Orange Plant Closes Amid Sour Times for Growers

Responding to a continued decline in the orange industry, the Limoneira Co. has closed its 1930s-era orange packinghouse near Santa Paula and shifted those operations to a plant in Piru.

Chief Executive Officer Pierre Tada said Tuesday that the company has signed a two-year agreement with the Fillmore-Piru Citrus Assn. to pack and ship most of its oranges, which are grown mainly in the San Joaquin Valley.

Most of the 72 employees at the Santa Paula plant are expected to move to other jobs with Limoneira or the citrus association, Tada said.

Still, he said the decision was not easy to make.

“There is a sense of sadness, a realization that this is the end of an era,” said Tada, adding that Limoneira will continue to use an adjacent plant in Santa Paula to pack and ship lemons, the mainstay of the company’s business.

Tada said company leaders could have chosen to use a facility closer to its production area in the San Joaquin Valley rather than shipping them to Piru. But he said they wanted to save Ventura County jobs and help bolster an industry squeezed by plunging prices and profits.

“Simply put, the Limoneira Co. does not have sufficient [volume] to run through [the Santa Paula] facility,” he said. “But we felt, given the stresses on the local industry and given the fact that we wanted to keep jobs in Ventura County, the right thing to do was to consolidate our packing requirements with another local packer.”

Indeed, Ventura County’s orange industry--particularly the Valencia industry--has been wracked by retail consolidation, rising production costs and increased competition from around the globe.

While Valencias remain a strong component of the county’s $1-billion-a-year farm economy, growers have suffered major losses in recent years, prompting them to uproot thousands of trees in favor of crops better able to turn a profit in California’s competitive fruit and vegetable markets.

Once the county’s second biggest cash crop, Valencia oranges barely crack the top 10 today. After an 80% plunge from 1999 to 2000, values have collapsed to 1970 levels.

And the amount of land dedicated to them has dropped by half--to 9,300 acres--during the past 30 years, prompting concerns that the industry may soon reach a threshold at which it no longer makes economic sense to grow oranges.

Limoneira, the county’s largest citrus grower, began converting its Ventura County orange orchards into lemon and avocado groves in the early 1990s. Local orange ranches that could not be redeveloped were sold or exchanged for acreage suitable for avocados and other crops.

While Limoneira had 1,000 acres of Valencias in 1990 in Ventura County, today it has none. Most of the oranges processed at the Santa Paula packinghouse came from the company’s 1,500 acres in the San Joaquin Valley. And with production there expected to be lower than normal this year, Limoneira decided it was time to pack elsewhere.

“Obviously it’s a little disappointing, because it confirms the trend we’ve been seeing,” said Earl McPhail, the county’s agricultural commissioner. “But economically, it was the right decision to make.”

Although the packinghouse doesn’t officially close until Nov. 1, it has been empty since late August, the end of the picking season.

Jim Schieferle, president of the Fillmore-Piru Citrus Assn., said Limoneira’s decision to continue to pack oranges locally will help ensure the survival of his operation, which, like the county’s other packinghouses, has been hard hit by the industry’s downturn.

“The added volume this agreement brings will help [us] survive the difficult challenges facing the local orange business,” he said.