summer to spray weeds, wrap trees and fix sprinklers. Now she says she’s going to take over once she leaves Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in agribusiness.

“I’ve finally found a replacement,” said Anita Tate, a Berkeley-educated psychology major who has helped operate her family farm for 50 years. “She worked really hard for us. And she’s got the spirit.”

In a region where farming remains only in small patches on the fringes of urban sprawl, the Santa Clara Valley--stretching 30 miles along the Santa Clara River from Ventura to Magic Mountain--is a throwback.

One hundred years ago, a visitor could have ridden from one end of the valley to the other and seen nothing but vast orchards and fields separating the small towns of Saticoy, Santa Paula, Fillmore and Piru.

It’s much the same today, except walnuts have given way to lemons and avocados and what remains of aging Valencia orange groves.

“The folks who come from Los Angeles are just amazed at what still exists up here,” said Pierre Tada, chief executive of 108-year-old Limoneira Co., one of the largest lemon growers in the state.

“They’re amazed there is still a farming valley that’s alive and well, or relatively well.”

The value of Ventura County crops exceeded $1 billion last year for the first time, ranking it the 10th most productive in the state alongside the counties of the great Central Valley, the world’s most bountiful farm region.

The slender Santa Clara Valley, framed by mountain peaks as tall as 6,000 feet, produces about one-third of Ventura County’s crops on about 33,000 irrigated acres.

“In many respects, this valley is doing just fine,” said Earl McPhail, county agricultural commissioner. “And there’s a good chance it will stay this way for 25 years, at least. But as time goes on, the growth pressures will be just phenomenal.”

Yet even after Ventura County’s strict voter-approved Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiatives expire about 2020, there’s a chance that the valley’s deep, loamy topsoil will still yield crops and that development will occur mostly on low hills and plateaus--overlooking the lush green farm belt, not replacing it.

“As we develop less toxic pesticides, I think crops and humans are going to be able to coexist much better,” McPhail said.

Ventura County, a slow-growth bastion, will not welcome much growth. At least not right away.

Both farm owners and city dwellers protested when the valley’s largest landowner, Newhall Land & Farming Co., announced plans to build a 70,000-resident community just across the Los Angeles County line.

Newhall owns 16,000 more acres in Ventura County immediately west of its planned Newhall Ranch development. But just 1,200 acres are cropland. So in 30 years, when Newhall’s current project is complete, critics suspect the Ventura County acreage will serve as the next development opportunity.

“We have no plans for development on the Ventura County side,” Newhall spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer said. “You’ll continue to see agricultural activities on that property for many, many years to come.”

The Santa Clara Valley’s pioneering European American families were looking for opportunities too when they arrived to find a valley where wild yellow mustard grew so high that horseback riders had to stand in their stirrups to see over it.

At one end of the valley, Massachusetts transplant Henry Mayo Newhall spent part of a fortune made as a Gold Rush-era auctioneer on 48,000-acre Rancho San Francisco, a swath running 20 miles from what is now Valencia to Piru.

On the other end, Pennsylvania speculators found oil so plentiful they tunneled into the side of mountains near Santa Paula, and thick black crude simply ran into barrels. They founded Union Oil in 1890.

And in the flatlands by the river, merchants and farmers from Ohio, Virginia and Maine came to start towns and experiment with crops.

“They were all opportunists,” said Santa Paula farmer Alan Teague, 63, the son of a Ventura County congressman and grandson of the founding president of Limoneira and the Sunkist farming cooperative.

When Santa Paula rancher Dorcas Thille’s great-grandfather Jefferson Crane and his uncle, horticulturist George Briggs, came to the valley in the early 1860s, Briggs brought 25,000 pieces of gold from the Sierra Nevada foothills.

“He decided there was more gold in miners’ pockets than in the ground,” Thille said. “He sold watermelon at $5 apiece to the miners.”

With the money, Briggs bought the 15,000-acre Rancho Santa Paula y Saticoy. He imported peach and apple trees from Ohio. But gophers and drought killed them. So Briggs subdivided the huge ranch and sold most of it off in 150-acre tracts for $10 an acre.

Nathan Blanchard, a native of Maine via Northern California, bought part of it, and then recorded the township of Santa Paula in 1875.

Over the next 20 years, the outlines of the valley’s economy took shape, as Wallace Hardison, C.C. Teague and Samuel Edwards joined Blanchard and many others to build a region that rivaled seaside Ventura in economic prosperity.

In the hills, oil fields sprouted. In the valleys, farmers experimented with oranges, lemons, pineapples and bananas. And they began to plant what for decades was the valley’s predominant crop--walnuts.

Today, the descendants of those families are still community leaders. But it has become harder for them to profit farming, or interest their children in taking over.

Thille, 69, a widow for 29 years, farms several hundred acres near Santa Paula, some of it owned by her three youngest sons, all of whom are in the computer business.

“Farmers don’t retire,” she said. “And the land that’s in the strongest hands, where the children have kept that tie to the land, I think they’ll try to keep it going.”

But pressures are increasing on farmers as the costs of water, energy and labor soar, and free trade agreements open U.S. markets to products from foreign countries.

Alan Teague, whose family has helped run Limoneira since its founding in 1893, merged the last of his privately held land with that giant agricultural combine eight years ago. The Edwards family sold its sizable acreage to Limoneira in 1985.

Limoneira now owns 4,100 acres in Ventura County and 2,000 in the San Joaquin Valley.

Still, it’s a struggle to compete.

“It’s not a level playing field. A lot of other growing areas have a cost advantage,” said Limoneira chief Tada, 43. “Farmers are going to have to embrace change in order to survive.”

The shape of that change can be seen along two-lane Sycamore Road outside Fillmore.

A mile down the road from California 126, Steve Barnard, 48, is planning to bulldoze his last 30 acres of Valencia orange trees.

“Farming’s a tough business,” said Barnard. “The rules are changing every day. And you’ve just got to do what you do better all the time.”