Cash Crop or Cash Out? : Agriculture: Faced with encroaching suburbia, some farmers take the money and run; others fight for their way of life. But many want it both ways.

SALIDA, Calif. — He bought the orchard in 1962 and sold it last year, 78 acres of prime farmland, soil that can grow just about anything. By the end of the year, Ron Vella’s peach orchard will start pushing up California’s latest cash crop--the ranch house.

Vella got fed up. When he bought the orchard, there were houses on the east side and a school on the northeast corner. Today, houses push in on two sides, and another subdivision has been planned for the third.

The third-generation farmer couldn’t even get his manure truck unloaded before the neighbors would complain of the smell. And the sheriff was a regular nighttime visitor, relaying complaints about the noise of evening irrigation and spraying. So when the developer knocked last summer, Vella was ready.

“I would have liked to sell it to someone in row crops, but how feasible is that when someone comes along and offers you development prices--$75,000 to $100,000 an acre,” said Vella, who still farms 260 acres north of Modesto in Stanislaus County. “I bought it for $1,100 an acre. That’s a hundredfold increase. How can you not take it?”

But if Stanislaus County has its way, fewer farmers will be cashing in on their land, which to many is the closest thing to a retirement account in an increasingly risky business. The county has proposed changes to its general plan to protect and preserve its No. 1 industry--agriculture--which many believe is in danger of being developed to an early death.

Rural California loses an estimated 75,000 acres of farmland each year to development, making it one of the most severely stressed agricultural areas in the country--along with south Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. But the battles developing along with strip malls and two-car garages are more than just arguments over the proper use of land.

On the one hand are preservationists, who want to cordon off “prime land” for planting in perpetuity, safeguarding the nation’s food supply and rural lifestyle. On the other are growers like Vella who want to farm the way their parents did -- with fewer rules and regulations, a large dose of independence and the option to sell out when the going gets too tough.

Whether you believe that preserving farmland is foresight or fertilizer, the controversy over the fate of agriculture underscores the problem of being a California farmer in the 1990s. This is a time when every squirt of pesticide must be reported, when a quirky urban electorate threatens to vote in the notorious Big Green environmental initiative, when a 4-year-old drought shrivels hopes along with crops.

“Farmers are being portrayed as rapers of the land, spreaders of death with pesticides,” said Keith Mahan, Stanislaus County agriculture commissioner. “They’re getting down in the dumps. A lot of them are just kind of feeling ‘If you want to pay me $50,000 or $100,000 an acre, maybe it’s time for me to take mine and leave.’ Overnight, you’re a millionaire.”

As the influx of new residents from the San Francisco Bay Area to Stanislaus County continues, farmers and government agencies are being forced to debate the issues that plague communities throughout the Central Valley. They are grappling over values and competing needs, wondering whether an influx of new residents and a successful agricultural machine can coexist.

So far, the answer has been: No.

“What happened to pastoral regions like the Santa Clara Valley in the San Francisco Bay area and Orange County on the south coast--the replacement of farmland with housing tracts, shopping centers and industrial parks--is now beginning to happen in California’s agricultural heartland,” warns a study by the American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving agriculture.

Driving up Highway 99 through the lower Central Valley, California seems one vast expanse of farmland: Cattle graze, almond trees blossom, cotton plants whiten the horizon. Small towns dot the landscape, as the richest farmland in the state--some say the world--whizzes by.

For the past 42 years, the Valley’s 17 counties have made California the undisputed farm capital of the nation. Sales of products from California farms and ranches reached $17.3 billion in 1989; 68% of that--a whopping $11.7 billion--was harvested in the irrigated basin that stretches north from Kern County to Tehama County.

Valley counties are the leading producers of California grain corn, rice and safflower, sorghum and processing tomatoes, raisin grapes, kiwi fruit, peaches, pistachios, plums, pomegranates, prunes and dry beans. Six of California’s Top 10 agricultural counties are here, nestled between the Coast Range on the West and the Sierra Nevada on the East.

Does this mean that California is an agricultural state that just happens to be anchored by San Francisco and Los Angeles and dotted with mid-sized metropolises? Not by a long shot, for the statistics of import these days are population figures, not farm receipts.

Between 1986 and 1989, California grew by nearly 2.6 million residents, about 75 newcomers per hour, more than one every minute. In the next decade, 6 million more are expected to arrive.

Where will they go? To California’s heartland, said Edward J. Blakely, professor of economic development at UC Berkeley. The Central Valley currently is home to 4.5 million residents; in the next 20 years, he says, 3.5 million more will settle there.

“The issue is not whether the Valley urbanizes, but how,” Blakely said at a recent symposium on the changing region. “The Central Valley could be the world’s longest single urban system early in the 21st Century. Those who would value this corridor for agriculture, wetland preservation and open space may have as little as 25% remaining.”

Urban encroachment is not new to California, for the history of development is the history of trading farmland for homes and businesses. The reason is that farms and building sites need the same thing: flat, well-drained acreage with an ample water source.

Los Angeles at one time was a farm village, and some of the richest agricultural lands in California have been buried under concrete and asphalt in the San Fernando Valley for the past four decades. As Bakersfield grows outward, it has no place to go but onto Kern County’s best farmland. Modesto, Sacramento, Fresno, Manteca--all are threatening to outgrow their boundaries and ooze out over the state’s richest acreage.

“In California, as our small agricultural towns keep growing, they’re growing onto the best soils,” said Robert Yoha, a senior land and water use analyst and manager of the state Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program. “This is real. We finally have numbers to show it.”

Yoha’s mapping program, which was started in 1982, has found that about 74,000 acres of farmland are being converted to “non-agricultural” use each year; about 50,000 become built-up urban land, while the rest remain in a state of “disuse, waiting for development to occur,” Yoha said.

Critics of agricultural preservation point out that, while farmland is being lost to urban development, other acreage is coming into production for the very first time, actually bringing the land-use equation a little closer to balance.

The problem, however, revolves around the kind of land that is lost, the kind that is being reclaimed and what must be done to bring land into production.

Stanislaus County, California’s No. 7 county in farm receipts, is a case in point. Although it lost nearly 12,000 acres of prime farmland between 1977 and 1988, nearly 14,000 acres of wild land were brought into production.

Sound good? Not if you ask Marsha Campbell, a county farm adviser and soil specialist.

“All of our prime farmland has been farmed for decades,” Campbell says. “Most of the reclamation is poor land innovatively used. . . . It’s not turning bad land into good land; it’s finding a marginally profitable use for bad land.”

That marginal land has troubles of its own: It is often highly erodible soil that needs greater amounts of fertilizers to produce smaller amounts of produce. Bringing such land into production goes directly against the push for decreased use of farm chemicals.

When it comes to Stanislaus County soil--the 27% that is classified as prime--Campbell is well-nigh poetic, rhapsodizing about its attributes with conviction that most reserve for lovers, children, cherished memories. The prime soil here, she said, is six feet deep, unobstructed by hardpan and versatile enough to grow anything.

It’s not so sandy that precious water flows away, wasted. It’s not so dense that the same fluid pools up and kills tender plants. These soils are pure and lacking in minerals that can harm a grower’s bounty.

And the weather!

“There isn’t any place in the world like this,” she says. “Where does it not snow in the wintertime, not rain in the summertime, have perfect soil for agriculture and have enough of that to support the food processing industry?” A pause. “Nowhere but here.”

The problem is that developers like it too.

When developer Steve C. Mothersell looks at the county of his birth, he sees single-family homes--three bedrooms, two baths--filled with young commuting families that work in the San Francisco Bay Area but can’t afford to live there.

Since 1982, he’s added 1,200 new units to growing communities like Modesto, Turlock, Newman, Oakdale. And once the development called New Salida is finished, Mothersell will have had a hand in creating some 2,600 more.

“Modesto and surrounding areas from Stockton to Patterson were discovered as a reasonable commute to East Bay with affordable housing, so consequently we attracted a lot of people,” Mothersell said. “As additional fuel to the last growth cycle, we had a big pent-up demand from the late 1970s and early 1980s in our own market.”

New Salida, a 700-acre subdivision just north of Modesto, is a perfect example of the county’s troubles. Salida is an unincorporated community of about 4,000 residents “plunked in the middle of an agricultural area,” said Fran Sutton-Berardi, associate planner for Stanislaus County.

Its boundaries had to be stretched by zoning changes to accommodate the nearly 3,000 new housing units and the subsequent 12,000 residents who will fill them. And yet another subdivision is in the works--this one 1,600 acres--even before ground has been broken for New Salida.

“The 1,600-acre proposal is all farmland right now--walnut and almond and peach orchards,” Sutton-Berardi said. “The soil is some of the best in the county. . . . I think it’s too premature at this time. The present (700-acre) project is just getting on its feet. The houses aren’t built yet. To come right on top of it with 1,600 acres on prime farm land is just premature.”

And it isn’t as if there’s no open space for development. Only 27% of the county is prime land. Stanislaus County officials are wondering why developers can’t just stay away from the good land and put the houses on the land that’s not fit for crops.

That’s the basis for the county’s new Agricultural Element, an amendment to the General Plan that proposes setting aside prime land for planting in perpetuity. It sounds logical, tame even, but it has the farming community in an uproar.

The reason is simple, and it echoes throughout the county like some kind of communal mantra: This is about property rights. Farming’s a business. We have to keep our options open.

Marie Assali was getting excited, but then it was that kind of an afternoon. Incredulous, irate, oddly vindicated, Assali waved a clipping from the morning paper as if to underscore speech with gesture.

The dateline was Chicago, but to Assali, it spoke volumes about Stanislaus County, about farming in a developing area, about last straws: “A farmer in a once-rural area has been arrested for plowing his fields too late at night after a neighbor in an adjoining subdivision complained that the drone of the tractor was keeping him awake.”

Marie Assali and her friends Dolores Zambruno and Anita Mayfield are the triumvirate, the opposition, the self-appointed saviors of farming in Stanislaus County. Four months ago, the women banded together to fight the county’s proposed Agricultural Element, which they see as their own last straw, the capper to a record tough year in agriculture.

First came so-called 100% reporting, a state law that went into effect Jan. 1. Previously, farmers were required to report to the county agriculture commissioner whenever they used a pesticide on the state’s list of restricted chemicals. Today, farmers must report all pesticide use.

Next came Big Green, the Environmental Protection Act of 1990 which qualified this spring for the November ballot. If Big Green becomes law and a score of widely used pesticides are phased out by 1996, the agriculture industry contends that fruit, vegetable and field-crop production would drop, and food prices would shoot up.

And then there’s the drought, year No. 4 of the worst weather since the 1930s. This is the first time since 1977 that irrigation water to farms has been cut, and most Central Valley farms will have to get by on a half-ration of water.

So when the Agricultural Element came to their attention this spring, the women were ready for a fight, even though, to the uninitiated, the draft document sounds very much pro-farmer. There’s a catalogue of suggested devices to preserve agricultural acreage, including protective zoning, the purchase of development rights from farmers and strong policy guidelines to direct growth to less important land.

“By balancing the need to create housing for an expanding population with the need to preserve our most important farmland, we will ensure the continued success of local agriculture, which helps feed us all.”

But to farmers like Assali, Zambruno and Mayfield, this so-called cure is worse than the disease.

“There’s nothing that says that 50 to 60 years from now we’ll be able to farm,” Mayfield says. “If we can’t make a living farming, there’s not another farmer who will buy your land. If this passes, who are we going to sell it to?”

Their protest to the plan started simply, with a single telephone call: Hey, there’s a meeting in half an hour; they’re presenting the Agricultural Element. Really? Let’s go.

They went. They came home. And said, “Something has got to be done.” Then the telephoning started in earnest. For the first time in decades of farming, Assali, Zambruno and Mayfield got political.

They called four or five friends and met for the first time. They hit the phones again and met again. Attendance grew along with indignation. They culled mailing lists from the Stanislaus County Farm Bureau and the local chapter of California Women for Agriculture.

They wrote a letter and sent it out to 200 local farmers and held a forum attended by more than 100 farmers to fill them in on the proposed changes and their impact. They demanded that the Farm Bureau board of directors take a stand on the proposal.

At an April 18 farm bureau board meeting before an unprecedented 200 spectators, the board unanimously rejected the proposal and demanded that the county give it time to come up with its own proposal. And the women attended every meeting the county held to push preservation to the people.

And they’ve made the county’s job much more difficult.

“We’ve been called socialists, but not communists yet,” said Leslie Hopper, associate planner for Stanislaus County and the woman who has done much of the presenting. “They’ve questioned our honesty. . . . They get real emotional about it, talk about property rights and democracy.”

Right now, the preservation push is on hold at least until the end of the year, thanks to the furor fomented by Assali, Zambruno and Mayfield. The Farm Bureau now has a chance to put together an alternative plan, as does the Building Industry Assn. Property rights will get their due.

To proponents of agricultural preservation, the irony is not lost. Farmers are crying that development has gotten in the way of farming and the rural lifestyle they cherish. But they also see it as their salvation, a way to sell agricultural land for development prices. They think they can play it both ways.

Said farm adviser Kathy Kelley: “The people against it are looking at their pocketbooks. That’s pretty motivating.”

FARMLAND UNDER PRESSURE Of the Central Valley counties, Stanislaus (shown below) in black and detailed at right) in particular is experiencing a surge of new residents from the Bay Area. The State Agricultural Board of Statistics considers the Central Valley to be made up of 17 counties: Tehama Glenn Butte Colusa Sutter Yolo Yuba Sacramento Solano San Joaquin Stanislaus Merced Madera Fresno Kings Tulare Kern Stanislaus Turock Patterson Modesto Oakdale Rural California loses an estimated 75,000 acres of farmland annually to development, making it one of the most severely stressed agricultural areas in the U.S.