OUT OF THE LIMA LIGHT : Rise in Cost and Competition Puts Future in Doubt for the BountifulBeans That Made Oxnard Famous

The din of freshly frozen lima beans cascading onto an assembly line at the Oxnard Frozen Foods Cooperative was overpowering, a Niagara of legumes.

“Sounds like marbles hitting metal,” Bob Bangs, the packing house’s plant manager, observed with satisfaction.

But the sound was also the death rattle for the once-mammoth growers’ cooperative, which still packs more Green Fordhook lima beans than any other plant in the United States.

After 30 years in business, Oxnard Frozen Foods is in the thick of its last pack, casting doubt on the future of one of Oxnard’s best-known products and the bane of many a childhood.

Growers say they have not decided whether they will continue to plant the wrinkled, sage-green vegetable whose abundance once earned the Oxnard Plain its informal title of the Lima Bean Capital.

The commodity’s future locally rides on the outcome of the harvest under Alpac Food, the privately operated Santa Maria company that in June bought the financially troubled cooperative’s equipment and announced plans to pack the very last lima bean with an Oxnard label.

If Alpac, which plans to move its equipment from Oxnard to Santa Maria, is able to improve returns on the beleaguered beans, growers said, they will continue planting them.

If, however, the bean continues to be battered by rising land costs, competition from cheaper varieties and changes in the American diet, more growers will follow their disgruntled predecessors into such fresh commodities as tomatoes and cucumbers.

The cooperative had harvested, cleaned, frozen, packed and sold to distributors like Birdseye lima beans and other commodities grown by 38 local farmers. It employed 160 seasonal employees, although even until the early 1980s, it boasted one of the county’s largest agricultural payrolls with 1,000 employees.

Alpac officials are “very enthusiastic” about the prospects for turning around the outlook for the commodity, which is produced almost exclusively in the Oxnard Plain, said plant manager Paul Altorfer.

“We have done market research over the past year, and we found we can increase sales by increasing the availability of the product,” he said.

But early estimates are not encouraging. At 4,672 acres, lima bean plantings are nearly a third less than last year’s 6,200 acres. Shortages would further diminish demand by driving up the price of the vegetable and by relinquishing precious shelf space in grocers’ freezers, packing officials said.

“You have space in the freezer cabinet for a certain product,” Bangs said. “If the product is out of stock for any length of time, that space goes to another product. To get that back is very difficult. In the past, some freezer space has been lost forever to lima beans.”

Even if Alpac succeeds where the growers have failed, nobody expects the vegetable to regain the ground it’s lost since its glory days in the mid-1960s.

“We’re in turmoil right now,” said Oxnard grower James Gill, who this year reduced acreage devoted to lima beans by 50 acres to 600 acres. “Candidly, I’m concerned about the future for Fordhooks.”

Concern hasn’t always been in order. For nearly a century after the lima bean was introduced to the United States by a merchant ship that docked off Ventura, its future along the Gold Coast looked rosy.

While visiting the ship’s crew in 1868, Carpinteria rancher Henry Lewis sampled their cargo of beans from Lima, Peru. Lewis was so taken with the large, dry white beans that he left with enough to plant his own fields.

By 1885, the lima bean had become a major crop along the Ventura and Santa Barbara coasts, where long, dry and cool summers were similar to those of the legume’s native coastal Peru.

Fifty years later, Ventura farmers had become the nation’s leaders in dry lima beans with 40,621 acres devoted to them.

But soon that variety was replaced with a strain developed by the venerable W. Atlee Burpee seed company in Warminster, Penn.--the Green Fordhook.

Harvested fresh instead of dry, it was uniquely suited to the frozen food industry that burgeoned after World War II. Palates shaped by frugal, meatless dinners during the Depression embraced the bean that was rich not only in protein but also calories.

Although it could be grown in some parts of California and the East, the Green Fordhook flourished on the Oxnard Plain, which became its leading producer. Oxnard Frozen Foods, opened by a private firm but soon bought by a group of growers, rushed to meet the demand, packing spinach, broccoli and other vegetables during the off-season.

In the process, the Green Fordhook became part of the county’s identity. Local eateries, such as the Sportsman restaurant in Ventura and the now-defunct drive-in, Judy’s Sandwich Shop, in Camarillo, made the vegetable their signature dish. Taken with the crop’s unlimited potential, one Ventura County farmer even created a mottled red-and-white lima he dubbed “the Christmas bean.” It flopped.

In the mid-’60s, Fordhook production reached its peak at 13,000 acres, but from there it was downhill.

Diet-conscious eaters pushed aside the starchy bean for fresh, low-calorie vegetables; restaurant-goers clamored for salads. Parents, meanwhile, stopped “encouraging” their children to develop a taste for lima beans, growers complain.

“Even my kids say, gosh, don’t give me lima beans,” confessed George Rees, former plant manager for Oxnard Frozen Foods.

The plain’s ever-escalating land and water values, meanwhile, have pushed farmers into more lucrative crops or business parks and housing subdivisions.

Meanwhile, another strain of lima bean grown more widely and less expensively has begun to eclipse the Fordhook variety, despite the fact that it is not as tasty, Oxnard growers complain. For the nearly 27 million pounds of Fordhook lima beans processed last year, there were 75 million pounds of baby limas produced from New York to California, according to the National Frozen Food Council.

Further compounding growers’ problems, several years of low yields have driven up the price of Fordhooks, limiting demand for them, they said.

The industry’s relatively small size also rules out efforts to promote the Fordhook variety in the way, for instance, that dry bean producers have launched a campaign to tout the low-fat and high-fiber vegetable’s ability to reduce cholesterol.

“Because it’s such a small industry, there’s no support for advertising,” Gill said.

The nail in the coffin of Oxnard Frozen Foods, however, had nothing to do with beans. It was the demise of the local broccoli industry, which had accounted for 50% of the plant’s revenues. The rest of the operation could not cover the losses, plant officials said.

They blamed the migration since 1980 of the labor-intensive broccoli industry to Mexico. Packing officials said they can’t compete with many U.S. firms who have moved their operations for cheap labor.

“We pay more an hour than they pay for a whole day,” Bangs said.

In the wake of the plant’s financial troubles, farmers such as Tom Vujovich of Oxnard have reduced their lima bean plantings from 1,200 acres three years ago to 700 acres.

“We’ve had to pull in our horns and weather the storm,” Vujovich said.

University of California farm adviser Robert A. Brendler hopes other lima bean growers won’t follow suit. He views the plant’s closure as “a tragedy” and speaks of lima beans with a reverence unexpected for what, after all, is the vegetable that gives vegetables a bad name.

Brendler said the bean serves as a good “filler crop,” which keeps valuable land in production while farmers wait to plant their more lucrative winter crops of lettuce and celery.

He added that lima beans act as fertilizers, replenishing the soil by serving from the root down as host to a bacteria that produces nitrogen. Most other crops merely deplete the nutrient.

“It’s less of a burden on the soil than some of these other crops,” he said, “but the question is not ecological but economical.”

The bean’s effect on the environment may surprise those who are knowledgeable about its chemical makeup. The distinctive flavor of lima beans may be traced to their slight cyanide content, according to a University of California publication called “The Origin, Dispersal and Variability of the Lima Bean, Phaselus lunatas. “

Cyanide has been measured at 25 to 55 parts per million in North American strains and as high as 970 parts per million in Puerto Rican lima beans, which actually killed unfortunate diners. At well below the 100 parts per million allowed under health regulations, the concentration in the North American lima beans is safe, nutritionists say, but does impart that characteristic nutty flavor.

As for the Fordhook variety, those versed in lima bean lore rave about its taste.

“The Fordhook is the lima bean eater’s lima bean,” said former plant manager Rees. “It’s a unique bean with a nutty flavor that people who like lima beans really like.”

But people who like limas aren’t necessarily those who work with them. “Processing lima beans is one thing,” said Ed Everett, a former Alpac plant manager. “Eating them is another. I’m not a connoisseur.”

Even Bangs politely acknowledges that the good-will created by his favorite vegetable doesn’t amount to a hill of beans: “Lima beans aren’t one of the more liked vegetables, you might say.”

Those who traffic in Fordhooks lose their diplomacy, however, when it comes to what they perceive as their worst foe--the baby lima.

“It has almost no taste of its own,” sniffed Rees.

Concurred Bangs: “Tough, mealy, tasteless--really a blob.”

Grower Gill takes his distaste even farther. He doesn’t think that the vegetable, which is grown widely in the East, should even be in the same class of bean as the precious Fordhook.

“It’s like calling a fat man tiny,” Gill said.